Weeks after the federal government enacted the $787 billion economic stimulus bill, two students at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, Wayne Congar and Troy Therrien, have convened an open ideas competition, dubbed Imagining Recovery, devised to integrate design into the conversation of how and where stimulus dollars should be spent.
Calling the competition an attempt to "make sense of these numbers that are being thrown around," Congar hopes that the submissions will help interpret the 1500-plus page American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and create visions for the future. In a larger sense, the organizers hope to reorient how design is seen in a policy setting: Architecture and planning ideas should be present in the initial stages of policy creation, Congar says, rather than be part of a reactive process, in which designers are handed projects long after the government has allocated funds for them.
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