Location: Boston, MA
Status: 2024-2026
Client: City of Boston Planning Department
Collaborators: Agency Landscape + Planning, Toole Design, Allston Brighton Health Collaborative
Impact Areas: Non-traditional Partnerships
Allston-Brighton sits under more development pressure than almost any other neighborhood in Boston, shaped by major institutional expansion, a transient student population, and a rapidly changing housing market that has long outpaced the rules meant to govern it.
The Allston-Brighton Community Plan is a comprehensive, city-led effort to set the terms of that growth ahead of it, aligning zoning, housing, and public-realm policy around what residents need rather than reacting parcel by parcel as proposals arrive. The work treats the rules, zoning in particular, as the design medium, on the conviction that the most consequential decisions about who a neighborhood is for are made in regulatory frameworks long before any building is drawn.
The plan pairs technical planning with sustained community engagement, including community ambassadors drawn from the neighborhood and paid to reach residents that formal process routinely misses, so the rules reflect those with the most at stake rather than those most practiced at attending meetings. Partnering with the Allston Brighton Health Collaborative keeps public health and displacement risk at the center rather than the margins.
That combination, market analysis read against community input, produces design scenarios tested across more than a dozen sub-areas, each asking how growth could land differently in its part of the neighborhood. The ambition is structural: to rewrite the framework through which dozens of future sites will be decided, so that added density and the continuity of local businesses, residents, and place are not treated as mutually exclusive.
Location: Boston, MA
Status: 2024-2026
Client: City of Boston Planning Department
Collaborators: Agency Landscape + Planning, Toole Design, Allston Brighton Health Collaborative
Impact Areas: Non-traditional Partnerships
Allston-Brighton sits under more development pressure than almost any other neighborhood in Boston, shaped by major institutional expansion, a transient student population, and a rapidly changing housing market that has long outpaced the rules meant to govern it.
The Allston-Brighton Community Plan is a comprehensive, city-led effort to set the terms of that growth ahead of it, aligning zoning, housing, and public-realm policy around what residents need rather than reacting parcel by parcel as proposals arrive. The work treats the rules, zoning in particular, as the design medium, on the conviction that the most consequential decisions about who a neighborhood is for are made in regulatory frameworks long before any building is drawn.
The plan pairs technical planning with sustained community engagement, including community ambassadors drawn from the neighborhood and paid to reach residents that formal process routinely misses, so the rules reflect those with the most at stake rather than those most practiced at attending meetings. Partnering with the Allston Brighton Health Collaborative keeps public health and displacement risk at the center rather than the margins.
That combination, market analysis read against community input, produces design scenarios tested across more than a dozen sub-areas, each asking how growth could land differently in its part of the neighborhood. The ambition is structural: to rewrite the framework through which dozens of future sites will be decided, so that added density and the continuity of local businesses, residents, and place are not treated as mutually exclusive.
Image 1 of 11
Image 2 of 11
Image 3 of 11
Image 4 of 11
Image 5 of 11
Image 6 of 11
Image 7 of 11
Image 8 of 11
Image 9 of 11
Image 10 of 11
Image 11 of 11