Manufacturing Consent for Engineering Earth: Social Dynamics in Boston’s Big Dig

Abstract

The landscape of Boston has been dramatically transformed over the past two decades by the “Big Dig,” one of the largest and most complex urban infrastructure redevelopment projects in the nation’s history. The heart of the $15 billion, 15-year project was the relocation of an elevated interstate highway that had cut the city in half since the 1950s into a new underground tunnel, as well as the construction of a new tunnel under the harbor to connect Boston and its interstate highways more directly to the airport. It came to include many other elements, though, including new mass transit options, a landmark new bridge, new parks and open spaces, and the transformation of a heavily polluted island in Boston Harbor into the centerpiece of a new national park. Each component was the subject of fierce political contestation as actors ranging from local neighborhood groups, to regional industry, to every level of government pressed demands, imposed conditions, and sought to have their preferred vision become the blueprint for the city’s new reality. This chapter argues that while the physical and technological aspects of the project were indeed extraordinary, the transformation of the city wrought by the Big Dig was shaped more by such political contestation over collective environments, much of it not in plain view, than by the more readily visible technological considerations.