Topic: City Planning
City planning and design, built environments, urban planners, parks, roads

City PlanningImmigrant NeighborhoodNew BostonUrban Renewal An aerial plan of the neighborhood of Charlestown, showing a large number of buildings colored in, coded with needing "serious" or "major" repairs.

Urban Renewal in Boston’s Charlestown Neighborhood and Lessons Learned from the West End

Boston’s urban landscape has been dramatically shaped by urban renewal initiatives of the mid-20th century. Among the most notable examples are the West End and Charlestown—two historic neighborhoods with starkly divergent urban renewal results. While the West End became the poster child for urban renewal’s destructive potential, Charlestown had a very different outcome only a few years later. This article examines these contrasting urban renewal experiences, highlighting their implementation approaches, community responses, and lasting impacts on Boston’s urban fabric.

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City PlanningImmigrant NeighborhoodImmigrationModernNeighborhood Life An aerial photograph of three-story brick buildings facing each other, with a garden walkway in the middle.

Victory Village: The Story of the South End’s Villa Victoria

During the mid-20th century, Boston targeted the South End for urban renewal, alongside the West End and other low-income communities across the city. Responding to impending displacement, the South End’s Puerto Rican residents organized to take control of their community’s destiny, forming the Emergency Tenants’ Council (ETC) and successfully negotiating the right to redevelop the land themselves. The result was Villa Victoria—a community-planned and operated housing development that would become the center of Latino life and culture in the South End. Unlike top-down redevelopment schemes that displaced residents, as happened in the West End, Villa Victoria emerged from the community’s own vision and struggle.

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City PlanningModernNew BostonReports & AnalysisUrban Renewal A black and white photograph of two high-rise apartments being built. In front of them is an advertisement for a new apartment complex labelled: "Charles River Park."

Affordable Housing in the West End: Initial Plans and Current Realities

The story of urban renewal in the West End is a complex one, marked by both ambitious plans and challenging realities when it comes to affordable housing. Over the past seventy years, the West End has served as a cautionary tale, full of broken promises and ongoing struggles for income-restricted housing. More recent efforts, such as the affordable housing initiative that is part of the redevelopment of the West End branch of the Boston Public Library, look to address this past.

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City PlanningModernReports & Analysis Heat map showing Massachusetts population by town, with most concentration around greater Boston and Worcester.

Population Predictions for Boston and Massachusetts, 2020–2050

Boston, like its West End, is no stranger to marked population changes. Recent studies have predicted further transformations for Boston’s and Massachusetts’ populations that could have meaningful economic and political impacts. Such changes, current and future, are influenced by various interrelated factors: immigration patterns, cost of living, major disruptors, anchor institutions, and global population growth rate.

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City PlanningNew BostonPolitics & LawUrban Renewal "A Guide to Slum Clearance and Urban Development," which outlines Housing Act of 1949

The Creation of the US Federal Urban Renewal Program

While the demolition of the West End began in 1958, the momentum for its destruction and for the federal urban renewal program itself began 20 years earlier, in the aftermath of the Great Depression. The Housing Act of 1949 would later mark the official birth of the federal Urban Renewal Program. Although it aimed to revitalize struggling inner cities, it often did so at the expense of established communities and displaced residents.

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City PlanningNew BostonUrban Renewal Garden apartment proposal, from the Boston Redevelopment Authority’s “Urban Renewal in Mattapan,” 1962 (Boston Public Library).

The Mattapan Project: Urban Renewal That Never Happened

The Mattapan Project was first mentioned by the Boston Housing Authority in 1952 and later by the Boston Redevelopment Authority in 1962 as a possible urban renewal project. Despite the preliminary planning funding being granted in 1963 and the urban renewal application prepared in 1964, the project was dropped by the City of Boston. The delays in the Mattapan Project’s site development and the eventual abandonment of the plan helps to demonstrate the changes in public opinion on urban renewal projects of the time.

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