Ever since the federal government began tackling an unprecidented financial crisis with equally unprecedented economic stimulus measures, conservative commentators have bemoaned the amount of control ivory tower experts have had in dictating the economy’s recovery. It’s a scene that’s easily constructed and plays on populist fears of detached technocrats turning the pain of an entire state’s unemployed workers into a numerical abstraction—as David Brooks put it, “10 guys sitting around in the White House trying to redesign huge swaths of the U.S. economy on legal pads.” Something like this worked well enough (in conjunction with WWII, of course) for the Great Depression and the New Deal, but that was before the Internet.
The widened scope of civic conversations and interactivity the World Wide Web has made possible have raised everyone’s expectations of having their voice heard. Barack Obama made transparency and accountability a theme of his campaign, but so far his administration’s economic recovery Web site hasn’t allowed this kind of interactivity, serving mainly as a repository for administration talking points, timelines, and links to other agencies.
To fill this gap is Stimulus Watch, a nonprofit, open-sourced forum that allows participants to rate and comment on the need for thousands of economic recovery projects. The site compiles a wish list from the United States Conference of Mayors Economic Recovery report . These shovel-ready projects range from HUD funding, public transit, road improvements, airport funding, schools, public safety, and all kinds of infrastructure. The Stimulus Watch database is searchable by program type, keyword, and location. Users can also contribute facts about each project in a Wiki format, and comment boards allow for discussions of each project's strengths and weaknesses. Most importantly, users can take an up or down vote on whether they think a project should be funded.
This kind of crowdsourced application has certainly engendered open discussion about the spending of tax dollars that might otherwise slip away unnoticed (there are almost 8,000 votes and 250 comments on its most active entry), but after participants have said their piece and logged off, there’s nowhere for their input to go. As an independent nonprofit, Stimulus Watch has no link to the agencies that will actually distribute the money and can only depend on fostering a visible public discussion to make legislators and agency heads take notice.
Projects are compared by how active their discussion and evaluation boards are, how worthy of taxpayer money they’re deemed, and how absurdly wasteful they seem to be. One big loser so far is a disc golf course in Austin. The $100,000 provision for doorbells in Mississippi won’t break anyone’s bank, but it perhaps illustrates Stimulus Watch’s biggest strength: the ability to sniff out and separate even the tiniest scrap of pork from the truly deserving.
Stimulus Watch is well established, but there’s still room for these conversations to be influenced. And who’s better positioned to lead the discussion of how to build ourselves out of this recession than architects? There’s probably a project in your town on the site now. It’s time to put your eyes on the Stimulus Watch.
Comments (4)
Stimulus watch will accomplish very little. We need to watch ourselves and examine what our licensing boards are doing and not doing.
One would assume that we all care about economic improvement and hope that architects can engage that challenge with the opportunities somewhere in the stimulus package. We hope, and speak to the idea that we want to put architects back to work and we really need to do that.
But let's face it we are a profession that talk's the talk but does not walk the walk. We have the best opportunity at the door and fail to answer with prudent and necessary promptness.
We tout our potential to improve the built environment with our superior design intelligence while simultaneously, the architects who sit on the state board allow those who are not educated, qualified or examined to design housing and other small buildings that constitute by volume the bulk of the heated, cooled or otherwise conditioned built environment. It is ridiculous that those most qualified to bring about a correction to reduce the carbon impact of the city are also expected to engage in a price competition with those unlicensed practices, "designers" who have no legal or ethical system of constraints, work cheap and do cheap work and do the design for speculative developers and on average permit about 75% of the new construction in the US. We do not have the market presence to do what we are telling America we can do.
Strategically speaking we could not possibly be taken seriously by the general public and the congress is likely to realize pretty soon that we actually are trading away our ability, somewhat voluntarily, to actually accomplish the desired carbon correction. We do that in almost every state by giving up the part of our service market that is critical to the success of the professions self appointed task, by the interpretations of licensing laws, in each state, by our own Architectural boards.
Time to get our heads in the game.
Posted by Terry L. Walker | March 30, 2009 1:59 AM
Posted on March 30, 2009 01:59
Here we go again. Massive public works spending has never been a path out of financial crisis. Not for the US, not for Japan. It slowed the pace of recovery during the Great Depression, crowding out the private sector renewal that is required for real growth. As Michael Adams above pointed out, if you are parroting the New Deal approach as a success story, you need to get the facts, not the talking points. It was a hap-hazard approach that we are seeing repeated again by more clueless bureaucrats. This is a 90% government created crisis, and the same people that have done such enormous damage to the nation are the characters still at the wheel.
In difficult times, being especially careful about spending is more important than ever. That's where architects and planners can be of critical importance on government projects, or any project with any client, for that matter. The Bush administration spent money like a drunken sailor, but the new administration is making Bush seem sober and fiscally restrained by comparison. Amazing.
Wasteful spending on a bridge to nowhere is an outrage in good times. Why do we think building a thousand bridges to nowhere is an enlightened policy?
Think: Where does all this money come from? Taxes on the productive sector, debt (which requires interest payments, usually to foreign countries like China), or the printing press, which devalues all the money we have left. Substantial damage is being done in the name of "doing something."
Posted by Dale | March 27, 2009 7:24 PM
Posted on March 27, 2009 19:24
"Stimulus Watch" will accomplish exactly zip.
The assertion that it is "fostering a visible public discussion to make legislators and agency heads take notice" is nonsense.
I you think the New Deal "worked well enough," you might want to do a bit of research on that.
The neologism "crowdsourced" I did find interesting however. Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary (second definition) defines a neologism as "a meaningless word coined by a psychotic. Hmmmmm......
Posted by Michael Adams | March 20, 2009 5:15 PM
Posted on March 20, 2009 17:15
"And who’s better positioned to lead the discussion of how to build ourselves out of this recession than architects?"
Seriously, you need to get over yourselves. Everyone knows it takes at least 8 months to design a shiny box, and at least another 8 months to build it. How is this 'shovel ready'?
Posted by O2 | March 18, 2009 4:14 AM
Posted on March 18, 2009 04:14