FROM THE MODERATOR
Kitty Dukakis framed environmental protection as a public health issue long before that connection was widely recognized — and she championed community involvement in local environmental decisions as a matter of civic right, not just good process. Both of those convictions run through this panel. The projects we will learn about were all co-created with neighborhood residents.
The presentations range across scales and disciplines: from the granular work of designing a pocket park in Chelsea with residents who helped build the benches, to the $150 million capital investment Boston is making in coastal resilience, to proposed state legislation that would direct environmental justice funding toward the communities that need it most. What unites all four speakers is a shared understanding that resilience is not just a technical problem. It is a question of who gets protected, who gets included in design decisions, and whose neighborhood gets the investment — and when.
Our panel also expands the conventional frame of resilience beyond stormwater and sea level rise to include energy: the capacity of disadvantaged communities to access affordable, renewable power and to maintain that power when disaster strikes. That broader definition, and the policy work required to realize it, represents the frontier of equitable climate action in Massachusetts.
Joan Fitzgerald
Moderator · Professor of Public Policy & Urban Affairs, Northeastern University
Professor Sarah Carr opened with a deceptively simple premise: a park can address multiple vulnerabilities at once — heat, flooding, isolation, and inequity — but only if it is designed with the people who will use it. Her research at Northeastern, conducted across the College of Arts, Media and Design and the College of Social Sciences and Humanities, layers lived community experience on top of environmental data — heat readings, open space access, walkability metrics, and building-level thermal performance —to produce design that is genuinely responsive rather than imposed.
The stakes are real. Chelsea, Massachusetts, is one of the hottest communities in the Greater Boston area, a direct consequence of its built environment: 80% impervious surfaces, just 4% green space, and only 2% tree canopy coverage. In a city already at the front lines of climate change, that physical reality is a public health emergency. The logical response is landscape architecture — not as decoration, but as infrastructure.
In the C2C-funded Chelsea project, Professor Carr worked with environmental justice nonprofit Green Roots and the Boston Society of Landscape Architects to transform a privately owned parking lot into a community park. Before any formal design was complete, Northeastern architecture students attended pop-up events, gathered resident input, and began making incremental improvements to the site — a swing installation, mulching, steps built from donated lobster traps, flexible seating that residents could rearrange for different events. The goal was for residents to begin claiming ownership of the space before it was finished, so that when it was complete, it was already theirs.
“A park is not created overnight — especially not one with such social and environmental importance. Residents need to use it and take ownership of it before it is formally designed.”
— Sarah Carr, Northeastern University
In New Bedford, in partnership with Envision Resilience, Groundwork South Coast, Love the Ave, and the National Park Service, Carr’s students built models with residents to plan streetscape improvements combining economic development, heat mitigation, stormwater management, and community gardening. The partnership with Groundwork illustrates how design work, when embedded in community organizations, can build lasting local capacity.
Carr closed by situating this project-level work within a broader framework: effective resilience requires cooperation at every level, from the individual to the community to the private sector to government. Architecture and landscape design are not peripheral to public health — they are among its most powerful tools.
Chris Osgood framed the city’s climate challenge in terms of three converging risks — stormwater flooding, coastal flooding, and extreme heat — and described how Boston has moved from a decade of community-driven planning into a decade of implementation.
On stormwater, the city’s two principal agencies — Boston Water and Sewer Commission, managing 600 miles of underground storm drain infrastructure, and the Streets Cabinet, managing 800 miles of roadway — are reshaping their investment priorities. The Water and Sewer Commission has launched a new program directing capital toward projects that reduce stormwater risk and improve water quality as it enters the Charles, Neponset, Mystic, and Boston Harbor. The Streets Cabinet has created a new Office of Green Infrastructure to embed green design into roadway investments. Central Square in East Boston, highlighted by Osgood, illustrates the approach: roadway space converted to expanded green infrastructure, new street trees, and a park extension, with stormwater captured and used to irrigate the trees on site.
The numbers are stark on coastal flooding. Boston is projected to experience roughly 40 inches of sea level rise between now and the 2070. With one-sixth of the city built on filled tidelands, the consequences of inaction are estimated at $1.3 billion in annualized losses by that decade. The city’s response has included the Coastal Flood Resilience Overlay District — described by Osgood as one of the most progressive pieces of zoning policy in the country — which requires large new buildings to be designed for the projected 2070 one-percent storm, not just current flood risk. The mayor has committed $150 million in the city’s five-year capital plan to a series of coastal resilience projects, many of them centered on parks.
“So much of what we are working on is how we actually respond to risk in ways that strengthen the fabric of Boston. It’s as much about how you build community as it is about how you build infrastructure.”“So much of what we are working on is how we actually respond to risk in ways that strengthen the fabric of Boston. It’s as much about how you build community as it is about how you build infrastructure.”
— Chris Osgood, City of Boston
On extreme heat — the leading weather-related cause of death in the United States — Osgood described both immediate and long-term responses. Near-term: cooling infrastructure (shade tents, misting towers) deployed during heat events, and Boston becoming one of the first northern cities to require heat illness prevention plans for its workforce and contractors. Long-term: a fundamental reorientation of street tree planting, now directing 40% of new plantings to the 20% of Boston with the lowest canopy coverage. And in a signature project on Blue Hill Avenue and Malcolm X Boulevard, the city installed the largest set of green roofs on bus shelters anywhere in the nation — a collaboration with YouthBuild and the Social Impact Collective that has empirically lowered temperatures at those stops by seven degrees on hot days.
Osgood closed by reflecting on the “how” rather than the “what.” The Muddy River restoration — a nearly $100 million project spanning Boston, Brookline, the Commonwealth, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — is a story of collective governance. Langone Park in the North End is a story of ground-up design: a seawall that doubles as a neighborhood amenity, built with community input so it functions just as well on a sunny afternoon as it does during a storm. Each project models a different dimension of what resilient cities actually require.
Sherry Ruane translates climate policy into actual, constructible, permittable, affordable landscapes — a process she described as considerably harder than it looks on a rendering. Her presentation moved from the neighborhood scale of Chelsea’s streets to the waterfront complexity of East Boston to the city-defining ambition of Moakley Park, and drew lessons about what makes resilience work in practice.
In Chelsea, the challenge is integration: taking stormwater management, pedestrian safety, climate adaptation, and heat mitigation and fitting them into tight rights-of-way that also must function as everyday streets. Ruane showed a before-and-after rendering of Eastern Avenue — the existing condition versus a proposed cooler, greener streetscape — as an example of how block-by-block design with consistent guidelines can accumulate into neighborhood-scale transformation. Community engagement is not a box to check; it is what makes the designs accurate. When residents see a rendering and say “they heard me” in the next iteration, that is how trust gets built, and trust is what allows the project to move forward.
In East Boston, early resilience work along the waterfront at Lewis Wharf and Carlton Wharf established lessons now applied across the city. When Langone Park was in the middle of design, a significant flood hit — a moment that reoriented the entire project around sea-level rise projections that had previously been underweighted. The response from the city was rapid, and the park was redesigned accordingly. Ruane described Langone as the first park built in Boston fully to the Climate Ready Boston guidelines and noted a detail that most visitors never realize: the seawall is not contiguous, but the entire graded site functions as the barrier, with the wall itself handling wave attenuation. Walkways extend all the way to the water’s edge. The resilience infrastructure is invisible because it is the landscape.
“The designs that we implement could not work anywhere else. Our goal is that you can’t tell these are our designs — they should feel like they’ve always been there, because they’re so grounded in the space.”
— Sherry Ruane, Weston & Sampson
Moakley Park represents the largest and most complex project in this body of work: a proposed flood barrier running through the center of the park that would protect South Boston, the South End, Route 93, and Roxbury from one of the major flood pathways into the city. The engineering challenge is matched by the design challenge — making a flood barrier disappear into a landscape of amphitheaters, overlooks, and sports fields so that the park feels like a park, not a piece of infrastructure. Ruane described the project as requiring an interdependent team in the fullest sense: geotechnical engineers, landscape architects, scientists, city officials, and neighborhood residents all sitting at the same table, all genuinely necessary, none more important than the others.
On the three resilience strategies available to any coastal landscape — protect, accommodate, and retreat — Ruane noted that most projects involve a combination. Langone protects with its wall and accommodates with areas designed to flood and recover. Managed retreat, the third option, is the most complex and contested, but it remains part of the toolkit for situations where infrastructure or facilities simply need to move out of harm’s way. All of these decisions, she emphasized, must be made with the understanding that parks are not empty spaces to be used for whatever the city needs — they are living systems that must remain high-quality open space for the people who depend on them most.
Gregory King broadened the panel’s definition of resilience to include a dimension often absent from climate planning conversations: energy. For communities like Greater Grove Hall — which sits on 3% of Boston’s land mass but contains 83% of its brownfields, suffers from poor air quality, chronic disinvestment, and significant stormwater vulnerability — resilience means not just surviving a storm but having reliable, affordable, renewable power before, during, and after one. That kind of energy resilience, the capacity to “island” from the grid when disaster strikes, is as important as any seawall.
King described the structural problem with Massachusetts’ current approach to environmental justice funding. The state’s EJ designation, codified in the 2021 climate bill signed by Governor Baker, is defined by race, income, and language isolation — with no reference to actual environmental damage or public health impact. The result is that over 200 of the state’s 351 cities and towns qualify as EJ communities, including wealthy municipalities like Lexington and Wellesley. Communities with the institutional capacity to navigate grant programs access funds. Communities like Grove Hall, with greater need and fewer resources, often cannot compete.
In response, King — working with Ed Gaskins and Professor Fitzgerald — developed draft Green Zone legislation designed to complement, not replace, the existing EJ framework. The bill would establish a scoring system based on public health data, greenhouse gas emissions, energy burden, and demographic indicators to identify the most damaged communities and designate them as Green Zones. Those designations would make communities eligible for a Green Zone Investment Fund — financed not by taxpayers or ratepayers, but by polluters, through sources including the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, building performance ordinance revenues from cities like Boston and Cambridge, and Attorney General legal settlement funds.
“We have decades of disinvestment and cumulative damage. Some communities are more significantly harmed than others. We need a way to prioritize those communities — and the science and the data to back it up.”
— Gregory King, TSK Energy Solutions
The Green Zone framework includes a full community planning methodology: an environmental audit covering air quality, health data, and land use; a project financial framework that produces a scoring index; and a Community Master Plan that ranks potential investments by impact. Green Zone investments would fund the kinds of projects that struggle to attract conventional capital — green roofs, white roofs, stormwater infrastructure, expanded green space — precisely because their returns are measured in public health and community well-being rather than financial yield. The goal is not to create parallel bureaucracy, but to inject more quantitative rigor and equity into the allocation of funds that are already flowing, so that the communities with the greatest cumulative burden are the ones that actually receive them.
Can building smarter help address the high cost of housing? King pointed to prefabricated construction as an underutilized path toward lower-cost, more sustainable housing. Factory-built subassemblies — using materials like mass timber and high-wool fiber for low embodied carbon — can reduce on-site labor intensity, accelerate construction timelines dramatically, and support a manufacturing workforce located close to where the buildings are deployed. This is not a distant future scenario; the technology exists, and the ecosystem around it is growing.
How should cities balance green and gray infrastructure? Osgood and Ruane both pushed back on the framing of these as alternatives. Almost all real projects are fusions of the two, and the research to quantify the resilience benefits of nature-based solutions — work being led by the Stone Living Lab at UMass Boston in partnership with Boston Harbor Now — is critical to making those cases rigorously. Ruane added a pointed caution: parks must not become municipal dumping grounds for stormwater overflows, snow, or other uses that compromise their quality as open space. The value of these parks to the residents who depend on them — for passive recreation, active play, shade, gathering — must be protected, not traded away for engineering convenience.
How can cities address “green gentrification” — the risk that improving parks and green infrastructure drives up rents and displaces existing residents? Professor Carr acknowledged the research documenting this pattern and argued that the answer lies not in building less, but in pairing design investment with policy: community land trusts, protections for local businesses, and anti-displacement tools implemented before parks are built, not after. She cited the 11th Street Bridge Park in Washington, D.C. as a model. Critically, when design is done with residents rather than for them, and when residents have genuine ownership of a space, they are better positioned to advocate for staying in the neighborhood it has improved.
What does it actually take to develop a major park like Moakley? Ruane and Osgood were candid: it is as much political and social engineering as it is physical engineering. Navigating multiple permitting agencies, elected officials with varying priorities, community groups with legitimate competing concerns, and funding timelines that never quite align requires patience, perseverance, agility, and deep relationship capital with the agencies and communities involved. Weston & Sampson’s 125-year history in Massachusetts means knowing what questions permitters will ask before they ask them. Osgood added that the key to long-term success is getting all stakeholders to commit to the outcome before the path to get there is clear — and then being willing to adapt that path repeatedly while protecting the core intent. He pointed to the cleanup of Boston Harbor and the construction of the Zakim Bridge as examples that the region has done exactly this before, and the results have transformed the city’s relationship with its waterfront.
Acknowledgments
This panel was convened in the spirit of Kitty Dukakis’ advocacy for community involvement in environmental decision-making and her longstanding framing of environmental protection as a public health issue. The panel also honored the contributions of Ted Landsmark, whose decades of leadership — through the BPDA, Boston Architectural College, the Boston Society of Architects, and the Emerald Necklace Conservancy — have shaped the architecture and landscape of Boston in lasting ways.
We are grateful to our panelists — Sarah Carr, Chris Osgood, Sherry Ruane, and Gregory King — for the depth and practicality of their contributions, and to Ed Gaskins of Greater Grove Hall Main Street, on whose behalf Gregory King presented.
Projects referenced in this brief: Green Roots Chelsea Cool Block · Langone Park (North End) · Moakley Park Resilience Project · Central Square East Boston · Green Zone Initiative (draft legislation). Community research tools and project information are available through the Dukakis Center conference website.