Still digging out
Our Wharf District Park design imbroglio from a few years ago, described in painful detail in Chapter 1 of Designing Public Consensus, got a thorough airing in a 90-minute panel discussion on October 8, at the annual meeting of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA).
Unbelievably, every one of the prominent players we invited actually gave up their weekend to come to Minneapolis to participate. The panel included Fred Yalouris, chief of architecture for the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority’s Big Dig project and our client; Rob Tuchmann, partner in the Environmental Law department at WilmerHale and co-chair of the mayor’s Central Artery Completion Task Force; Susanne Lavoie, Harbor Towers resident and co-chair of the Wharf District Task Force; J.P. Shadley, past chair of the Boston Society of Landscape Architects; myself; and moderator Tom Palmer of the Boston Globe.
Entitled “Lessons from the Wharf District Park Public Process,” the discussion revisited the process of designing the Wharf District Park. All of the panelists were exceptionally honest in presenting their take on how this public process worked. The discussion focused on how much public process is too much, how the public sector manages a complicated public process, whether the park design was homogenized by too much public participation, whether only large firms with deep pockets can afford to take on challenging projects in the public eye, and the role of the media.
The lessons I came away with from the Wharf District public process, and from this panel, are that Bostonians are passionate about their city and totally committed to seeing the process through. As my book demonstrates at length, this is essentially true of any community. The people who go to public meetings or get involved in public process are not a few loose cannons with nothing better to do. They are residents who are deeply and genuinely interested in what you are going to do to make a difference in their city, neighborhoods, and lives. They will go to great lengths to make sure their way of life is either left undisturbed or made better by change.
A podcast of the panel discussion will be posted soon.