INTRODUCTION
Boston's Back Bay Fens is more than an urban park.
Even before its formal codification as a park, the Fens was an important
urban landscape, serving critical infrastructure needs--a reciprocal
to the 'civilized city, an urban wild, a productive landscape, a municipal
utility in many forms and services, a reformist territory, an institutional
foreground, and marginal social territory, that is, a place for activities
that had no other place in the city. And this only begins to cover
the Fens' infrastructural values. |
