To address social and environmental gaps between a traditionally working class neighborhood and a biotech campus surrounding MIT, I helped design a park to encourage community mingling and restoration of the urban natural environment.
Role Designer
For MIT 11.328 Urban Design Skills
Team Catie Ferrara
Instructors Stephen Gray, Mary Anne Ocampo
Date 2014
Type research, spatial design
How do you shape a space to mend broken social and environmental networks?
The amoeba of giant lab buildings and research facilities in Kendall Square next to MIT grows larger and larger every day, steadily encroaching on the traditionally working-class neighborhood of East Cambridge. The shifting border between these communities forms a sort of no man’s land, lacking in social cohesion or continuity in the urban natural environment.
Our proposal focuses on ways to bring these two communities together and stitch together the broken urban natural environment. It reconciles a vacant lot’s existing use as a flexible playfield with its potential to become a nexus for formal programming that would attract members of both neighborhoods.
We were pretty awestruck by the soon-to-be-demolished Cook County Jail as a strong wayfinder for the East Cambridge neighborhood, so we included a 50-foot stovepipe-style beacon in the park will help people connect with neighborhood history and serve as a meaningful transition between large lab buildings and low-rise industrial warehouses and townhomes.
