Visualizing Boston's Winter Spatial Inequality
July 2026
Graphics from The Indoor Emerald Necklace: Amplifying Boston's Winter Spatial Inequality, a paper co-authored with Michael Lawrence Evans (Director of Office of Emerging Technology at City of Boston). I led the data analysis, visualization design, and production.
Boston has 60 times less indoor public space than outdoor. This paper and its graphics map the typology of the city's de facto indoor public spaces, organized by ownership and consumption expectation, and visualize the scale gap between indoor and outdoor public space to make that disparity legible. From there, we propose a provocation, the Indoor Emerald Necklace, modeled on Olmsted's historic outdoor park system, asking: what could expanding or connecting indoor public space look like?
The scale of indoor public space compared with outdoor public space. Yellow marks "potential" areas, places we propose as provocation for building and expanding the "Indoor Emerald Necklace."
Typology map of Boston's de facto indoor public space. City-wide view (left), close-up of Downtown and adjacent neighborhoods (right).
Additional infographics