LAND COLLECTIVE joined the SiteLab Urban Studios team to collaborate with Sasaki Associates, Nelson/Nysgaard, and Sherwood Engineers in the Connect Kendall Square Competition. Our Team’s submission was entitled: “The Kendall Commons Public Realm Framework Plan,” and focused upon several key elements: establish A Magnet for Public Life; create identity and coherence that is rooted in local culture and the promise of the future – Essentially Kendall; define a framework that is temporal, malleable, and personal, Making It Your Own; and do so in Small Steps, Bold Ideas. But most importantly, the team envisioned Kendall Square as a holistic Commons – building upon the Cambridge tradition – a set of collective and democratic resources. This empathetic approach to the spaces used by the citizens of Cambridge, and in particular those living in the Kendall neighborhood, focused on a humanistic approach to public space-making: universally inclusive civic open space; local resources; surrounding culture; and ecological systems. This “new urban commons” is comprised of the information, networks, goods, and services that define and connect broad communities.

Although our submission wasn’t selected in the final round, it was universally acknowledged that our team had a BLAST inventing and presenting our proposal – ideas we believe in wholeheartedly.