NYC asks “What If?”

After reading my post on Re:vision, my buddy Ryan over at the New School Sustainability Committee alerted me to another effort at crowdsourcing city planning – this one a little closer to home. What If NYC is a competition sponsored by the city government to develop creative solutions to temporary housing in the wake of a natural disaster.

While it might not have the appeal of designing a city block from the ground up, the What If competition is an intelligent move on the city’s part: climate change is making weather patterns more violent and unpredictable, and New York’s dozens of miles of waterfront will be put at increasing risk. And, as the site’s brief points out, conventional trailer park-style temporary housing is poorly suited to the high density neighborhoods of New York.

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