Boston

Pascal Menoret

The Boston Metropolitan Trail is a projected grid of eight trails connecting sixteen bus, subway, and commuter rail stations.
The BMT critiques and displaces the image of Boston, which is still dominated by settler colonial fantasies centered on the Boston peninsula. The BMT is the anti-Freedom Trail. It takes you to the Deer Island concentration camp and cuts across the Middlesex Fells, this "living monument to Boston's first settlers" (Michael Rawson, Eden on the Charles, p. 235).
The BMT is also a transportation infrastructure. The walking city of 1850 (2 miles radius) gave way to the streetcar suburbs of 1900 (10 miles radius) and to today's Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH metropolitan area (50 miles radius, nearly 5 million residents). The streetcar suburbs of 1900 have become the core of today's metropolis. The metropolis of 1900 is the walking city of 2020.