Nathan Phillips, a CAS professor of earth and environment (front left), and Sal Genovese, a CGS lecturer in natural sciences (front right), on Cummington Mall with students from the Bike2BU course they coteach and Carl Larson of BU Transportation Services (back, fourth from left).

Campus & Facilities

Reimagining Cummington Mall

Hub Cross-College Challenge class has organized an event for Sunday to promote the street’s potential to be more pedestrian- and bike-friendly

Sleepy Cummington Mall will get a wakeup call this Sunday when the Bike2BU Cross-College Challenge course hosts a sustainability-friendly block party to showcase the space’s potential.

The students in HUB XC 433 are organizing Crash Cummington, from noon to 4 pm, to promote new bike- and pedestrian-centric ways of looking at the quiet street off Comm Ave, now home to various engineering and science buildings. 

“We want to promote the cultural and community value of pedestrianized spaces,” says Jack Albrecht (Sargent’25), who heads up promotion for the class event. (His tasks included getting us to do this story—just sayin’.)

The street will be closed to traffic temporarily, and there will be pickleball, a tug of war, chalk drawing, promotion teams from Redbull and Yerba Mate, and lots more. Organizers hope the event will include representatives from BU Sustainability, the BU Cycle Kitchen, aka the BUCK, and a few outside entities with similar agendas, possibly including NEMO, a new on-location bike repair service whose slogan is Bike Repair for Busy People.

“Really one of our biggest challenges as a society in addressing some of our biggest challenges, like climate change, is the ability to imagine,” says Nathan Phillips, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of earth and environment, who coteaches the course. “It’s very easy to just see what’s there now and assume that that is what will always be there. And so kind of jolting us all out of that in a fun way allows us to be able to imagine something different.”

Phillips cites local initiatives that have closed Boston’s Newbury Street and Memorial Drive in Cambridge to cars on some weekends as exemplars of their approach—as well as the Hindu Holi festival of colors that signals the arrival of spring, which he enjoyed recently on Cummington Mall, hosted by the BU Hindu Students Council.

A permanent streetscape makeover is not in the works, however. “This is more what’s called Tactical Urbanism,” says Phillips. “It’s where you quickly use removable items to transform a space, and that could inform future thinking about what works there and what doesn’t.”

BU Transportation Services is the class’ client for the project, and the students will produce a sort of manual for how any group can put on a similar event in the future, Phillips says.

“The only ask of them is that they make something fun happen here,” says Carl Larson, BU’s assistant director of transportation demand management and planning. 

If you’ve never been—and many haven’t—Cummington Mall runs behind the College of Communication and Warren Towers, parallel to Comm Ave.

Back in 2012, the University bought Cummington Street (and the adjacent bits of Blandford Street and Hinsdale Street) from the City of Boston for $11.45 million. BU replaced the word “street” in the name with “mall” to indicate the long-term plan to make it more pedestrian-friendly, while retaining access for vehicles. It’s a sleepy street used mainly by delivery drivers and patrons of the Warren Towers parking garage.

“Last year the class separated into several groups, and one of the teams came up with the name for the new BU Cycle Kitchen,” says Sal Genovese, a College of General Studies lecturer in natural sciences and mathematics, who coteaches the course.

Another team was going to produce a Cummington Mall event, the professors say, but because of the scale of the task and the small size of the team, it didn’t come off. This semester all 14 students in the class are working on the project

“We have an Instagram account set up—that’s @BU_crash,” says Albrecht. “We have been working hard at creating a custom logo and posters. We spend a lot of time doing graphic design. We’ve been working on getting flyers out and talking to some clubs and groups. We’re trying to dip our toes in every one of the pools trying to reach as many people as we can.”

Benedict Zhang (CAS’25) leads the programming team, Kota Tsukada (CAS’25) heads up partnerships, and Matt Alves (CAS’26, CAMED’26) is in charge of permitting and logistics.

“We’re trying to provide as many different, interesting activities to people as we can,” Zhang says. “This is near to finals, so we’re trying to provide some lighter time for all the students and employees at BU.”

“We got the BU side of things done,” says Alves. “It was just knowing who to talk to. And then they took care of getting us the correct forms for the City of Boston permitting. Just about things like serving food, music, entertainment, the amount of people, what kind of event it is. But once we got that all figured out, it was relatively easy.”

Larson notes that other factors will affect the long-term plan for the area, including a planned major renovation of Warren Towers in the next few years that will likely have a substantial impact on the western half of Cummington Mall.

For the transportation department, Larson says, “getting pulled into the academic area is a pretty exciting new thing for us. It’s really a fun opportunity to try some creative interventions that are not permanent and just see how it works.”

As for classroom goals, Phillips and Genovese say the class meets a variety of HUB requirements, as the students research how governments and urban planners have pedestrianized spaces to find what’s effective and what’s not, as well as teamwork and oral and written communication skills.

“It’s really interesting to see the difference between a paper, and you know, making places human-centered,” Alves says. “I think it’s really useful that we have to work as teams, and not only within our teams, but we have to work together with the other teams. That’s very indicative of what actually happens in the world.”

“Boston University is a place that doesn’t have a lot of outdoor spaces,” says Larson, who, like the BU faculty involved in the project, came to a photo shoot by bicycle. “What little we have is really precious. And students have proven themselves with good ideas for what to do with it. They made BU Beach a thing. And so to see that kind of creativity and adaptiveness given to this space I think will be really exciting.”