Wrestling with Growth in Acton Massachusetts - Event and Paper Explore the Possibilities of Progressive Planning

Cambridge MA – The story of how the town of Acton has wrestled with questions of growth over the last half century reveals the possibilities and the limits of progressive planning within the political and legal structure of Massachusetts, concludes historian Alexander von Hoffman in a new working paper published by Harvard’s Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston and its Joint Center for Housing Studies. The paper will be released at a talk that von Hoffman is giving at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design on Thursday, February 11th at 1 pm in Portico Room 123.

Von Hoffman, a senior fellow at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, uses a series of developments built or proposed by members of the Sweeney family to illustrate changing attitudes about and policies toward growth in Acton. These include the Colonial Acres I subdivision that Daniel Sweeney built on part of his family’s farm in the 1950s, the Colonial Acres II development that his son Kevin built on adjacent land in the 1970s, and the Colonial Acres IV project, which Kevin Sweeney first proposed in 1998 but was ultimately built by a developer who bought the site from Sweeney in 2003.

As these histories illustrate, in the decades after World War II, Acton, like many suburbs, initially embraced new development and then began imposing increasingly stringent and complex restrictions on future growth. However, unlike many suburbs, Acton also adopted many promising new approaches, such as cluster zoning, that tried to shape growth in ways that addressed some, but not all, concerns about its impacts. Consequently, says von Hoffman, “Acton offers both a model for other localities trying to manage their growth and a caution about what can be accomplished under the current political and legal frameworks that shape growth not only in greater Boston but in other areas as well.”

Von Hoffman will discuss the paper at the February 11th event, which will also feature comments by Toni Griffin, Adjunct Professor of Urban Planning in Harvard Graduate School of Design and Eran Ben-Joseph, an Acton resident who also is an Associate Professor in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. The event, which is free and open to the public, is co-sponsored by the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston; the Joint Center for Housing Studies, and the Graduate School of Design’s Urban Planning Program.