Introduction

This web-site is a project for the course Urban Nature and City Design in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning. It began as a fascination with the Boston Urban Wilds, a network of wild spaces not typically found in an urban area, and a desire to better understand how a small study designating the Urban Wilds in 1976 generated an idea powerful enough to stick around for three decades. Through my research, the project evolved into an analysis of how advocacy for the Urban Wilds has happened in the past and what this form this advocacy might take in future.

The web-site is broken into three sections that look at what the Boston Urban Wilds are today, consider a theoretical framework for how Urban Wilds protection has happened in the past, and provide an analysis of how this framework might be used for advocacy in the future. The site makes the argument that the process of Urban Wilds conservation has frequently followed a model in which an Urban Wild is used to solve a policy problem not tied directly to the original goals of Urban Wilds preservation. The site concludes with a consideration of what this model means to future advocacy work.

This analysis is broken into three sections which can be read sequentially or independently.

Boston Urban Wilds defined. In1976 the Boston Redevelopment Authority listed142 undeveloped open spaces in the publication Boston Urban Wilds: A Natural Areas Conservation Program. The policy problem defined by this publication was how to go about protecting these sites from development. This section of the web-site looks at what where Urban Wilds are located, what they look like, and what organizations are working to protect them today.

A theoretical model for past Urban Wilds advocacy. It is often assumed that once a policy problem such as how to protect the Urban Wilds from development has been identified, the solution will then be found through a rational and linear problem solving process. This section of the site presents an alternative model in which solutions and problems are generated independently and then coupled by policy entrepreneurs.

Urban Wilds as a policy solution. Although the publication Boston Urban Wilds: A Natural Areas Conservation Program advocated for a rational approach to protecting the Urban Wilds from development through transfer of property between Boston city agencies and purchases from private property owners, in practice a non-linear process of policy problem and solution generation has resulted in much of the past Urban Wilds advocacy. This section of the web-site analyzes past advocacy that has employed Urban Wilds as a solution to a policy problem and considers how this model might be used for further Urban Wilds advocacy in the future.