.png)
How can the field of urban planning in Boston shift to recognize the collective voices and power that we hold? In this edition of the Ujima WIRE, MIT Masters of City Planning Student Ananth Udupa shares two present-day stories, and two recent histories, that may lead the field of planning in the right direction: prioritizing the stories, needs, and dreams of Boston’s working-class communities of color.
01
My students eagerly sat down, jittery from their free period, as I unfurled the large piece of butcher paper. It had been a whole two weeks since our last session of class at Blackstone Elementary School, on Shawmut Avenue, and they were itching to work on a new project. The brief was simple: Imagine the entire class lived in a village together. What would it look like if it were built for you? Design it with your classmates, on butcher paper.
I had given them a brief introduction to Seundja Rhee, a South Korean painter, engraver, draftswoman, and illustrator who used a speckling effect of dots to create these large landscapes swirling with the power of memory and nostalgia.
I showed my students Rhee’s work as an example, a suggested method for how to illustrate their village more abstractly; the dots were also an attempt to slow them down.
Second graders, however, take what they want and do what they want. So, after ten seconds of creating speckled maps using chalk, they began to create their own rules for their drawings. What flowed out of them was a fascinating set of parameters for what a city needed to include: multi-story housing with unit numbers, public parks, basketball courts, trees, pools, massive boats with skyscraper housing on the upper decks, monster friends living next to big houses, video game characters walking alongside stick-figure portraits of the students, farms and churches and schools and zoos.
The students toppled over each other, adding layers of chalk onto one another’s drawings, and collaborating (sometimes fighting) about colors, outfits, and borders. With smudged chalk intentionally, chaotically streaked across the map, people walked sideways and houses were upside down; perspective, elevation, and plan slowly connected through lines into one village home for the class.
The village plan took two more class periods to complete; once it was done, each student took turns going up to the drawing to point out their favorite parts. They named connection points and analyzed how the residents could get around, also vocalizing how they’d edit their co-designed plans. I came back the next week to find their drawing hung up proudly in the center of the classroom, where it would sit for the rest of the school year (with students occasionally looking back at it during class).
02
People slowly filed into the large meeting room at Pao Arts Center on Albany Street (1), a block down from the Chinatown Gate. An artist team (2) had organized an engagement event for the residents and extended community of Boston’s Chinatown; everyone had convened to talk about the then-upcoming Cultural Plan: a planning addendum to the 2020 Chinatown Masterplan, determining how to preserve, protect, and promote Chinatown’s unique residential and cultural heritage. This particular event was a ‘Memory Mapping Dinner,’ where residents would share what places, memories, and aspects made Chinatown Chinatown (3).
A long, singular table in the center of the main room had been set with a bright red tablecloth. Red flowers, fairy lights, gold plates, and nametags were placed on each seat. A small clementine sat in the middle of each plate: a “gift” for each attendee. Steaming hot Szechuan food, catered from several local restaurants, was unboxed and placed onto platters, to be served family-style amongst the attendees.
After everyone came in, served themselves, and settled, the quiet chatter lowering to a slow lull, the artists introduced themselves and their broader team. I sat amongst the attendees at the table, with a laptop in hand, ready to jot down the locations and memories people shared (along with any additional notes).
The stories poured out. One by one, each person at the table reminisced: some reflected on their time as youth volunteers for Boston Chinatown’s Asian Community Development Corporation’s A-Voyce program, while others voiced their concerns regarding new “transplants” into the Boston community, all ultimately agreeing on hearing safety and family in the East Asian languages spoken around the neighborhood.
Each story demonstrated the sharers’ deep gratitude and pride in how they spoke about their homes, some of which had been held for over four generations. One resident charted the history of the Kwong Kow Chinese School, which used to be a funeral home and was rented out by the Chinese Merchants Association, neighboring several community organizations and advocacy groups. Another attendee remembered how all her friends would pass her home on Oxford Street to get to school for Taishanese lessons on the weekend, and reminisced fondly on how they would all play afterward. Another third-generation resident lifted their own family history, describing their immigrant great-grandparents as paper sons: Chinese immigrants who loopholed entry into the United States by filing paperwork claiming to be family members of immigrant friends who were already US citizens (sometimes even making up names). Time and collective memory wove around the table, through tears and a lot of laughter, from people of all ages and relationships to the neighborhood.
Eventually, attention turned back to the end of the table where the artists were sitting. By this point, three and a half hours had passed, running well over the time we had originally allotted for the event, but everyone stayed through the end to pack up, take home leftovers, clean up the space, and linger for deeper conversations….I still remember one of the attendees telling us, as many started to trickle out the door, “We have never been to an event where we have felt this valued.” What was captured in words was only fractional compared to the vulnerability, care, and honesty we held in being together that evening.
I offer you these two very different stories that I’ve participated in or observed, of people living in and enlivening the fringes of areas just a short walk from one another (the South End and Chinatown), to highlight that these abbreviated histories fit into a greater narrative of resistance in Boston. Although separated by a highway (I-90) and impacted by different waves of immigration, both neighborhoods face similarly powerful forces of gentrification and urban renewal which they continue to struggle against.
Blackstone Elementary School was once a part of a historic fight against urban renewal in the 1960s and 1970s. This struggle began when residents of the surrounding Villa Victoria neighborhood, within the South End, banded together to create the Emergency Tenants Council of Parcel 19. This council incorporated itself in 1968 to oppose coming renewal plans by the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) for this parcel of land in their neighborhood.
Concerned community members could not see any other way to advocate for their rights to the city. Nick Salerno documents this sentiment in a digital timeline, writing that, “the neighborhood[‘s] residents, primarily low to moderate income Hispanic people, strongly felt that the plans of the BRA would result in the destruction of the neighborhood and the displacement of residents.” The Emergency Tenants’ Council would go on to fight for the retention of over 400 housing units (4), housing which would have been removed and families which would have been displaced within Parcel 19 if the BRA’s planned redevelopment had come to pass. The council also moved to acquire land to redevelop itself, including plots of open space and a building which would eventually become Blackstone Elementary School.
The South End today is advertised as an affluent, artist-oriented enclave, with median rent standing at $4.1k a month; but the area organized by the council, and by Inquilinos Boricuas En Acción, remains a Latinx and Puerto Rican stronghold. Blackstone, following an Ubuntu Pedagogy, continues to serve a large number of Spanish-speaking students and families from the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and Argentina, and sits in the middle of this conflicting landscape as a site still dedicated to a vision of the South End as a neighborhood that cares for all of its neighbors.
Traveling just a short way up Shawmut Ave, or Washington St. via the SL5 Silver Line Bus, and crossing over I-90, we arrive in what we now call Boston’s Chinatown. The area has long been a gathering point for immigrant communities: first known as South Cove, the neighborhood was, “built on landfill in the 1840s for… railroads and row houses. By the 1870s, the industrial uses had turned the residences into tenements for new immigrants – the Irish, Germans and Jews”(5). Chinese men began to arrive in the 1870s and by the 1880s, a Chinatown was slowly established. Industries like laundry houses, nail salons, and a local garment district became staples for employment in the area (6). Historic maps of the area before renewal, and observing leftover traces of Chinese storefront signage down Washington Street, into the South End, tell the story of the connection between the two neighborhoods.
Chinatown was deeply impacted by the construction of I-90 in the 1960s; this transportation project displaced 20,000 people, and removed access to local green spaces–this sowed the seeds for deeper community health issues stemming from eventual particulate matter pollution left behind by car traffic.
While there is a long and interrelated history of highway construction across the United States which rift communities of color asunder, it is also important to note that this horrible outcome activated other communities in Boston to fight back against further highway construction. A second large highway project, which would have created an inner ring road through many of Boston’s neighborhoods (as well as a highway corridor through Boston’s southwest neighborhoods), was halted by community action in the late 1960s and ‘70s. At the same time, reflections from community members in Chinatown show us that people still remember their time in the neighborhood fondly and that their memories of the place are not characterized by its lack, but rather by its abundance of care.
Both the South End and Chinatown continue to be impacted by restrictive planning and development, prioritizing capital gains over community.
Still, both sites continue to serve as hubs for working-class immigrants finding homes in Boston. These neighborhoods have gathered power and shown force as examples of resistance against urban renewal and gentrification (which are often shepherded by bureaucratic policy and planning to make space for fast-acting private, luxury developers trying to capitalize on “prime downtown real estate”). Further notable community-led struggles in Chinatown include: the development of Parcel C into affordable housing, now managed and occupied by the Asian Community Development Corporation; activating the Reggie Wong Memorial Park through creative place-keeping; and most recently, fighting for a new library and park on Parcel R1, currently a privately-owned parking lot in the downtown area.
Activism in the South End is still present, although private developers and gentrifying forces have taken stronger hold here. Organizations like Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción continue to work hard to support the legacy and present reality of residents of Villa Victoria; the IBA is in the midst of constructing a community center celebrating Latinx arts, culture and community empowerment in Villa Victoria, called La CASA.
A promise of progress is a call to the table. Who gets to shape the city? Who decides what is preserved, what is erased, and what is built? We hear from students the priorities or visions for different ways of being; we hear from our elders the stories and lore that ground us in the places we inhabit. But these desires and personal remembrances do not square with the predominant rationale for city-making, most recently a trend towards a “smooth” and stainless city (7).
The fight for community-led development in the South End and Chinatown—against urban renewal, gentrification, and displacement—is not just history. It is ongoing. It is a reminder that the city is not just a collection of buildings and zoning plans; it is the people who inhabit it, the stories they tell, and the futures they imagine. It is easy to compartmentalize, categorize, or erase messiness with labels and smooth lines, to “plan for the majority” using the lenses of rationality and efficiency, and to prioritize money-making, development, and speed over preserving community legacies. But the real work of change, the change that will serve us, is both urgent and slow (8).
We can ground the work of designing cities by working directly with the people who call our city home. Sasha Costanza-Chock, a researcher and designer who works to support community-led processes that build shared power, offers that “design justice compels us to begin by listening to community organizers, learning what they are working on, and asking what the most useful focus of design efforts would be. In this way, design processes can be community-led, rather than designer- or funder-led. Another way to put this might be: ‘Don’t start by building a new table; start by coming to the table’”(9).
Gathering and engagement can become a social project of rebellion, recentering our perspective from a sterilized birds-eye view towards an eye-level, humanistic rendering of the city around us. If we commit to collective visioning—grounded in art, play, storytelling, and activism—then we can build a city where all of us belong. A city where a child’s dream of monster friends living next door is just as valid as a zoning plan, and where every gathering ends with enough leftovers for us to pack up and take home.
The table is set. Are we ready to take our seats?
Endnotes:
(1) Pao Arts Center is an art gallery placed in the Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center that is a community hub for the residents in the neighborhood and broader Asian community. Born out of community activism, Pao Arts Center’s vision is to promote cultural equity for the AAPI community through the gentrification of Chinatown and inequitable access to resources that enable cultural agency. Learn more about Pao here: https://www.paoartscenter.org/
(2) Artists, Mel Taing, Lily Xie, and Heang Rubin, were selected through a public call for art put together for the Chinatown Cultural Plan to center local artists in designing the engagement process with the working group and also complete creative documentation of the cultural plan as a whole.
(3) This would later become source material to outline what sites specifically needed to be preserved to keep Chinatown as a living cultural and residential hub for Chinese and Asian American community members as well as policy to create the container for future, anti-fetishizing growth for the community.
(4) Mel King, “Chapter 5: Housing: Community Assembly for a United South End (CAUSE),” Chain of Change: Struggles for Black Community Development (Boston: South End Press, 1981): 72.
(5) A comprehensive history of Boston’s Chinatown was documented in the Boston Chinatown Atlas by Tunney Lee. See here to read more: https://www.chinatownatlas.org/era/bachelor-exclusion-era-1875-wwi/
(6) Drawing from logic of cities oriented around industry and housing for labor described in “Authoritarian High Modernism” by James C. Scott
(7) René Boer. Smooth City: Against Urban Perfection, Towards Collective Alternatives. Valiz, Print. 2023
(8) Pulling from “Wholeness is no Trifling Matter,” by Holly A. Smith
(9) Sasha Costanza-Chock, “Design Practices: ‘Nothing About Us Without Us’,” 384
Ananth Udupa (he/they) is a dancer, designer, and artist based in Boston, MA. With a background in Bharatanatyam and architecture, his work aims to nurture diasporic communities through socially engaged art. Ananth’s current focus is the relationship between emotion-based movement, South Asian rituals, and being in space explored through performance, drawing, collage and sculpture. His work has been exhibited in MassART’s Godine Gallery and Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts. He was part of the 2023 aMASSit choreography cohort at the Dance Complex and is a part of the Early Career Network for Natura Network. He is currently pursuing a Masters in City Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.