A couple things today.  First, as someone who commutes to school about 7 miles each way by bike, I probably spend more time than most staring at pavement.  Today a friend of mine -- a fellow bike commuter -- asked if, like him, I've noticed a preponderance of squashed squirrels in the streets lately.  As a matter of fact, I think I have.  The poor little guys.  If our observations are correct, though, are Boston's squirrels getting more careless?  Or are they just getting more prevalent?  Well, I also don't recall so many of them up in the trees raining acorn shards on my yard as they prepare for winter, either, so I suspect the answer is the latter.

In a weird coincidence, the Washington Post has a story today about DC's own booming squirrel population, and tucked inside are a couple paragraphs that might be relevant here as well:

The local public's fascination with Sciurus carolinensis is better understood in the context of the urban park movement of the mid-1800s. As cities grew and became more densely populated, the notion emerged that "what was needed from parks was an antidote to the city itself," says Anne Whiston Spirn, professor of landscape architecture and planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design. "In the late 19th century, there was a growing sense that the public needed urban parks to walk through and enjoy 'rural scenery.' "

Frederick Law Olmsted Sr., father of American landscape architecture, believed people derived a mental benefit from exposure to nature. Animals were sometimes introduced into urban parks to enhance the experience. Herds of sheep trimmed the grass and provided a pleasant spectacle in some parks, most notably New York's Central Park, which had a herd until 1934. Squirrels, though relatively useless as grass mowers, played a similar aesthetic purpose in the District.

We all know of Olmsted's historic influence on the greening of Boston.  The article doesn't draw a direct line between Olmsted and squirrels, though, so I'll hold off for now on blaming him for this year's Boston squirrel massacre.

Second, returning to my previous post regarding the Greenway -- yesterday I came across an interesting perspective while flipping through James Howard Kunstler's The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition (published in 2003), which I think is worth quoting here at length:

In the context of contemporary cultural confusion, "green space" or "open space" essentially means build nothing. It is a rhetorical device for putting city land in cold storage in the only currently acceptable form, that is, covered by grass and shrubs, aka nature. This happens because we have lost confidence in our ability to produce buildings worthy of our spirits and aspirations.  So many twentieth-century buildings are failures in one way or another -- looks, relation to the public realm, attitude toward the pedestrian, quality of workmanship -- that we assume any new building is liable to be at least unrewarding and at worst another horror.  The aggregate failures of all the glass boxes, like the Hancock and the Pru and the dreary slabs of Government Center, of all the public place botches like City Hall Plaza, have taken their toll on the public imagination.  Citizens are now thoroughly conditioned to expect the worst.  A large fraction of the public has actually taken this attitude a neurotic step further and decided categorically that urbanism is a menace to the human spirit and therefore that the only acceptable use of vacant city land is for the intallation of the putative antidote to the city: nature.

[...]

This is "nature" in cartoon form.  Unfortuantely this is the current recipe for the twenty-seven acres of valuable land that will be available when the Fitzgerald Expressway is gone: "green space."  The term "green space" should be a tip-off that we're thinking too abstractly.

[...]

It might be appropriate to lay aside a few of the twenty-seven acres for the creation of two small formal parks or squares within the district.  But it is silly to leave it all unbuilt [...] Twenty-seven acres is a lot of land in an urban setting.  It could be composed to contain tremendous civic amenity, activity, and value, without skyscrapers.  Indeed, if the old city is to be truly knitted back together, this land must be built upon.

By the way, I wasn't able to make it to the grand opening yesterday after all.  Did anyone?  I'd particularly like to hear about Calvin.

Or rather, your newly-annointed (er, volunteered) bloggers in chief, Eugenia Gibbons and I, are here.  Howdy!  We hope to generate some momentum here at Practical Visions.  This will require not only our posts, but also your comments.  And I won't speak for Eugenia, but I'm particularly interested in frequent guest posts, so please contact me if there's something you'd like to throw on here -- an upcoming event, a particular interest of yours, a project you're working on, whatever.  The only guideline Dr. J gave us was "don't trash the faculty" (actually I think there was one more, but I can't remember it now; we can't get in trouble for breaking a rule we didn't know existed, right?).  Who knows, over time this page might be worthy of a bookmark in your browser.  That's the general idea, anyway.

So to get the ball rolling on this school year's incarnation of Practical Visions, I'd like to highlight an event coming up this weekend that signals an important milestone of a local public works project that has practically redefined the term "boondoggle."  The event, to which those of us included on the proper UEP mailing lists have already been alerted by both Julia Prange and this week's Off The Wall, is the official inauguration of the Rose Kennedy Greenway.  The boondoggle is, of course, the Big Dig.  For those not familiar with the Big Dig's sordid history, I won't recap it here (this Wiki link will get you started), but suffice it to say it is one rife with what are termed in Foundations as "causal stories."

First off, I'll go way out on a limb here and assume that most people consider the Greenway to be an upgrade from having an elevated freeway slicing through downtown, dismembering the North End and Wharf District:

But lately I've been fascinated by how grand urban plans grow into, and are accepted by, the cities they are planned for (or, often, imposed on).  Considered from this angle, was the Greenway project worth it?  Frederick Law Olmsted's Emerald Necklace, for instance, has been around for nearly 130 years and to me it seems to have been largely successful, though perhaps a bit more disjointed than he intended.  Jane Jacobs, however, warned against plopping down parks merely for the sake of fulfilling some sort of urban green quota -- "people do not use city open space just because it is there and because city planners and designers wish they would," she said.  (And yes, I just fulfilled my planner name-drop quota).  Until recently, I worked for three years in the cylindrical building on the left edge of the above photos, and after the park blocks near me opened last year it was difficult to tell how they would eventually take.  It'll be years, probably, before we know how the different sections of the Rose Kennedy Greenway and their adjoining districts will really treat each other.  It'll be especially interesting to see how they interact at night.

For now, we are now in the slightly awkward position of celebrating the completion of a project (persistent underground engineering issues and still-future plans notwithstanding) that almost certainly would not have broken ground had its true costs in terms of money, time, and even lives been accurately predicted.  But here we are.  I'll try to check out the festivities on Saturday (I already have plans to do the Bow Tie Ride in Cambridge on Sunday) and see how it feels with people there -- not to mention meet Calvin, the 40' right whale balloon.  I dare you to pass up that opportunity.