Planning for Boston

In last week’s episode, we learned about MetroCommon 2050, the regional plan for Boston that is currently underway at the Metropolitan Area Planning Council. We had Sarah Philbrick from their staff walk us through the many issues involved in pulling together such a complex endeavor as a regional plan that tries to look into the future 30 years.

Planning for unknowns is always hard. It’s one thing to plan for a rail expansion that has already been funded and will begin construction in 18 months and take 3 years to complete, but it is quite something else to try to imagine an unforeseen event like the 9/11 attacks, or a plague such as Covid-19, both of which will fundamentally reshape our behaviors and our systems in ways we still struggle to understand.

More generally, it’s just very hard to imagine the future, especially the future of a region 30 years from now. One way to help people develop a picture of what the world might look like in three decades is to look backwards three decades. What did 1990 Boston look like? For those of us old enough, we can conjure up an image of that city then, photographs and movies can help, and that experience opens a door to the world of 30 years hence.