The Boston Greenway: Form and Process Issues at Stake

The Boston Greenway is an imposing urban regeneration programme in the centre of Boston, which is now free from the heavy road infrastucture of the early 1960s, and is considered against the backdrop of the planning system in the US. The paper focuses on the regulatory framework set forth by the Boston Zoning Code and the Greenway Guidelines in order to manage the process at its different stages, stressing relevant issues related to policy making and community involvement throughout. Despite general regulations and specific morphological rules, form and density issues prove unstable under market pressure, which is ultimately the engine shaping the Greenway. Discretion and transparency inflect the strategic approach in an original way in comparison to the European case.