WEEKEND READING: June 4-10, 2011

Sylvan Terrace, one of my favorite sites of "urban delight" in Manhattan

This week was like a big traffic jam of awesome in the urban-o-sphere. No time for dithering introductions, on to the good stuff.

ITEM ONE: David Roberts wraps up his five-part series on great places at Grist with a post on urban delight, taking time to note both the suburbs' relative inadequacy in this realm and Bjarke Ingels' unstoppable charge toward architectural legend.

ITEM TWO: The tenth issue of MAS Context takes on the meaty subject of Conflict in urban environments.

ITEM THREE: Speaking of conflict, Maisonneuve looks at the violence in many video games and wonders whether urban AR gaming might make for more dangerous cities (thanks to an Anonymous commenter for sharing this link on Wednesday's post!)

ITEM FOUR: Meanwhile, SimCity creator Will Wright shares his insights about the relationship between playing and learning, and how about people actually engage with video games (nutshell: the violence a'int so bad, folks).

ITEM FIVE: Nicolas Nova suggests a design studio for locative media that would be centered on visualizing the bizarrely partitioned city at the heart of China Miéville's novel The City and The City. Now that, I've gotta see.

ITEM SIX: Springwise writes of an innovative new app that crowdsources geodata to predict when the next train or bus will arrive. (WANT)

ITEM SEVEN: Urban Omnibus interviews David Giles, lead author of the Center for an Urban Future's new report on the prominence and related power of the design sector in New York City.

Enjoy the reading, and stay cool this weekend!

Economic Stimulus: Not a Spectator Sport

Long before President Obama signed the stimulus bill into law, municipalities across the United States had already begun salivating, and understandably so—the bill promises to spread CRAZY moolah across this economically-troubled country. Unless you’ve been on an extended camping trip, of course, you already know about the stimulus bill.

A variety of websites have emerged lately to solicit stimulus project suggestions and feedback from the masses. Stimuluswatch.org, for example, aggregates specific projects that are candidates for funding via the bill while acting as a forum for discussing their merits and drawbacks. As Catherine Rampell puts it, the stimulus is being crowdsourced. This is a manifestation of civic involvement that no one could have envisioned in the New Deal era. We can only hope some folks in Washington take a look at the message boards.

It may seem silly to nitpick about where the stimulus funds go, as long as they create jobs. Your city wants to secure the biggest chunk of cash it can get, and it wants project proposals that will attract that cash. During another economic upheaval, the Great Depression, Robert Moses demonstrated the pitfalls of that mentality in New York City. Moses noticed that Washington was handing out New Deal money and that few cities had projects on which to spend it. By catching on to this before many others did, Moses managed to almost single-handedly execute public works projects like the Triborough Bridge while elevating himself to an autocratic level of power in New York. Many of the New Deal projects he oversaw helped to choke the five boroughs with automobile traffic, and his influence—good and bad—is still felt in New York City today.

An individual with the power Moses had is unlikely to appear again in a U.S. city, but his legacy reminds us that large-scale federal funding enables the kinds of mega-projects that induce seismic change in cities. Under the guidance of mere mortals, those projects have the potential to harm cities just as easily as they can help them. As your city works to secure its stimulus money in 2009, examine the use of that money with a critical eye.

(Photo from Flickr user Tracy O.)