Becoming Boston - The Urban Photosynthesis

Boston, Photosynthesized.

This project plans to forecast the future of the 10,000 cities across the globe -- as though they have survived climate change and social discord and gone on to flourish anew. Today, we highlight the future of the American city of Boston, MA.

On a bright April morning in 2045, the Charles River is doing something it hasn’t done in years: it smells like nothing at all. No diesel tang, no hot asphalt breath. Just water, moving. On the Esplanade, cyclists glide past on algae-powered bikes — quiet, green, and civic -- in the way only a city that solved all its environmental problems can be.

Boston, MA, didn’t save itself with one silver-bullet invention. It did it the Boston way: by stacking clever ideas on top of old bones, arguing about them fiercely, and then building them anyway. The first clue that something had changed came from the rooftops.

From Tar to Thyme

Once upon a time, Boston’s roofs were black, blistering, and about as useful as a sunburn. Today, they’re farms. Urban horticulture didn’t arrive as a utopian gesture—it arrived as a zoning amendment. Flat roofs sprouted soil trays. Slanted ones got grapevines. Schools grew lettuce; hospitals grew herbs; triple-deckers grew tomatoes and opinions about tomatoes.

The city discovered that plants are excellent roommates. They cooled buildings in summer, insulated them in winter, and soaked up stormwater that once overwhelmed drains and flooded basements. The air grew cleaner. The skyline grew fuzzier.

From above, Boston now looks less like a collection of buildings and more like a lasagna: layers of brick, glass, and green, stacked with intent.

A Recycling Life

Then came plant-based recycling, which sounds like a marketing slogan until you see it working.

Instead of shipping waste out of state and pretending it disappeared, Boston leaned into biology. Mycelium—fungal root networks—were trained to break down complex waste. Fast-growing plants absorbed heavy metals from contaminated soils. Food scraps fed engineered compost ecosystems that returned nutrients directly to neighborhood gardens.

Trash stopped being a problem and started being a process. The city didn’t eliminate waste; it metabolized it. “Boston learned to digest,” one urban ecologist told me, standing next to what used to be a landfill and is now a public orchard. The apples are excellent, if a little philosophical.

The Rise of the Algae Commute

Transportation was harder. Bostonians love their cars almost as much as they hate traffic, which is to say: intensely, and with resentment.

The breakthrough came not from banning cars outright, but from making bikes irresistible. Algal-fueled cycling lanes—thin, translucent tracks embedded with living algae—began appearing along major routes. The algae produced small but steady amounts of energy, enough to power lights, signals, and subtle assist motors in shared bikes.

Cycling stopped being sweaty heroism and became smooth, luminous, and faintly sci-fi. Commuters pedaled through softly glowing lanes at dawn, their energy coming from sunlight captured by pond scum. It was hard to argue with that.

Sky Gardens and Accidental Community: An Urban Photosynthesis

Boston’s famous verticality finally made sense once the sky gardens arrived.

High-rises were retrofitted with open-air garden bands every few floors—shared spaces of trees, benches, and wind-tolerant flowers. At first, developers pitched them as amenities. What they became were social glue.

People met their neighbors while pruning blueberries at the 14th floor. Kids learned that strawberries don’t originate in plastic clamshells. Office workers took meetings among bees and forgot, briefly, to check their phones.

The city found that when you put nature in the way of people, they slow down. Sometimes they even talk.

Buildings That Grew Up

The most controversial change—because this is Boston, and there must always be one—was treehouse-grown architecture.

Instead of clearing land and then building, new structures were designed to grow alongside living trees. Engineered supports wrapped around trunks. Floors adjusted as trees thickened. Buildings didn’t dominate the landscape; they negotiated with it.

Critics worried about safety, predictability, and whether this all felt a bit too whimsical for a city that once measured itself in bricks and centuries. Then the buildings started outperforming expectations—cooler, more resilient, shockingly beautiful.

It turns out trees are excellent structural partners if you let them be.

The Forests Move In

Urban forests were the final piece, and the most transformative. Not parks, not decorative trees, but real, dense, messy forests threaded through neighborhoods.

They reduced heat, filtered air, absorbed floodwater, and gave wildlife a foothold in the city. Foxes became commuters. Owls took up residence near Fenway. The soundscape shifted—from sirens to wind.

Property values rose, predictably. The city responded, uncharacteristically wisely, with protections to keep long-term residents in place. The future, Boston decided, had to be shared.

A City That Learned to Breathe

Boston didn’t become perfect. It’s still loud. Still opinionated. Still convinced it could have done this better and earlier if anyone had listened.

But it learned something essential: cities don’t have to fight nature to function. They can collaborate.

Today, when the river smells like nothing and the buildings photosynthesize and your bike is powered by algae, it’s easy to forget how unlikely this all once seemed. But Boston has always been good at reinvention—as long as it could argue its way there.

The city didn’t just solve its environmental problems. It grew out of them.

Now, wherever in the subtropical world you might be, if you are contemplating about beginning your own little urban eco-renaissance, feel free to buy just one gorgeous potted tropical plant in order to get started -- from our kind and "Green" associates at "The Garden Shed"