Alexandra Lange highlights a crowd-sourced urban design that actually worked.
The Institute for Urban Design's project, called By the City/For the City solicited input from New Yorkers with a "Wouldn't it be great if...?" question. The results, writes Lange, were surprisingly good:
"Reading them, as I did, via the Institute's Twitter feed (#bythecity), I felt proud of the scale of my fellow citizens' thoughts. The project cleverly employs what I would describe as a Twitter-like interface which, for those who tweet, makes contributing almost impossible to resist."
The next step for the project is bringing in a team of urban designers to make renderings of the ideas.
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