Common Ground: Enfranchising Charlestown’s Tidal Wetlands through Chapter 91




Year: 2022
Studio: MLA Core 4 Studio (Harvard GSD)
Instructor: Mark Heller


This project proposes a fifty-year phased operation of urban retreat, land-forming, and reconstruction of Charlestown’s tidelands through amendments to Chapter 91. Chapter 91 has historically protected the “public benefits” of the waterways by mediating between industrial port functions and public access. While it empowered Charlestown’s economic vitality and urbanization into the Twentieth Century, it has also contributed to the dichotomies that define contemporary Charlestown. These filled lands now face compounding hazards: uneven subsidence, structural rot, and water reclamation from coastal and stormwater flooding. Projected to 2070, the greatest public benefit from currently-landlocked tidelands will be coastal protection for the dual identities of Charlestown: urban residents and the maritime industry. The enfranchisement of Charlestown’s tidelands will create common ground between Charlestown’s dual identities and provide Boston with socioeconomic resilience to environmental precarity.


Explore the project slideshow below.



Title slide.
Project description slide.
The contemporary neighborhood of Charlestown is overlayed with its original 1818 edge of salt marshes. The white hatch shows the lands filled over the course of the neighborhood’s industrialization and development.
Photographs by author contrast the two prominent land uses of the neighborhood, single-family residential and maritime industrial.
Charlestown is a city defined by its boundaries. In order from the upper left: coastline, freeway infrastructure, flood zone, steep topography, public land, low-income housing.
Overlay of contemporary and 1818 neighborhood boundary, with flood zones shown in blue. Water reclamation threatens the filled lands.
Map of all landholders affected by flood risk, projected from 2030 through 2070. Zoning and land use are marked in brown shades.
Water reclamation will shrink the contemporary footprint of the Charlestown neighborhood back to its 1818 shape.
Timeline showing chronological growth and projected shrinkage of Charlestown’s footprint.
Climate adaptation and retreat framework plan showing industrial unbuilding and phased housing densification strategies.
Timeline of phased retreat strategy and projected flood risks for 2030, 2050, and 2070.
Each phased intervention will involve funding bodies from both the public and private sectors.
Chapter 91 mandates that the contemporary coastline be accessible for the public and used for the greatest public benefit. In the near future, this use will shift from maritime industry back to a naturalized tideland.
Section of the retreat master plan, showing densified housing on the elevated topography and marshlands on the perimeter of the neighborhood.
Zoom in of the section showing the renaturalization of the marshes.
The port will be unbuilt, producing a spectral landscape where the piles can be repurposed for future use.
The port will be unbuilt, producing a spectral landscape where the piles can be repurposed for future use.
The port will be unbuilt, producing a spectral landscape where the piles can be repurposed for future use.