News

Road Less Traveled: First year MUPs and MAUDs tour Boston’s lesser known sites

On September 15, first year MUPs and MAUDs took an introductory bus of tour Boston led by Alex Krieger (professor in practice of urban design) and Jim Stockard (curator of the Loeb Fellowship). The tour focused on parts of the city that many tourists and Bostonians do not visit and provided students from the two programs a chance to interact.
Bunker Hill Monument The tour began in East Boston and then traveled to South Boston. There it stopped at Columbia Point, which began as a desolate housing project built near active waste dumps. In the mid-1980s the project was sold to a private developer who improved the project and added market rate housing, which transformed the entire area. The tour next went to the Seaport and Innovation District. The Innovation District is the mayor’s initiative to develop the area and bring entrepreneurs and start-ups. From there the group continued on to Castle Island, which was originally an island, but has since been joined to the mainland, and has served as a fortification since the 1630s. The tour ended along Rose Kennedy Greenway and Long Wharf where the group was able to look at the legacy of the Big Dig and the redevelopment that has occurred in Boston.
Alison Tramba (MUP ’14) says, “I learned a lot about the city’s design decisions and current strategies for investment in development.  Even though I lived in Boston for three years before going on this tour, I saw places that I had never visited and gained a new perspective on some that I had seen several times.”