![]() ![]() That’s an interesting question to try to answer using the tools of historic GIS. ![]() All of that prompts the question: how much, in dollar terms, is all of that made land worth today? (Economists regularly point to the “ agglomeration effects” that make clustering together in cities a valuable phenomenon.) The legacy of landmaking coupled with the continued financial value of urban space means that a huge amount of Boston’s wealth-as well as the tax revenue that’s generated from property assessment-rests literally on invented property. Today, even though trains and highways have made it possible for Boston to expand its urban footprint far inland, some of the city’s most valuable neighborhoods are still located near to center, in places like the Back Bay, the Seaport, and South Bay that were created by fill projects. They were creating the ultimate financial asset: brand-new urban land, ready for development. But for the investors who backed such projects, the profit was obvious. Chewing up hills and quarries throughout the region and spitting them out in the water around Boston wasn’t cheap, and it certainly wasn’t easy for the thousands of laborers who were employed shoveling, dumping, and grading. The proximity of shallow water in places like the Back Bay, immediately adjacent to downtown, yielded a straightforward economic calculation. Bostonians created land out of water because it was lucrative: with a historic core tightly hemmed in on the Shawmut peninsula, Boston faced severe geographical constraints on where its growing population could be housed and where new industrial and commercial facilities could be built. The value of urban land and the processes of urban landmaking were more than just coincidentally related to one another. ![]() This 1852 plan shows the Back Bay area just before its most dramatic period of land filling Mapping the growth of the city into the surrounding ocean has been an interest of Boston’s geographers for centuries, and our modern maps of shoreline change are some of the most popular objects in our digital collections. has a more striking history of landmaking than Boston, with about a sixth of its present land area sitting on estuaries, mudflats, coves, and tidal basins that would have been submerged at high tide prior to the seventeenth century. This 1895 map documents the changing shoreline of Boston using different colors Many parts of Boston-including some of what are today its most expensive neighborhoods-were created over the past 300 years. (In 2018, a research firm found that just a single parking space in downtown Boston could fetch $350,000.) What’s especially interesting about Boston’s high-value land, though, in comparison to other expensive cities, is the fact that much of it wasn’t always land. In fact, even before the emergence of the industrial city, early economic geographers realized that valuable land near centers of population tends to get put to use for more capital-intensive purposes.īoston is one of the most expensive cities in one of the most expensive countries on earth, which means that land in Boston represents some of the most costly plots of dirt anywhere on the globe. A square foot of land costs more to own or rent in downtown Boston than it does in, say, rural Maine, and this pattern holds true throughout global patterns of urbanization. One of the basic definitions of cities is that they are places where land becomes increasingly valuable.
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