A controversial new concept in urban planning gained a foothold in Boston last night when Edward J. Logue, the powerful director of the Boston Redevelopment Authority signed a "memorandum of understanding" with a citizens group in Roxbury.

'Memorandums of understanding' outlining ideas and points of agreement between the Redevelopment Authority and the leaders in renewable areas are not new in Boston. Logue has signed a number of them in the past--but the agencies and methods which led to last night's agreement with the Lower Roxbury Community Corporation are novel and may play an important part in future attempts to renew neighborhoods not only in Boston, but also in other large American cities.

Standing in the background at yesterday's ceremonies at the Whittier St. branch of the Shaw Settlement House was a small group of planning professionals, mostly Harvard, M.I.T., and Brandeis faculty members, and have banded together as an organization called Urban Planning Aid.

These are the men responsible--some say to a dangerous degree--for the BRA Lower Roxbury Community Corporation pact.

The agreement signed by Logue is just a promise by the BRA to erect 400 units of housing on part of a 57.3 renewal site called Madison Park and to consult with the LRCC about development plans for the area. But that promise was at least six months in coming.

Madison Park has been slated for destruction since 1948 when it was first included in plans for the yet unbuilt Inner Belt. For nearly two years the BRA has had its eye on the dilapiated area, which houses about 300 families.

According to one official, BRA studies showed that Madison Park was "residual area." "The only ones left in this neighborhood," he said, "are the ones who couldn't get out." Original BRA plans suggested that the area would be best used for non-residential purposes.

Last winter the Boston School Committee was looking for a site on which to build an elaborate new campus-style high school. The BRA prepared plans using 35 acres of Madison Park for the high school and devoting a great deal of the remaining land to industry. The School Committee voted last February 22 to put the high school in Madison Park, but to devote all the area's acreage to the school.

Madison Park residents said little while these proposals were being discussed in City Hall and at School Committee headquarters. The lack of commotion, especially since people were going to be relocated, seemed to confirm BRA findings that Madison Park was a neighborhood but not a community.

During the spring months, however, a few people in Madison Park who wished to stay there, and who would soon become the nucleus of the Lower Roxbury Community Corporation, sought ways to protest the BRA's plans for the area.

Friends at settlement houses directed them to a non-profit organization which had been recently formed in Cambridge and which was urging a re-study of the whole idea of the Inner Belt.

The people at Urban Planning Aid were delighted and agreed to look into the situation at Madison Park.

Robert Goodman, president of UPA and an assistant professor at M.I.T., recently explained the thinking of the people who founded UPA.

"In the past few years, planners and others have become more concerned about the entire planning process," he said. "We began to wonder if those groups most directly affected by the planners: the poor, the Negroes, the people who have to send their children to inferior schools and suffer from inadequate city services, were adequately represented in the preparation and carrying out of programs for social and physical change."

Logue called the Harvard, M.I.T. and Brandeis professors "tinker toy boys" and suggested they were frustrated academicians exploiting the people of Madison Park in order to try out their own planning ideas.