By: Paul Lukez
Boston’s 2024 Olympics nomination presents a unique opportunity to invest its vast educational, technological and athletic resources toward not only hosting this time-honored international sports spectacle, but also heightening the city’s climate-change resiliency. Boston can now build on its historic harbor city identity while facing environmental threats to its future by combining an Olympic City’s required infrastructural investments with those needed to protect its coast.
Better yet, let’s harness the harbor’s amenities as a focus for Olympic upgrades, as a means of linking its future development to its rich heritage by making the harbor a model metropolis that demonstrates the long-term economic and physical strength of coastal cities.
Money First: Temporary Olympic Cruise Lines
The Olympics must house 16,500 athletes and coaches and 15,000 media broadcasters and journalists. In lieu of new housing, bring in diverse boats and cruise ships as temporary quarters. Boston has already proven its ability to host a major harbor event: the Tall Ships attract more than 7 million visitors, and 50 vessels from more than 20 nations.
The Olympics are more complex, but they offer an opportunity to expand the birthing capacity of Boston’s Pier 5-6, General Ship, Reserved Channel and Charlestown Navy Yard dry docks to accommodate more ships for the Olympics and beyond. This could benefit Boston’s export and tourism industries long-term. Ship-housing could also bring significant housing cost savings that could be channeled toward other city improvements. A cruise can cost $1,500+/week, so more than 30,000 athletes and journalists could be housed for under $100 million, meals included. Security concerns, too, could be addressed in creating Coast Guard-protected Olympic maritime districts.
Floating Housing
But if new housing is insisted upon to meet longer-term housing needs, this too can be sustainably achieved in the harbor. Look at the many sea level-resistant habitats the Dutch have created over centuries in a country with about 50% of its land below sea level.Floating housing unit communities are common in Amsterdam’s harbor. So Boston’s harbor shorelines—South Boston Seaport, Savin Hill, East Boston, Hull, Shipyard Quarters Marina in Charlestown, etc.—could berth floating homes while seawalls are reinforced to stabilize existing harbor side communities.
Or other prefab developed housing units such as these“9 Floating Homes You’d Love to Live In” via Virginia Duran’s blog.
Public Spaces – Protect, Buffer or Absorb
To support its events and visitor traffic, Olympic cities demand great public space networks, which can build city resilience as follows:
- Developing city ordinances in the form of; Raised berms, walls or landforms keep water levels at bay.
- Landscapes emulating natural systems buffer storms and tidal surges (e.g., Louisiana’s bayou protects New Orleans in hurricanes).
- Vegetative systems on coastal terrains absorb overflows before they strike populated areas such as the Marshlands of Essex in England.
- Urban canals rechannel rising waters, creating leisure boating (or Olympic rowing or canoe slalom) routes with Venetian tourist appeal, and even a gondola market, not unlike the Boston Public Garden’s Swan Boats.
This rendering, via the Urban Land Institute raises the idea, “What if Boston were the next Venice?” It’s a scary thought, but with unprecedented rises in sea-levels, the idea may not be too far out of reach within the next 100 years or so.
Such waterworks can foster networks of parklands, wetlands and public waterfronts intertwined with natural and urban habitats, ready for Olympic cycling, equestrian events, gymnastics, pentathlons, triathlons, etc. This network would benefit Boston long-term as its cityscape evolves, the way Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace integrated with Boston’s urban structure.See an example of how New York reinvented its West Side from a failed Olympic bid.
The Boston Globe detailed the idea of combating rising sea levels in their piece called,“Venice on the Charles?”which directly envisions a narrow system of canals in place of majority of the streets in Back Bay. By 2100, climate scientists predict, sea levels around Boston will rise as much as 7.5 feet; in just a few decades water levels will be 2.5 feet higher than they are today. As innovators, engineers, educators and citizens, what can we collectively do?
Visionary City, Visionary Ideas
Old cities built on or beside water—Venice, Amsterdam, Suzhou—are great precedents for Boston, as are contemporary visions. In the 1960s, Japanese Metabolist architects Kenzo Tange and Kisho Kurokawa proposed floating cities in Tokyo Bay in a delicate balance of building, open space and water.
In the 1970’s, MIT Prof.Jan Wampler envisioned a floating cityscape extending from Columbia Point to a harbor islandfor the 1976 World Expo.
More recent water-Utopians include Kiyonori Kikutake, Michael Burt, and Antonio DiMambro, whose award-winning 1988 BOSTON VISIONS competition entry proposed countering rising sea levels with dams and gates connecting Winthrop (to the north) and Hull (to the south), creating habitable land for new neighborhoods—modeled on such historic enclaves as the Back Bay—while forging stronger North-South connections.
Conclusion
Whether or not Boston hosts the Olympics, let us embrace its challenge for us to create economically, environmentally and climatically targeted solutions ensuring the city’s long-term viability while building on what has made it a distinctive harbor metropolis for five centuries.