Selling England by the Pound

If I’ve learned anything from blogging is that blog entries should be positive and brief, so I’ll try to stick to this golden rule.

Two weeks ago, I had a funny idea of Boston. In my mind, the city was something like this:

Apart from learning about islands’ names, public projects’ budgets and the word “drumlin”, this is what our field trip did for me:

It expanded my view of the city! Two things about this map are important:

1) It is cool because it has a picture this new movie “The Town”, in which the neighborhoods of Fenway and Charlestown are shown among gunshots.

2) It represents the dynamic nascent economy that developed around trade, thanks to its naturally protected harbor.

As professor Berman pointed out, today Boston’s key strengths are innovation, human capital and the financial sector, but these big three are all the result of the investment done by fortunes made through national and international trade.

So, to certain extent, apart from geographically expanding my view of the city, after the trip I think of Boston in a historical way, covering from Tudor’s stubborn adventures to the skyscrapers + universities formula of today.

Hopefully, now that I have a wide idea of this economy I can start to fill in the gaps, learn what parts play each neighborhood in Boston’s economy and position this city and Massachusetts in the vast American economy.