Urban Planning,Community Participation,and the Roxbury Master Plan in Boston

Abstract

This article examines the role and impact of community participation in the development of the Roxbury Master Plan in Boston, Massachusetts. It describes how residents and activists utilized the Roxbury Master Plan as a tool to raise challenges to planning ideas perceived as detrimental to the neighborhood. Discussion of this master plan provides a laboratory for examining race and class relationships and tensions generated by proposals for economic development strategies based on benefiting powerful institutional players as a way of helping low-income neighborhoods. Review of the development of this neighborhood master plan between the period 1999 and 2003 shows how residents can use community participation to ensure adoption of broad economic development strategies advocated by proponents of big business that do not spell dislocation and gentrification for poor and working-class neighborhoods. The case study also represents a critique of smart growth and New Urbanism as planning concepts in terms of how issues of race, class, and social inequality are approached or ignored by some planners. The study is based on the author’s involvement in the development of the Roxbury Master Plan, including participation in meetings and interviews with residents, elected officials, and representatives of city government between 1999 when the Roxbury Master Plan was officially launched and its completion in 2003.