7 July 2002

At the end of May, Joe and I attended the Beyond the Big Dig public forum in Faneuil Hall. I meant to write about this before, but things being what they are, I haven’t gotten around to it till now — on AA flight 193, headed out to the left coast for continued adventures in open source capitalism. One nice thing about airplanes is that they do make it easy to sit down and do some reading, get some work done, generally be disconnected.

SERVICE DEACTIVATED EFFECTIVE MARCH 31, 2002

If you don’t know, The Big Dig is a massive federally-funded civil engineering project to bury several miles of major highway that cut scar-liked across the face of Boston, filling the most central parts of the city with noise and pollution and effectively disconnecting the city from the harbor.

This project is extraordinary in many ways, not least for its ambitions to inter one of the most active stretches of highway in the country in the middle of one of the densest cities without shutting down either highway or city, or for its well-publicized 460%, $11.5 billion budget overrun. But its potential for positive consequences for the quality of life in Boston is what makes it interesting to me. In particular, I think that we as a society have forgotten that city life can be pleasant and can include a strong sense of local community, and I think that it can.

So, the Beyond the Big Dig program was a joint project between WCVB, MIT and The Boston Globe to help determine what will become of the twenty-seven acres of prime real estate that will be freed up once the hideous route 93 skyway comes down.

It is sad that two media entities have to get together in an act of "civic journalism" to stimulate and organize popular involvement in a governmental decision of the most physical and obvious local significance. We really do have very little public engagement in government in this country, even in one of the most liberal and well-educated cities in the US.

Distilled down to its most basic elements, the event played out a four-way tension between: (1) the interests of the Boston public who want the optimal impact on their communities and city, (2) the interests of the government, in principle acting in the interests of the people of Boston but in practice driven by a much more complex set of interactions, (3) the pure journalistic interests of the media organizations — in theory a public trust — to uncover and fairly report the truth about what is happening, and (4) the commercial interests of the media organizations to maximize profit.

Most plainly offensive, the entire event was televised and broadcast live to the WCVB viewing audience, and consequently wholly structured around the task of producing a television show. For the first thirty minutes, in fact, those of us seated in Faneuil hall — under portraits of Washington and Lincoln — were subjected to commercial interruptions in full video and audio, a ridiculous scene with Senator Kennedy and Michael Dukakis shifting in their seats and chatting with the people next to them, a room-wide murmur growing until the WCVB engineers played a tune to signal that they were beginning again, and we all dutifully fell silent and looked around the room to see where the cameras were positioned, were we on TV?

Public space in Sevilla.

Anyway, I could talk about this for a long time. In short, it was a disgusting spectacle, and it will be a fucking miracle if that space is well portioned out, well used, well governed, if the opportunity to create a beautiful and useful and vibrant public space is not pissed away in orgies of self-interest and aimless bickering.

Oh, but one interesting thing we found out is that Dukakis looks about three decades younger than his nearly seventy years.