Chinatown Cultural Plan
唐人街文化規劃
The Chinatown Cultural Plan is a collective strategy to sustain Chinatown as a historic cultural district and vibrant hub for arts and culture.
Completed in May 2025 as an addendum to the 2020 Chinatown Master Plan, the updated Plan captures a snapshot of the neighborhood’s current cultural ecosystem and outlines a shared vision, values, and actions to support the people, places, and organizations that shape Chinatown’s creative life.
Questions?
Annis Sengupta, Arts and Culture Director
[email protected]
Project Overview and Progress
Project Overview
Commissioned by the City of Boston Mayor’s Office of Arts & Culture (MOAC), MAPC facilitated the project in close partnership with the Asian Community Development Corporation, Chinatown Community Land Trust, Pao Arts Center and Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy.
The project featured a participatory planning process led by an artist team who engaged diverse sectors of the community. Joyful, inviting and open-ended engagements informed an expansive definition of Chinatown culture and a roadmap to achieve a shared vision for the future.
As part of the project, an interactive Chinatown Cultural Asset Story Map was created to explore the places, organizations, and businesses that contribute to the identity of Chinatown as an authentic neighborhood and historic cultural center.
Project Progress
In summer 2023, the Cultural Plan Working Group composed of representatives from project partners, released a Call for Artists and selected artists Heang Rubin, Lily Xie, and Mel Taing to join the project team.
The artists led two series of creative engagement centered around the question:
“What makes Chinatown Chinatown?”
Humans of Chinatown Portraits and Stories and Memory Mapping Dinners.
These activations elevated lived experiences, cultural memory, and local priorities through multisensory storytelling, bringing community voices and collective visioning into the heart of the planning process.
The Artists Team
Learn even more about the Team on the Artists Website.
Heang Rubin
Heang has been actively involved in Boston Chinatown since 2009 as a facilitator, advocate, researcher, community builder, storyteller/evaluator, teacher, and researcher. These multiple roles enabled Heang to build productive, reciprocal, and generative relationships with youth, residents, workers, community leaders, artists, students, government staff, and others who care about the health, well-being, and future of Chinatown. Because Heang’s perspective is to address community priorities, she has worked on a diversity of issues within the neighborhood including housing, problem gambling, emotional wellness, arts and culture, and open space. Through this work, Heang is learning what it takes to move forward a community-driven policy agenda in Chinatown and how to work cross-sectors to build a healthy, thriving neighborhood. Heang is also a writer and working on her first memoir project about faith, family, and forgiveness.
Lily Xie
Lily Xie is an artist and educator. Lily has collaborated with Chinatown residents and organizers on multiple storytelling projects since 2019 on topics including environmental justice, access to open space, and urban planning. Her approach to storytelling centers deep co-creation between artists and community members, with an emphasis on art as a platform for underheard communities to tell their own stories, on their own terms. Lily is currently an Artist in Residence for the City of Boston, and she holds a MA in City Planning from MIT.
Mel Taing
Mel Taing is a Cambodian-American photographer and educator. She has multiple collaborations within Chinatown through the Pao Arts Center as an exhibiting artist and a photographer for all exhibitions and art installations since 2020. Mel was also a teaching artist with the A-VOYCE program in 2022, facilitating community engagement to surface the dreams and hopes for the future Chinatown library branch. As a photographer, Mel works in the intersection between people and art - documenting exhibitions at arts institutions and serving her artist community through her photography and teaching opportunities. Beyond the camera, she is the Vice-Chair of MassArt Alumni Leadership Council. She is also currently a taiko apprentice of artist Karen Young, supporting a project called Older and Bolder, which seeks to provide a space for elders of color to address issues of racial equity and build community through the art of taiko.
Background
Beginning in 2018, the Chinatown Master Plan Committee and Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC), led a participatory community planning process to update and publish Chinatown Master Plan 2020, in parallel with the City’s PLAN: Downtown Boston. That work focused on critical priorities including housing, public realm, mobility, historic and cultural preservation, and air pollution.
As implementation progressed, community leaders identified the need for cultural strategies that could:
A) Protect cultural activity within the community, and
B) Build stronger coordination across Chinatown’s arts and culture stakeholders.
While many individual organizations and community groups have sustained vibrant cultural programming, community leaders recognized that preserving Chinatown’s cultural identity requires collective strategies, especially in the face of displacement and development pressures.
The Chinatown Cultural Plan responds to this need. Its goal is to align partners, artists, institutions, and public agencies around a shared roadmap to protect and grow the neighborhood’s cultural ecosystem, ensuring it continues to flourish as a home for immigrant,
working-class, and Asian diasporic communities.
Additional Resources
- Chinatown Master Plan 2020
- Chinatown History Directory
(a project of the Boston Research Center and Boston Public Library) - Chinatown Atlas