Over the past month and a half, the Institute for Urban Design (IfUD) collected more than 500 ideas from New Yorkers about how to improve their city's public realm through the crowdsourcing project By the City / For the City. Now, the IfUD is launching the second phase of the project, an open call to architects, designers, planners, artists, students, and urbanists from around the world to develop a design proposal that addresses an opportunity identified by the city's residents.
Entries to the By the City / For the City design ideas competition are due by midnight on Thursday, July 31, 2011. A distinguished jury will then choose ten exemplary submissions that illustrate innovative and forward-thinking possibilities for New York City. Jury members include: Kate Ascher, the Milstein Professor of Urban Development at Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), a Principal at Happold Consulting, and author of The Works: Anatomy of a City; Barry Bergdoll, the Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design for the Museum of Modern Art; Learning from Las Vegas co-author and urbanist Denise Scott Brown; Architect magazine editor-in-chief Ned Cramer; Morphosis principal and Pritzker Prize-winner Thom Mayne; Urban planner and architect Toni Griffin; and WXY Principal and AIA Design Award-winner Claire Weisz.
The jury will award ten $500 prizes, five of which will be dedicated to will be a project in each borough, and five at the jury's discretion. The IfUD will compile the winning entries and most of the proposals submitted to the competition and publish them in An Atlas of Possibility for the Future of New York City, which will be released at the first-ever Urban Design Week festival from September 15-20, 2011. The submissions will be displayed in a public exhibition during the festival before traveling to venues in each of the five boroughs.
"Urban Design Week was conceived as an opportunity launch a wider public debate about the collaborative process of city-making in which we each play a part," explained IfUD Executive Director Anne Guiney. "Through the By the City / For the City design ideas competition, we're trying to connect the valuable lived experience of New Yorkers who know their streets and neighborhoods so well to the talents of designers who can help give form to ideas about making the city better and more livable."