Boston Is A Brotherhood, Part II

In a recent column, Peter Canellos, one of the Globe's highest-ranking editors, pined for a second airport for metro Boston an idea batted around through the 1980s, only to dissolve. Dulles Airport in northern Virginia, Canellos writes, birthed "a city unto itself," with "hundreds of office buildings emblazoned with the most dazzling names in global high tech," albeit a generic city "that could be anywhere." Meanwhile, Boston is static about 20 years later, and the decision not to build an airport looks like "a big mistake, the kind that separates the truly global metropolises from the boutique cities."

Forget whether an airport with hundreds of acres of open land around it, ready for development, is a good route to being a top-tier city in the early 21st century. This is a questionable assumption. Canellos misses the mark more widely when he says that Boston is a boutique city, not one of the "truly global metropolises" he wishes it were. With the country's leading universities, life science companies and finance companies, and great culture, sports, nature and general quality of life, Boston is a global city. If it isn't, only maybe five cities are (New York, L.A., London, Tokyo and Beijing or Shanghai), which seems too restrictive of a list. And if Boston isn't a global city, why do I have to walk around every foreign tour group in the U.S. on my way through Harvard Yard?

Boston is also a wonderful place to study planning. It's post-industrial but re-animated; it removed an elevated highway and is redeveloping its waterfront. Downtown includes some of the country's most notorious urban renewal projects; but downtown also doesn't include as many such projects as it could because the massive push back against urban renewal and inner-city highways began here. It is one of the starting points of the historic preservation movements and not surprisingly, has wonderful, charming neighborhoods. It also is one of the starting points of the CDC movement because of the city's rough neighborhoods. You don't need a car to get around. I could go on. But the main point is: Being here is much more worthwhile than Canellos suggests.

Update: The above photo is my favorite view of the whole city -- from the Longfellow Bridge, looking west at the Charles River, Back Bay and the Hancock Tower.