The Indoor Emerald Necklace: Amplifying Boston’s Winter Spatial Inequality

Authors

Natalie Ng (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Michael Lawrence Evans (City of Boston)

Presentation

Session

VISAP Paper 1

Time

Wednesday, Nov 11, 08:24 – 08:36 (US/Eastern) · session 08:00 – 09:30

Location

Hall Essex south

Keywords

cartography, civic data visualization, winter urbanism, public realm, spatial equity, indoor public space

Abstract

Boston's winter spatial inequality is widely felt, but institutionally invisible. No municipal dataset tracks indoor public space or usage, no planning process accounts for it, and no data infrastructure exists to surface the seasonal inequity it produces. This paper takes that absence as its starting point. By assembling lifestyle guides, crowdsourced maps, entertainment permit records, a variety of municipal inventory datasets, and historical transit maps, we 1) map Boston's de facto indoor public spaces using a typology organized around ownership and consumption expectation, and 2) build a second visualization that makes the scale gap between indoor and outdoor public space immediately legible. From that foundation, we propose the Indoor Emerald Necklace: a conceptual framework for a networked system of indoor public space, modeled on the logic of Olmsted's historic outdoor park system. It is not a plan but a provocation, using the visual language of the map to argue that Boston's winter spatial inequality is not a fact of climate but a designed outcome, and that the boundaries of public care do not have to stop at the entrance.