Smart City Master Plan Announced Near Boston

"Architecture firms Elkus Manfredi and Sasaki have unveiled a masterplan to transform a parcel of land south of Boston into a smart city," according to an article by Eleanor Gibson.

The 1,500-acre site is the former home of a U.S. Navy airfield. "Developer LStar Ventures acquired the site – approximately 1,500 acres (607 hectares) – two years ago, with the ambition to build a new community 'from the ground up'," according to Gibson.

Union Point, as the master planned development is named, "will incorporate high-tech features such as autonomous vehicles, and smart systems for collecting and sharing data, to improve the lifestyles of future residents and the management of the city," explains Gibson. More details, and renderings, are included in the original article.

Union Point joins a smart city landscape that has populated quickly in recent months. In October, Toronto announced a plan to partner with Sidewalk Labs (a unit of Google's parent company) to develop the Quayside district into a smart cities experiment. News also broke in November that Bill Gates had acquired 25,000 acres of land located outside of Phoenix to develop a smart city dubbed Belmont.