BOSTON 2060: LANDSCAPE TACTICS FOR CARBON-NEUTRAL FUTURES
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Context map of Study Area 5 within the City of Boston. Historic coastline indicated by color overlay on top of aerial image. Current political boundaries indicated by solid black line, while historic boundaries of the City of Roxbury are overlaid with a dashed line. Study Area 5 shown with hatching overlay.
Introduction. This project explores what a city can do to tackle global warming at an urban scale by lowering the heat-island effect and sequestering as much CO2 as possible. How can investment in natural and artificial systems be integrated into our urban environments so to provide the benefits we need to survive a warming earth? Using the city of Boston as a case study, four intervention prototypes demonstrate how natural systems, as well as man-made solutions, can be inserted into the fabric of a city so to help reduce both CO2 and the heat island effect. The “Forest as Infrastructure” Scenario, developed by researchers at the Harvard Forest (in Petersham, MA), provides a set of baseline assumptions for
2060. This scenario envisions a future in which policies, markets, state and local planning, and incentives focus on growing the Commonwealth’s living “infrastructure,” its forests. The project builds on CO2 sequestration techniques such as forestation, bio-char and soil absorption, and adapts these concepts to an urban context where space is limited. The goal is to study the city and make suggestions for the insertions of natural and man-made systems that will make the region more self-reliant, while also reducing CO2 and cooling the environment.