Or rather, your newly-annointed (er, volunteered) bloggers in chief, Eugenia Gibbons and I, are here.  Howdy!  We hope to generate some momentum here at Practical Visions.  This will require not only our posts, but also your comments.  And I won't speak for Eugenia, but I'm particularly interested in frequent guest posts, so please contact me if there's something you'd like to throw on here -- an upcoming event, a particular interest of yours, a project you're working on, whatever.  The only guideline Dr. J gave us was "don't trash the faculty" (actually I think there was one more, but I can't remember it now; we can't get in trouble for breaking a rule we didn't know existed, right?).  Who knows, over time this page might be worthy of a bookmark in your browser.  That's the general idea, anyway.

So to get the ball rolling on this school year's incarnation of Practical Visions, I'd like to highlight an event coming up this weekend that signals an important milestone of a local public works project that has practically redefined the term "boondoggle."  The event, to which those of us included on the proper UEP mailing lists have already been alerted by both Julia Prange and this week's Off The Wall, is the official inauguration of the Rose Kennedy Greenway.  The boondoggle is, of course, the Big Dig.  For those not familiar with the Big Dig's sordid history, I won't recap it here (this Wiki link will get you started), but suffice it to say it is one rife with what are termed in Foundations as "causal stories."

First off, I'll go way out on a limb here and assume that most people consider the Greenway to be an upgrade from having an elevated freeway slicing through downtown, dismembering the North End and Wharf District:

But lately I've been fascinated by how grand urban plans grow into, and are accepted by, the cities they are planned for (or, often, imposed on).  Considered from this angle, was the Greenway project worth it?  Frederick Law Olmsted's Emerald Necklace, for instance, has been around for nearly 130 years and to me it seems to have been largely successful, though perhaps a bit more disjointed than he intended.  Jane Jacobs, however, warned against plopping down parks merely for the sake of fulfilling some sort of urban green quota -- "people do not use city open space just because it is there and because city planners and designers wish they would," she said.  (And yes, I just fulfilled my planner name-drop quota).  Until recently, I worked for three years in the cylindrical building on the left edge of the above photos, and after the park blocks near me opened last year it was difficult to tell how they would eventually take.  It'll be years, probably, before we know how the different sections of the Rose Kennedy Greenway and their adjoining districts will really treat each other.  It'll be especially interesting to see how they interact at night.

For now, we are now in the slightly awkward position of celebrating the completion of a project (persistent underground engineering issues and still-future plans notwithstanding) that almost certainly would not have broken ground had its true costs in terms of money, time, and even lives been accurately predicted.  But here we are.  I'll try to check out the festivities on Saturday (I already have plans to do the Bow Tie Ride in Cambridge on Sunday) and see how it feels with people there -- not to mention meet Calvin, the 40' right whale balloon.  I dare you to pass up that opportunity.