Readers can check out a 10-minute summary version of a presentation on “Planning the Hub’s Metropolis” that I made at the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy, in Cambridge, MA, on October 23. In this presentation, I discussed the difference between the development and implementation of urban and regional plans, often undertaken by government or transportation companies, and the use of vernacular development templates employed by legions of developers and builders. Please view the video Two Kinds of Regional Planning.
Archive for the ‘The Hub’s Metropolis’ Category
Posted in Boston History, Metropolitan Boston, Politics of Planning, Smart Growth, The Hub's Metropolis, tagged Metropolitan Boston, suburban history, The Hub's Metropolis on November 5, 2013| Leave a Comment »
Jim O’Connell Interviewed in Quincy
Posted in Metropolitan Boston, Quincy, Smart Growth, The Hub's Metropolis, tagged Metropolitan Boston, Quincy, Regional Planning, suburban history, The Hub's Metropolis on September 10, 2013| Leave a Comment »
For a short five-minute overview of The Hub’s Metropolis, check out this intereview on Quincy Access Television. This interview was taped to promote Jim O’Connell’s September 24 presnetation at Thomas Crane Library in Quincy. The prohgram starts at 7:00 PM.
Interview about Newton as a Suburban Innovator
Posted in Metropolitan Boston, Newton, Railroad Development, The Hub's Metropolis, tagged Railroads, suburban history, The Hub's Metropolis on September 5, 2013| Leave a Comment »
Jim O’Connell has been interviewed by Ellen Meyers on “Books and Beyond,” a program featured on NewTV (Newton Cable TV). Jim discusses how his book The Hub’s Metropolis helps explain the development of Newton, MA. The first railroad trip from Boston traveled on the Boston & Worcester Railroad line to West Newton in 1834. Within a decade, Newton was becoming one of Boston’s first railroad suburbs. A key developer was Congressman William Jackson, who supported building the Boston & Worcester Railroad through Newton, instead of Watertown and Waltham. In 1844, Jackson laid out Newton’s first residential subdivision–Walnut Park–adjacent to his estate (today’s Jackson Homestead & headquarters of the Newton Historical Society) near Newton Corner. Jackson was also instrumental in developing Auburndale three years later.
You can find the interview at http://www.newtv.org/video/booksandbeyond/april2013/
Jim O’Connell Interviewed on “The Urbanologist”
Posted in Boston History, Metropolitan Boston, The Hub's Metropolis, tagged Boston, Metropolitan Boston, Regional Planning, suburban history, The Hub's Metropolis on September 5, 2013| Leave a Comment »
Jim O’Connell has been interviewed in print on “The Urbanologist” website about his perspectives on living in metropolitan Boston. Jim’s observations address the question “Boston How Did You Grow?” They expand upon the findings in his book The Hub’s Metropolis: Greater Boston’s Development from Railroad Suburbs to Smart Growth. “The Urbanologist” website is written and curated by Max Grinnell, an historian and urban planner who is particularly active in Chicago and Boston. Find the interview at
http://theurbanologist.com/post/52381953690/boston-how-did-you-grow
Book Review in “Architecture Boston”
Posted in Boston Society of Architects, Metropolitan Boston, Smart Growth, The Hub's Metropolis, tagged architecture, Boston, Metropolitan Boston, Regional Planning, suburban history, The Hub's Metropolis, transit-oriented development on September 3, 2013| Leave a Comment »
Review of The Hub’s Metropolis in Architecture Boston (Boston Society of Architects), Fall 2013
The Hub’s Metropolis: Greater Boston’s Development from Railroad Suburbs to Smart Growth
James C. O’Connell
MIT Press, 2013
Reviewed by David Luberoff
Preparing to move to Boston in 2000, James O’Connell went “scouting for a home to buy” in Milton near the Blue Hills Parkway. As an urban and cultural historian, he recognized that the road and nearby neighborhoods were typical of Boston’s inner-core suburbs and thought it would be interesting to learn more about how they were built. Thus began a more than decade-long exploration that culminates with The Hub’s Metropolis.
O’Connell, a community planner for the National Park Service in Boston, fills three notable gaps with this book. First, rather than focusing on the city’s historic core, O’Connell turns his eye on the entire region. Second, rather than focusing on well-known epochs and structures, he is interested in the full sweep of development, including the region’s ubiquitous and largely undistinguished split-level houses, Cape Cod–style homes, and McMansions. Finally, O’Connell recognizes that there is a gap between guidebooks, which tell us what to see but not why, and history books, which tell us why but often ignore the what. To fill this third gap, he describes nine waves of development, starting with “Traditional Village Centers and Proto-Suburbs,” continuing through such eras as “Metropolitan Parkway Suburbs” and “Postwar Automobile Suburbs,” and ending with the current “Smart Growth Era.”
The book’s “guidebook” elements point to extant buildings and communities that exemplify each era. In Newton, where O’Connell ultimately settled, he not only suggests well-known sites such as the Jackson Homestead and the MBTA Green Line station in Newton Centre but also points to Oak Hill Park, a development of 418 small, cottage-style homes the city built in the late 1940s for veterans of World War II and their families.
Although useful, the book does have its limits and flaws. Because it spans vast amounts of both time and space, the accounts of specific projects cannot convey the wide array of values, goals, beliefs, and forces that drove them. Writing about the Middlesex Fells, for example, O’Connell notes that it was part of a seminal plan prepared by Charles Eliot and Sylvester Baxter, creators of the Metropolitan Park Commission, a notable example of regional governance in an otherwise fragmented region. However, he does not mention the significant class and religious differences behind the park’s creation. Indeed, as historian Michael Rawson has pointed out, the park’s very name was a 19th-century fiction designed to suggest a nonexistent Anglo-Saxon past for an area called The Five-Mile Wood, popular with Irish-Catholic immigrants.
Such gaps become more striking when O’Connell, who has strong views on what he considers desirable policies, writes about contemporary issues. He laments the state’s decision not to construct a second major airport at Fort Devens when that facility closed in the early 1990s, but does not note that funding the new airport probably would have required enormous increases in landing fees at Logan Airport during construction and possibly closing Logan after the new airport opened. Nor does he mention that a successful airport at Devens would have spurred the sprawling development he frequently decries elsewhere in the book.
Despite these drawbacks, The Hub’s Metropolis is a welcome addition to my shelves of “books about Boston” and will accompany me as I travel the region.
Blog on “Brainiac” about “The Hub’s Metropolis”
Posted in The Hub's Metropolis, tagged Boston, suburban history on July 30, 2013| Leave a Comment »
Kevin Hartnett, a blogger on the Boston Globe’s Brainiac website discussed The Hub’s Metropolis in a piece “Color by Transportation Era,” June 11, 2013. Check it out
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2013/06/color_by_transp.html
Review of “The Hub’s Metropolis” in “Planning Magazine”
Posted in Boston History, Metropolitan Boston, The Hub's Metropolis, tagged Boston, Metropolitan Boston, Regional Planning, suburban history on July 30, 2013| Leave a Comment »
Book Review of The Hub’s Metropolis in the American Planning Association’s magazine Planning, July, 2013
Planners Library
By Harold Henderson
Two centuries of Boston suburbs
James C. O’Connell, AICP, a planner with the National Park Service in Boston, finds that area residents “lack a clear perspective of the entire region and how it has developed.” His response is The Hub’s Metropolis: Greater Boston’s Development from Railroad Suburbs to Smart Growth (2013; MIT Press; 326 pp.; $34.95).
Using a format inspired by Dolores Hayden’s Building Suburbia, O’Connell outlines nine stages of development, from traditional village centers and proto-suburbs (1800–1860) and country retreats (1820–1920) on up to interstates, exurbs, and sprawl (1970–2012) and the smart growth era (1990–2012). Along the way, he includes mill towns, Boston’s urban renaissance, and future possibilities for the Northeast region. The account remains readable while covering a great deal of ground both physically and temporally.
Period photographs, plans, and engravings make the book inviting to students of American urbanism anywhere. An example is the view of the Mystic Valley Parkway in 1897: all horses, bicyclists, pedestrians, and carriages. In his postscript, the author speculates on the impacts of climate change, expensive oil, and digital urban management on Boston and environs.
Book Launch for “The Hub’s Metropolis”
Posted in Metropolitan Boston, Newton, The Hub's Metropolis, tagged Boston, Metropolitan Boston, Regional Planning, suburban history, The Hub's Metropolis on April 2, 2013| Leave a Comment »
Please join us
Book Launch Party for
Jim O’Connell’s New Book
Newtonville Books
10 Langley Rd., Newton Centre, MA
http://www.newtonvillebooks.com/cms/2013/03/22/sun-apr-21-2pm-james-c-oconnell-author-of-the-hubs-metropolis-greater-bostons-development-from-railroad-suburbs-to-smart-growth/
Sunday, April 21, 2013
2:00 PM
Enjoy refreshment and learn more than you ever knew about the hub’s metropolis
RSPV Ann Marie O’Connell 617-244-4038 or jcoconnell@comcast.net