The Design Tactics and Operations course at Northeastern saw me identify an urban issue, provide analysis, and eventually provide a proposed urban design intervention responding to the initial diagnosis. Within the broad area of Boston’s Back Bay, the instructors identified three linear paths of potential concern in the neighborhood, these being Newbury Street, Commonwealth Avenue, and the Charles River Esplanade. I chose to find a common thread or issue between all three paths rather than focus on any one of them. In my diagnosis, I found that each path suffers from some kind of chaotic condition, and all three lack an easily accessible and locatable refuge that allows the pedestrian to remove themselves from this chaos. This analysis informed my final design intervention, which saw each linear path receive its own kind of refuge with a deployment strategy specific to that path.
Newbury Street is restricted by its narrowness and inefficient sidewalks. Stairs leading into lower level retail and dining cut significantly into operable sidewalk space; frequent tree planters cut the sidewalk down even further. Newbury Street’s refuges are deployed frequently as a form of offering respite from the recurring instances of pedestrian funneling. They come in the form of more formal and identifiable rest areas, which the street currently lacks.
Commonwealth Avenue has a clear refuge in its median, yet the median still suffers from continuity and access issues and does not sufficiently remove itself from the roadway, emphasizing strict linearity over landscape. In this intervention, the refuge is a more clearly defined component placed at irregular intervals along the central mall. The irregularity deprioritizes the staunch rhythm and linearity with which the avenue operates, while also helping to encourage more natural, meandering pedestrian patterns through interaction with the garden refuges.
The Esplanade currently suffers from the proximate chaos of Storrow Drive and pedestrian access issues of its own. Access points from the urban fabric are limited to pedestrian bridges spanning over Storrow Drive; it may be disconnected from the urban fabric, but in the sense that it is inconvenient to reach on foot from the south. In order to solve the abrupt interaction of Storrow Drive with the Esplanade bike and pedestrian paths, the refuge effectively covers the entire East-West length of the Esplanade from the adjacent roadway. This is a response to the constant nature of Storrow Drive - it affects the Esplanade as a whole, and as such, the refuge cannot simply be limited to a few points. To this end, the intervention allows the Esplanade to become the refuge from the chaotic urban fabric that it is meant to be.