Build a Better Burb

This ideas competition seeks bold design proposals for retrofitting underutilized asphalt in suburban downtowns into innovative and surprising new uses, forms and urbanisms.

Description
With assistance from the Regional Plan Association and the CUNY Mapping Service at the Center for Urban Research, the Long Island Index recently added a new layer focused on the downtowns to our interactive online map of Long Island – the only publicly available, comprehensive source of mapped data for the two counties, home to almost 3 million residents.
Successful solutions may range widely in scale, although you are asked to site your proposal in one of the 156 mapped downtown areas. You can propose something small, such as an energy-producing bus shelter or a repurposed parking spot. You could propose something medium, such as an innovative infill building or a small urban farm on a vacant lot. A big box store could be adaptively reused as intergenerational housing while the parking lot is co-opted as a civic park, or a bicycle station. You could think big, and design a mixed-use plan for an entire block, strip shopping center, or historic downtown. Or you could think extra-big, and design at the scale of regional infrastructure: to introduce new mobility systems, to manage water, habitat and sewage, to generate renewable energy, or to engage in environmental repair.
Proposals may be prototypical, or customized to a particular downtown. Use your imagination, skills, insight and creativity to help Long Island, and other similar aging suburbs throughout the North American continent, to boldly envision a future that is exponentially better!

Jury
Allison Arieff (design journalist, contributor to the New York Times "Opinionator" blog and GOOD Magazine)
Teddy Cruz (principal of Estudio Teddy Cruz, San Diego)
Daniel DʼOca (Interboro Partners, New York, and assistant professor, Maryland Institute College of Art)
Walter Hood (professor of landscape architecture, UC Berkeley, and principal of Hood Design*)
Rob Lane (director of the Design Program at the Regional Plan Association)
Paul Lukez (principal of Paul Lukez Architecture, Boston, and author of Suburban Transformations)
Lee Sobel (real estate development and finance analyst, U.S. EPA: Office of Policy, Economics and Innovation)
Galina Tahchieva (partner at Duany Plater-Zyberk and Company, Miami, author of the forthcoming Sprawl Repair Manual)
Georgeen Theodore (Interboro Partners, New York, and associate director of the Infrastructure Planning program, New Jersey Institute of Technology)

Prize
First prize: $10,000 and $10,000 in additional prizes
The top project submitted by a student: $2,500

Entry Fee
None

Entries
5 image pages(A3) and a short statement of up to 250 words

Timetable
Finalists announced: July 6, 2010
Online voting ends: September 15, 2010
Winners announced: September 21, 2010

Organizer
The Long Island Index

Official Website
http://www.buildabetterburb.org/