Finishing the Emerald Necklace is a Matter of Environmental Justice
Completing Boston’s Emerald Necklace – Frederick Law Olmsted’s vision for an interconnected system of parks to connect communities to nature – by building a Columbia Road greenway has been little more than talk for decades. But the idea might have finally met its moment because of a combination of the need to address one of the most deadly consequences of climate change – extreme summer heat – and the election of Mayor Michelle Wu, who won office on the strength of her vision for Boston as a city that cares for all its people and neighborhoods.
The threat of dire climate change this century is stark. Even accounting for existing national pledges to mitigate carbon emissions, Earth is on track to warm about 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 degrees Fahrenheit), according to United Nation’s scientists.
Last July, an independent research group reported that Boston ranked as having the nation’s sixth hottest “urban heat islands.” As described by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, heat islands “are urbanized areas that experience higher temperatures than outlying areas. Structures such as buildings, roads, and other infrastructure absorb and re-emit the sun’s heat more than natural landscapes such as forests and water bodies. Urban areas, where these structures are highly concentrated and greenery is limited, become ‘islands’ of higher temperatures relative to outlying areas.” Mid-afternoon temperatures in urban heat islands can run as much as 15 to 20 degrees hotter than surrounding tree-lined areas according to the independent report.
Fortunately, Mayor Wu is addressing the issue. At a recent Earth Day observance she released a comprehensive “heat plan” to mitigate the effects of extreme heat in the city with several relief measures, including enhancing tree canopy, installing water bottle filling stations and making investments in cooling infrastructure. The plan also briefly mentions building or enhancing green corridors, including Columbia Road in Dorchester.
A Columbia Road greenway running from Franklin Park to Moakley Park in South Boston is the major unfinished portion of Olmsted’s master plan mostly completed in the late 1800s. The Emerald Necklace runs west from Boston Common down Commonwealth Avenue, through the Fens and past Jamaica Pond south to the Arnold Arboretum, and then north to Franklin Park.
Olmsted’s plans for Columbia Road stalled in the early 1900s. It had become a critical transportation corridor, including numerous electrified trolley lines. By the time the trolleys were gone, the character of Columbia Road, one of the widest in Boston, was cemented as a busy, mostly treeless, vehicular thoroughfare, its asphalt median today featuring massive concrete planters only occasionally sporting a bit of vegetation.
Despite the fact that Olmsted, whose 200th birthday is being celebrated this year, practiced landscape architecture at the intersection of design and social equity, the failure after all these years to complete the Columbia Road greenway is also an example of environmental injustice as the harshest impacts of environmental neglect of all kinds often occur in disadvantaged communities.
In addition to heat mitigation, potential benefits of a Columbia Road greenway include healthier air and greater economic prosperity, possibly including an economic renaissance of Upham’s Corner – once a shopping center for a quarter million Bostonians – as well as jobs to construct the greenway and for planting and pruning brigades.
Proposals to build the greenway arise periodically. Several years ago, former Mayor Marty Walsh’s administration published a series of infrastructure, transportation and climate-ready strategies, including plans for design and construction of a Columbia Road greenway, but the project is on hold in favor of other roadway priorities.
A Columbia Road greenway designed to fully meet the climate resilience challenge should be a priority as a matter of environmental justice. Finishing the Emerald Necklace would also be an appropriate lasting symbol of the transition from old Boston to new, a majority-minority city under a new mayor putting its troubled history of racial, economic and social injustice in the past by equitably facing up to local and global challenges of the present and the future.
About the Author:
David Cifrino, a 2022 Senior Fellow in Harvard University’s Advanced Leadership Initiative, was born in Dorchester where his grandfather in 1915 founded the Upham’s Corner Market at 600 Columbia Road, a massive food store recognized as a National Historical Landmark for being an important predecessor to modern supermarkets.