Our Citywide Project Tracker allows residents to explore City investments across Boston’s 23 neighborhoods in community centers, libraries, parks and coastal resilience, schools, streets, and public art.

On a walk through your neighborhood, you might notice your neighbor’s new garden, a budding coffee shop down the street, or a sprouting sapling. You might even notice a new project from the City of Boston.

The City uses its capital budget to make Boston a more resilient, green and growing, family-friendly city. These investments are all around us, including:

• berms and natural seawalls to prevent coastal flooding
• newly built schools and major renovations that achieve the vision of a district equipped to meet the learning needs of all students
• renovated pools offering programs ranging from youth swim club to water aerobics to adaptive swim hours, and
• major investments in the public right of way that make our streets and sidewalks safer for people of all ages and abilities.

'How is the City investing in my neighborhood?'

Residents want to know more about how the City is improving the quality of the places and spaces around them. Historically, information was distributed across various department websites and not searchable by neighborhood. To make this information more accessible, our team at Boston Digital Service and the Planning Advisory Council developed the Citywide Project Tracker. Now residents can search a single database of nearly 200 projects, both recently completed and underway.

How the Project Tracker works

We worked with the Planning Advisory Council to conduct user research with City staff and constituents. Through that work, we learned that our new tool had to meet certain requirements:

• Capital project pages needed to be consistent across all departments.
• Key project information — including purpose, timeline, and status — should be front and center on each page.
• Project pages had to include information about how residents can get involved and share their hopes for the work ahead.
• Projects pages must be organized in an index searchable by project type, neighborhood, and project phase 
• Projects should be viewable on an interactive map.

We worked closely with City staff to design a new project page template and an interface for the searchable index. Once that work was complete, we partnered with the Planning Advisory Council to help six departments migrate 180 projects to the new project page format. Ten new projects have been added since this major migration effort.

The tracker itself includes projects that are currently underway and those completed within the past four years. Ongoing projects include those in design, planning, and construction. Residents are able to filter City investments by specific interests, such as neighborhood, project type, and project phase.

The Citywide Project Tracker connects Boston residents to:

• new parks, public art, and experiences in their neighborhood to enjoy
• information about how to attend community meetings
• opportunities to contribute to the planning process, and
• ways to share input with neighbors and community leaders

What's Next for the Tracker

We will continue to improve the Citywide Project Tracker based on resident feedback, as we do with all of our products and websites at the City of Boston. Affordable housing projects led by the Boston Housing Authority and the Mayor’s Office of Housing will be added to the project tracker later this year.

We welcome your input on how we can improve the tracker. Check out the Project Tracker today and let us know what you think by clicking the feedback button at the bottom of the page.