METROPOLITAN BOSTON AREA, 2002-PRESENT
Project Description
The Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) began to update MetroPlan, the 1990 regional plan for Metropolitan Boston, which covers 101 cities and towns in northeastern Massachusetts. The visioning process, incorporating a wide range of people, organizations, and public participation tools, resulted in a “tapestry of visions” that celebrates the diversity in place and opinion, rather than homogenizing them.
Finance and Support
The MetroFuture program is required by statutes in Massachusetts (a strategic growth plan is required, and this plan will cover the region through 2030). The project is primarily funded through the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC), with the assistance of numerous foundations and NGOs. Top supporters include the Barr Foundation, the Boston Foundation, the Boston Metropolitan Planning Organization, and the Garfield Foundation; the Orton Family Foundation has also been involved.
Stakeholders
Stakeholders include all citizens of the 101 towns comprising the “Metro Boston region.” In particular, the MAPC invites participation from schools, immigrants, start-up businesses, and other groups that have traditionally been under-represented in the planning process.
Methods
The MetroFuture project is proceeding in several phases, starting with visioning. Led by a Process Design Committee in 2002, working groups planned six separate project components: public involvement, leadership dialogues, data and decision support tools, media and communications, planning, and governance/steering. A Steering Committee drives the project, mostly comprised of members who have been involved since the beginning. The first phase of the project involved visioning; the project staff is currently analyzing information from the visioning process and creating integrated scenarios for the region; a public comment period will help the MAPC distinguish between the scenarios; and finally the organization will work with communities to implement the selected scenario in 2007.
The visioning process attempted to gain a sense of citizens’ visions and feel for the entire Metro Boston region as well as their individual communities. The project solicited information in many ways and with a distinct attempt to gather the opinions of minorities and under-represented groups. Methods included multi-lingual visioning sessions in minority communities; activities with school groups and youth centers; and charettes and surveys conducted across the region.
The diversity and complexity of ideas resulting from the visioning process created two major challenges for the planning group, which characterized them as “the allocation problem (what category does this statement belong to?) and the aggregation problem (how big/small should this category be?” ). MAPC’s consideration of these large questions in the identification of community character strengthens its resulting analysis and assumptions. The staff used a methodology of Visioning Themes to address these problems, which involved systematically creating themes from the data and assigning individual ideas to one theme. Clear statements of community character and values emerge from the themes and associated statements.
Concrete ideas resulting from the visioning process were divided into five major categories: People and Communities; Buildings and Landscapes; Air, Water and Wildlife; Getting Around; and Prosperity. The Buildings and Landscapes category specifically addresses how projected growth will impact community character. Reports and process information do not specify how the implementation phases will be undertaken, so it is not yet clear whether or not community character elements will actually be protected.
Outcomes
MAPC has produced several reports summarizing different aspects of the visioning process. Analysis of survey and workshop data resulted in the Tapestry of Visions Report, and staff are now converting these ideas into integrated scenarios for public review. MAPC continues to hold community meetings and briefings to update the public of the visioning results and gather feedback.
Evaluation
It is unclear how MAPC has evaluated the process up to this point, and how it will evaluate the completed plan.
Innovative Ideas
MAPC’s most innovative ideas come in response to the greatest challenges of planning in Metro Boston—incorporating and accommodating a wide range of viewpoints and diverse communities. While the MetroFuture project used familiar planning tools (charettes, surveys) to seek citizen input, its attention to under-represented communities is unusual. By holding events and communicating in multiple languages and directly seeking input from communities unlikely to volunteer input, MAPC is working to ensure that the emerging picture of community character is more representative of the whole region than it otherwise would be. Visioning results were conveyed to the community in a variety of forms as well—maps, pictures, words, presentations—ensuring that they would be accessible to the broadest possible audience.
MAPC's other innovations were primarily philosophical. Due to the large geographic span of this project, MetroFuture needed to consider character and vision on a regional scale; since participants inherently focus on places closer to home, the project was forced to consider character at local levels as well. It is rare for visioning exercises to address the interplay between regional and local character, and issues at other spatial scales. Finally, the sundry nature of opinions in the region forced MAPC to consider the aggregation and allocation questions—overarching issues that planning processes rarely stop to discuss in theory—and to create a methodology for addressing them.
METROFUTURE AT A GLANCE
COMMUNITY TYPE
101 towns in urban/suburban/rural areas
AREA
1422 square miles
POPULATION
3,066,394
LOCATION
Eastern Massachusetts
PROCESS
Visioning
PROJECT LEADERS
Metropolitan Area Planning
Council
Boston College
PROJECT THEMES
Development
Diversity
Participation