Understanding Master Planning and Why it is Important.

Proposed Urban Residential Areas for Medford, MA

On the importance of master planning

Back when Boston was considering hosting the 2024 Olympics, it came to light that the city has lacked a true urban regional master plan since the 1920’s. As several major cities enter mayoral and city council races while grappling with the state’s new public transit housing act, rising housing costs, and deteriorating traffic conditions, the importance of regional planning must finally overshadow campaign promises for incumbents and new candidates alike.

What is an urban regional master plan

An urban regional master plan is a long-term plan that guides the development of a region’s cities and towns. It blueprints the region with projected recommendations for everything from zoning to infrastructure and resource flows – including traffic – that rest on analyses of the existing conditions toward what the core city and its region can accommodate. Urban regional master plans comprehensively assess the existing condition of the urban fabric and set benchmark projections for the costs of maintenance and expansion including changes to zoning, infrastructure, and more based on studied, patterned, and expected people, business, and industrial flows.

Examples of urban regional master plans include the Regional Plan of New York and its Environs; The Montreal Master Plan; and the Paris Project and Ile-de-France Regional Master Plan. In the US, many cities have comprehensive plans but lack urban master plans let alone urban regional master plans centered on an alpha or beta core city. A key difference between comprehensive plans and master plans lies in the metrics and measures that set the benchmarks for each with comprehensive plans being more aspirational and less rooted in the existing conditions of the city or region in question.

Understanding the Urban Fabric of the Greater Boston Area (GBA)

As an alpha global city, Boston serves as the center of the GBA that encompasses a historical urban center with historical towns that incorporated as suburbs and the rural hinterland. While many cities in the GBA are as old or even older than Boston, as the port of Boston overtook historical centers like Salem and Plymouth, it grew to become the center of commerce and industrial directional growth in Massachusetts and Southern New England. The GBA generally encompasses the suburban ring encircled by I-95 and the rural-suburban hinterland encircled by I-495. The region encompasses several beta cities including Providence, RI and Worcester, MA as well as gamma cities that the state of Massachusetts considers ‘gateway cities’ including Lawrence, Lowell, Taunton, New Bedford, and Fall River.

As Boston developed as an urban economic center, its infrastructure grew to link today’s gamma and beta cities into Boston’s port apart from a two-way flow to the port of Providence, RI. Legacies of the region’s industrial infrastructure can be seen in the layout of the regional rail that today combines several rail routes that linked industrial centers outside of Boston with the financial and shipping centers it once housed. Like many American cities, the interstate highway system (IHS) opened domestic industrial routes that bypassed port dependencies and opened suburban industrial centers to cargo and shipping opportunities. As the economy of Massachusetts transitioned out of heavy industry and into knowledge sectors in technology, biotech, and life sciences, gamma cities leveraged I-95 and I-495 connections to draw business and industry outside of Boston.

Today, Boston suffers from a re-urbanizing population with infrastructure built to serve business and resource flows into the alpha city as industrial, commercial, and residential flows move bidirectionally between alpha, beta, and gamma cities. Poor regional flow management is exacerbated by the lack of an urban regional master plan as each city and town manages its own infrastructure independent of its neighbors for maintenance, planning, flow restrictions, and redirection. The result: The GBA suffers from bi-directional rush hour lockups on highways that cause traffic spillover onto local surface routes as well as infrastructural demand spikes that sustain housing shortages and challenge the capacities of utilities, education, and public safety resources.

Why is this important today

Urban regional master planning is a key tool to manage housing availability; strategically place urban resources from shelters to clinics and affordable housing stock; identify traffic flow opportunities to improve pedestrian safety while opening bicycle and vehicular traffic flows; and to optimize the cost and efficiency of public transit corridors. Localizing the focus for infrastructure overlooks the major issues the GBA is facing and leads to demonization of advocacy groups by other advocacy groups. With true studies, planning, and analyses that combine the efforts of cities within the GBA and abutting state agencies that manage interconnecting infrastructure (DCR, MassDOT, and MassPort), much of the friction cities are experiencing can be much better managed with better optimized costs and opportunities.

Let’s look at Medford, MA

Within the urban fabric of the GBA, Medford, MA is an interstitial suburban city whose economy is directly dependent on Boston as the core alpha regional city. To put the terminology in perspective, regardless of the independent history of the cities and towns around an alpha city, business and development rings form over time that represent population and business flows as the alpha core city grows. For the GBA, the first ring around Boston includes neighborhoods (former cities) like Brighton, Allston, Dorchester, Roslindale, Hyde Park, and West Roxbury, as well as cities like Brookline, Cambridge, Chelsea, and Quincy. As the regional population grew, each city in the initial ring drew commercial core interests into its borders that moved larger bedroom residential interests into the next ring that includes Somerville, Revere, Everett, Watertown, Newton, Canton, and Dedham. Boston’s annexation of its southern inner ring, the general rejection by northern cities to be annexed, and independent urban management typically led northern cities to encompass smaller areas and to be denser than their southern counterparts.

Urban maturity in the second ring is pushing transitional residential demand into the third ring that includes Malden, Medford, Arlington, the western side of Waltham, West Newton, Needham, South Dedham, and Milton. When looking at the future residential profile of Medford, it is important to recognize that Medford is an interstitial suburban city whose urbanization is drawing families into phased condominium living at market rates on the southern side of the city scaled to single-family homes on the northern side of the city. Meanwhile, large-scale commercial and industrial interests continue to re-focus on the I-95 ring away from I-93 and parkways, and within urban development closer to Logan Airport and the Port of Boston (seaport) as the Mystic River seaport scales down.

It is critical to study and understand flow and demand changes across the region to model how Medford’s internal fabric is shifting and digest what the drivers of those shifts are in the broader surrounding region. Unfortunately, a result of Medford’s isolated management is that it has only undertaken an aspirational comprehensive plan without consolidated studies, measures, and metrics that set the existing conditions of the city and what it can handle under its current and planned financial capacity. Like many of its surrounding cities, Medford, MA independently manages its governance and infrastructure including traffic, building design requirements, zoning, deed management, land use management, education, public safety, and critical infrastructure. Insular considerations and management threaten the continuity of both development opportunities and community sustainability as the city forges ahead toward its future identity.

Unlike its surrounding cities, however, Medford, MA also has one of the highest per capita land-use and roadway partnerships with state agencies including MassDOT for I-93 and MA DCR for parkways, Mystic Lakes, the Mystic River Watershed, and the Middlesex Fells. Medford’s exposure and dependence on interconnection and interagency points mean that it has an opportunity to blaze a path for regional planning that its neighboring cities have not done well.

There are opportunities to do this right

Interconnected requirements for land-use and infrastructure management place Medford, MA in a unique position to set a standard for how to collaborate between local city interests and a broader urban fabric for community and regional development. Unfortunately, without a proper urban master plan, the city lacks the insight necessary to exercise leverage with its neighbors and abutting state agencies to get much done. In fact, the city’s current, un-studied approach leaves it at risk of incurring liability costs from agencies and interests to which it is subordinate should it cause what is termed ‘irreparable harm’ to their own planning efforts.

For example:

• In 2020, MA DCR published its parkways Master Plan that includes an existing conditions analysis and codified plans for how it aims to improve its inter-urban corridors. City planning and infrastructure efforts that encroach on and cause excess traffic flows through infrastructure within MA DCR’s planning and projections can result in the city of Medford, MA incurring the costs of updating MA DCR’s studies and/or implementing flow restrictions within city infrastructure before the approach to intersections like the one at Salem St. and the Fellsway West on the identified Salem St. corridor. In similar manner, any Shared Streets and Spaces funding from MassDOT can be called into question if MassDOT critical infrastructure incurs loading changes or excess wear beyond maintenance studies traced back to infrastructural and development plans authorized by the city.

• One that hits closer to home is that Meford’s insularly focused mayor and city council proved particularly incapable of navigating its broader urban fabric obligations as it broke down into policy discussions surrounding the memoriam resolution to honor Dan Dill who was struck and killed by a vehicle on the Mystic Valley Parkway. The city council displayed its lack of understanding for how to engage with and activate MA DCR for risk and liability management on a road that it owns and manages running through the city. A combined lack of experience and governance understanding on the part of a city council elected on a severely localized and pre ordained agenda and platform led to a display of disarray in understanding or competence toward activating its regional partnerships. In the process, the city demonstrated its lack of aptitude for how to engage planning on a regional level even if only for impact considerations.

Between state agency subordination and inter-urban collaboration, Medford, MA overestimates its governance prominence when trying to isolate its transformation apart from its place in the GBA regional fabric.

For example: while the GBA lacks an urban regional master plan, activating regional considerations is codified in the Massachusetts General Laws Part I, Title II, Chapter 21, Section 29 that outlines the procedure for establishing a district commission for inter-city infrastructure, policy, and planning considerations. While the provision does not go far enough to establish a regional master planning body, it outlines the procedures cities should use to manage through provisions, planning, and work that impact each other, such as traffic flows, border zoning balances, public safety, critical infrastructure, rights-of-way, through-routes, trucking, and more.

District commissions pair cities and towns together to co-plan and resource- and cost-share for development and policy allowances and changes to ensure that the connected fabric between neighbors remains intact. Strong district commissions have led to proactive state agency participation and activation with the most notable past district commission being the metropolitan district commission that later broke apart into some of today’s city and regional resource management agencies in Boston and across the GBA.

Pulling inter-urban planning into focus, the city of Medford, MA has a responsibility to chart a new course forward for itself and its place in the fabric of the GBA. The city is in dire need of an urban master plan after 30-40 years of inconsistent planning and jurisdictional management – the comprehensive plan is not nearly enough as it does nothing to encompass the current urban fabric in its studied entirety.

Planning proposals in Medford to date, including zoning efforts, are being made inconsistently and without codified community engagement and partnership for the purposes of unlocking very small and locally minded development opportunities that will further disenfranchise the city from its surrounding environs. As an interstitial suburb in the next development ring of the GBA, Medford has one shot to get this right and so far, it is proposing changes in the wrong order to engineer toward a comprehensive, representative, and prospective planning effort that codifies a sustainable urban future. Unfortunately, backward planning efforts – no matter how well intended – are all too common in the GBA and have initiated and compounded many of the problems, - from traffic to strains on safety, education, electrical, and water infrastructure - that the GBA suffers from daily.