Most of us in the pro-development pool think that community groups have too much power but I think that is a very one sided view. Why is it that these people think they need to get together in the first place? I think that it is because they see the city fighting against them and they feel threatened. If we could have a system where all three parties, the city, the developers, and the citizens, had equal say in development then I think we might be better off; a checks and balances system if you will.

Obviously the role of the government is to speak and fight for the citizens but as we all know this many times isn’t the case.

The BRA used to work along the top-down approach. They were the educated elite and their new plans for the city would fix all its problems. As time has proved over and over this is the wrong way to do things. We need a bottom up approach. But can a massive bureaucracy work bottom-up? I think it can and it has to if we are going to seriously start fixing the problems of the city.

I firmly believe that a city is only as strong as it’s weakest neighborhood. Sure New York has Midtown, the Upper East Side, and Park Slope, but it also has the South Bronx, Bed-Sty, and East New York. I think it is an Utopian dream to think that a city will never have slums or ghettos; I believe that they are inevitable. But what I don’t think is inevitable is that they have to be places where people are beaten down, places that are broken with broken people begetting more generations of broken people. I think that we need to see neighborhoods as not just real estate but as functioning organisms, much like the organs of a body. If you had healthy lungs but a dieing liver, sure you could breath but you would still be dieing. I think low income neighborhoods should be places where the weakest in society can go and survive, and where they can even bring themselves up and eventually move out. This was the vision of Jane Jacobs and I think that it is a noble and attainable one.

What I think the BRA needs to be is the agent that regulates the neighborhoods of Boston to make sure each is working correctly. You might think that most neighborhoods won’t need much help but just look at how much stink the Back Bay or Beacon Hill makes when a new building is proposed. The BRA needs to have representatives in every neighborhood that are on the ground and can talk to community groups, and so that community groups and citizens know who they are (perhaps they are elected?) so that people don’t have to feel so powerless. The fact that there are so many community groups in Boston should be a good thing, it should show that the people there actually care about the future of their communities, that they want them to be better places with good transportation, good schools, and safe streets. If developers had no walls against them then Boston would look like Houston.

I am not an early riser. This, combined with going out every night, means that I have been missing a number of presentations I wanted to see, but I’m not concerned with this since I’m finding this whole conference a bit too academic for my tastes. I met up with my geographer friend Stef at the official conference party, complete with open bar and 80s cover band. When I got there everyone was standing around the dance floor, not dancing. At one point the singer said “Do geographers know how to party?” From the response the answer to that question is a definitive no.

I want to give a shout out to CJ Bright and Rebecca Alper. CJ did his presentation on the Silver Line BUS and seemed quite surprised when I dropped the bomb by telling him who I was. Rebecca did her presentation on property values in relation to the E branch street car of the Green Line verses the #39 bus. She found that property values were unaffected whether the transportation was via streetcar or bus. Interesting findings that may make people reevaluate the fight to bring back the Arborway trolley.

I left the conference and was about to go home when I realized it was an absolutely beautiful day out so I just started to wander. I checked out the construction site for the Columbus Center. What a clusterfuck that has been. I’m not going to go into now but lets just say they just dug everything up and it looks like it is going to stay dug up with nothing being built for a while. I wandered around the Back Bay, not really having any real place to go. I made my way into the Public Gardens and onto the Common. This was one of the first warm days this spring in Boston and everybody was out.

I met up with Stef and we got some food and ate it on the monument on the top of the hill in the Common. We were hemmed in on both sides by two separate groups of kids smoking pot so we left. I showed her Beacon Hill and where John Kerry lives. She is short so we took a bunch of pictures inside those crazy tiny doorways they used for coal deliveries back in the day and took pictures inside those Dickensian alleyways that are all over the Hill.

We then went to check out the Hurley Building, a Paul Rudolph building where parts of The Departed were filmed. This is one of the most amazing buildings in the world but lack of respect and investment are showing their signs. The concrete is falling apart and the plazas, which are used as parking, are in terrible shape. We got lost walking down a set of stairs that go nowhere and ran into a guy rolling a joint who gave us directions on how to get out of there. If weed is illegal you wouldn’t know it here.

We ended our trip through the Bulfinch Triangle. I love the old warehouses here. This area could totally be Boston’s TriBeCa (think about it, it is literally the Triangle Below Canal St, more so than TriBeCa in NYC) but its proximity to the Garden will probably forever relegate it to the domain of drunken Celtics and Bruins fans.