Broadway Chelsea Recommendations
The downtown Chelsea field project was conceived as a cooperation between Chelsea Collaborative and an Urban & Environmental Policy (UEP) field projects team. The main goal of the project is to develop informed policy and planning recommendations for revitalizing downtown Chelsea to improve the quality of life of the area’s current residents. This area possess many attributes that mark it as unique, some of which are seen as more desirable than others by residents and members of Chelsea Collaborative. For this project, we offered the city recommendations on how to accentuate and build upon the positive aspects of the community while working to solve some of the problems that it faces.
While downtown Chelsea has largely been ignored in recent plans for Chelsea, these plans do tend to show common threads of community concerns and desires throughout the city that are very relevant to the downtown area. Chelsea’s demographics set it apart from many cities in the region, and any solution should take into account its unique combination of density, immigrant population, and income. Most importantly, any solutions to the issues that downtown Chelsea faces should be heedful of what residents and community members want for their community, not what might seem sensible outside of Chelsea’s specific context.
From the foundation provided by this contextual research, we created a toolkit, or collection of potential actions. It is the aim of this toolkit to provide a wide range of strategies that could effectively address the problems and assets of Chelsea in a revitalization effort, and it is from this toolkit that the final recommendations are drawn. By being formatted in this way, we not only offered concrete recommendations, but also presented alternative courses of action should it be decided that these alternatives better suit the needs of the community.