The Participatory Design of the Southwest Corridor
Written by Cassandra Nicholson after an interview with Ann Hershfang.
Edited by Lindsay Mawhiney and William Benjamin.
"Community residents guided the design of each station,
each garden, each playground and recreational facility".
-Plaque at Roxbury Crossing T Station
After the Master Highway Plan's defeat in 1972, there was a pause in action for a couple of years until the MBTA started designing the Southwest Corridor in 1974 with community collaboration. This project is an example of one of the most cooperative processes ever involved in civil engineering. There were five more years of organizing and collaboration regarding design after the moratorium was placed on the construction by Sargent. The whole 5-mile Ride was supposed to be above ground but citizen input contributed to its current depressed location.
In addition to the prevention of the highway, the citizen groups that were organized to prevent it worked in tandem with Boston Transportation Planning Review (BTPR) and rallied for the narrowing of Columbus Ave to accommodate the new underground Orange Line and re-direct SW-heading trucking traffic from Massachusetts Avenue to Melnea Cass Boulevard.
For the first time, a transportation planning committee included citizens and municipalities that researched and consulted with each other about alternatives to the I-95 expansion. The committee, headed by Allen Altschuler of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, was comprised of 1/3 bureaucrats, 1/3 municipalities and 1/3 citizens. This group had access to all information that went into the decision-making processes. It was with this information that the citizens could make very powerful arguments about the Southwest Corridor design in the same vein of the powerful arguments they had made about why the highway would adversely affect their neighborhoods.
To carry on with the spirit first established by the BTPR, the Urban Mass Transit Administration (UMTA) was established by Governor Dukakis as the first ever instance of highway funds being reallocated to mass transit budgets.
Katherine Crewe writes at length about the cooperative design of the Southwest Corridor mass transit system in her paper entitled, "The Quality of Participatory Design: The Effects of Citizen Input on the Design of the Boston Southwest Corridor" published by the Journal of the American Planning Association in 2001. She speaks about "radical designers" called "social architects" and how they interacted with citizen groups. These participatory efforts were largely documented and widely distributed via the Corridor News. This was a bi-monthly newsletter, written to recount progress of meetings, which allowed for citizen input and participatory design of the Southwest Corridor Project from 1976-1985.
