As climate change intensifies the risks facing Boston’s waterfront neighborhoods, a group of seniors in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning (LARP) spent the spring imagining what a more resilient future could look like, one project and one conversation at a time.

The senior capstone studio, “Beloved Places: Envision Resilience Boston,” examined the challenges facing the city’s North End and West End neighborhoods, where rising seas, aging infrastructure and dense urban development collide along the waterfront.

Image

The studio, led by Carolina Aragón, associate professor and associate department chair; Robert Ryan, professor; and Julia Slater, lecturer, marked a return to Boston following a community-based project in 2023 and built on a design framework Aragón and colleagues first developed in 2021.

“We coined the term ‘Beloved Place’ as a way to think differently about the way that we design places,” Aragón says. “If the goal is to make people feel loved by the place they live, what does that look like?”

The answer, she says, begins with basic human needs—safety, accessibility, and connection—but extends to creating public spaces that foster trust and community while addressing the changes needed to adapt to the impacts of climate change.

Supported by a National Design Studio Award from the nonprofit Envision Resilience, students developed 26 individual design proposals focused on sites along Boston Harbor and the Charles River. Their work addressed issues ranging from coastal flooding and storm surge to the urban heat island effect, limited green space and disconnected pedestrian infrastructure.

The projects challenged students to confront the complexity of planning in one of the nation’s oldest cities, where public and private ownership patterns overlap with multiple layers of government oversight.

“This isn’t just talking about problems. It’s trying to figure out what can be done and how can we approach it,” Ryan says. “Looking historically at Boston, how it developed and how it's changing—and then looking at the future.”

Image

Grace Kirkpatrick, who’s majoring in landscape architecture and sustainable community development, focused on a stretch of waterfront behind TD Garden where a break in the Harborwalk disrupts pedestrian access.

“My concept started out with making a pedestrian connection in a place where the Harborwalk is broken,” Kirkpatrick says. “But it evolved as I talked to stakeholders and found out that people are sort of afraid of the site.”

Her proposal shifted toward smaller interventions designed to make the area feel safer and more welcoming while laying the groundwork for future waterfront connections.

Students spent months studying maps and reports detailing projected sea-level rise, flood pathways, dam vulnerabilities and heat concentrations throughout Boston.

Aragón says students quickly realized coastal resilience involves much more than seawalls.

“It’s not just sea level rise and storms, but that there are critical places where existing infrastructure could fail,” she explains.

At the same time, students were encouraged to imagine how resilience infrastructure could also improve daily life in the city.

Rhapsody Espiritu, a landscape architecture major whose project focused on Lovejoy Wharf near the Charles River Dam, proposed reshaping part of the shoreline into a tidal lagoon system intended to reduce flooding while generating backup energy and improving water quality.

“At first, it kind of felt hopeless after diving into a lot of the city reports to combat coastal flooding,” Espiritu says. “But then I got really hopeful after talking with some of the kids and doing more research on existing methods around the world.”

Community engagement became a defining element of the studio.

Over the semester, the class partnered with sixth graders at the Eliot School in Boston’s North End, introducing them to concepts such as flooding, pollution and urban heat through interactive activities and neighborhood discussions.

Aragón says those relationships with community partners were only possible thanks to a decade of work and trust-building in Boston neighborhoods.

Image

That groundwork helped connect the studio with neighborhood groups, city officials, the Eliot School and representatives from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who attended the students’ May 1 presentation in Boston alongside residents and parents.

The response, Aragón says, suggested the student work may have influence beyond the classroom.

“We had the people that are currently working on that problem,” she says. “It was incredible.”

The studio’s value lies not only in producing design concepts, but also in helping communities visualize possibilities that otherwise exist only as technical planning documents.

“The planning has been done,” Aragón says. “We need to take what’s already there and actually have that community engagement to see what people that live there actually want.”

The experience offered students a glimpse into how landscape architecture can shape cities facing an uncertain climate future.

“One of the biggest takeaways,” Espiritu adds, “was that we can make a difference.”