The Boston Foundation supports 'a neighborhood fit for people'.

With the award of $65,000 at its December meeting, the Boston Foundation provided support for the third year to Adaptive Environments for the Boston initiative, A Neighborhood Fit for People, Universal Design in the South Boston Waterfront. The Foundation's commitment is invaluable to the success of making the Waterfront a place that works seamlessly and beautifully for all residents and visitors regardless of ability.

Building Boston's first new neighborhood in a hundred and fifty years deserves passionate debate and engagement. We all have a stake in making the South Boston Waterfront more than another angular profile on the skyline. The thousand plus acres along our rediscovered and clean harbor have immense value because $20B in public funds makes this previously invisible area the center of our imagined future. That public investment also sets the stage for ensuring the public's benefit from the overwhelming private development that will occur.

State law further enhances the opportunity. Massachusetts Chapter 91 requires that buildings that are constructed within 100 feet of the original tide line make their entire first floors 'areas of public accommodation.' So not only outdoor areas, and water-based activities must be open to the public but also the first floors of ALL other buildings. There are lots of ingredients that make great public places. But there is only one absolute ingredient for success: people--lots of them and all kinds!

A citywide coalition, including Adaptive Environments with support from The Boston Foundation, has long promoted the South Boston Waterfront as a place that can be an international model of universal design at the urban scale. Sometimes called design-for-all or lifespan design, universal design acknowledges that design is powerful and that we are deeply affected by our relationship to our physical surroundings throughout all our lives. It assumes that differing physical needs are not the exception but rather the rule, and that our abilities inevitably change over time. And universal design assumes that function and aesthetics can and should be seamlessly integrated into good design. It requires that we base design on how well it works for a wide spectrum of real users: children, families, older people, people with disabilities, people who are visiting for the first time, who may not speak English.

The recently approved Municipal Harbor Plan builds on the commitment to universal design in the initial document that described the vision for the South Boston Waterfront, the Public Realm Plan: "Transportation, open space, access to the Harbor, pedestrian facilities and residential, civic and commercial buildings should be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design."

Universal design makes sense, particularly now. We find ourselves at the start of the new century faced with a changed reality of human life. We live longer, on average, than at any other time in human history. We survive illness and injury at rates unheard of just twenty years ago. Our expectations are different, too. We don't want to be impeded by thoughtless barriers or limited by our environment. It is time for design to catch up to the breathtaking strides in medicine and science and to our expectation of freedom of choice. The Municipal Harbor Plan states: Street furniture accommodates differing abilities and sizes of users and is placed at distances convenient for people with limited stamina or mobility. Precisely.

The key to user-centered design is to ask what ordinary people want and need. We have started to meet with three kinds of potential users: children, older people, and people with disabilities. It's proven easy to get people to talk about what works well for them. And what doesn't.

• People with disabilies are the primary 'user/experts.' A curriculum has been developed specific to the Waterfront project. People across a wide spectrum of ages have agreed to participate from the Boston Center for Independent Living, Vivienne Thomson Independent Living Center, and Partners for Youth with Disabilities.
• The children's portion began in the summer of 2000 with over 100 children from across the city who were participating in 'Camp on the Channel' at the Children's Museum. A collaboration between the Boston Society of Architects 'Learning by Design in Massachusetts' and Adaptive Environments brought universal design in city planning to Camp on the Channel. The next round of children's activities will involve projects in South Boston through the South Boston Neighborhood House and in Roxbury through Boston Neighborhood Lifestyles in after-school programs out of which a curriculum will be developed for children and teachers.
  [ view photos from Camp on the Channel ]
• Older Bostonians from the South Boston Neighborhood House Senior Center and the Kit Clark Senior Center are participating in orientation sessions followed by focus groups on specific waterfront design issues (e.g., HarborWalk and pedestrian elements). The Gerontology Institute at UMASS/Boston assisted in the recruitment, training assessment and the analysis of the results of the focus groups during Fall 2000.

A Boston 'neighborhood fit for people' can illuminate a path for the rest of the nation to follow. We live in a city that for the most part balances our disparate desires that keeps its elderly residents and also attracts the young. And perhaps we really do understand that cities can be great places only if they work at the intimate scale, person by person. That should be the explicit goal of those whose vision will become the reality of the South Boston Waterfront.