I went on a twenty mile hike through Boston today in a mad hunt for a site. I am going again tomorrow to continue to document the site I am looking at (since part of it is not one for me to stay in past mid-day) but wanted to run it by you first. I am looking at Washington Street in Boston, where the housing projects and nicer lofts and businesses flip flop the sides of the street depending upon their accessibility and proximity to community services- such as the hospital and colleges. This has created a visible checkerboard of neighborhoods that are merely connected by the road. They are their own stand-alone units within the larger whole. The communities do not mix, and trust me- while my best friend's tattoos and dark skin may not have been smiled upon in the one section of laptop using, polo wearing, latte sipping college students, he was a bodyguard two blocks down. The site proper is a chain linked in field between an informal community shopping center/slums (a BAD place to be)and a tower housing project. This sits at the very edge of the North Eastern realm of latte sippers and Ruggles Station and just down the street from some checker-boarding along Washington Street.
My goal is to make a site proper and to then create a continuation linking and serving the many other smaller jumps up and down Washington Street. The site is large enough to hold some of the larger precedent examples I showed before, and is flat, located at a great intersection for accessibility, and has access to a multitude of neighborhoods that each need their own center and a connection besides the arterial street. This will allow me to show my thesis in practice both in large and small scale. Maybe one large "home-base" unit and several satellite units somehow linked to the first.