What can a “crowd” do better than the government, financial institutions, or a corporate entity? Can this crowd replace today’s accepted avenues of development where funding or employment comes through fixed economies such as the government, NGOs, corporations, or financial institutions and become a tool for genuine community empowerment? The idea to create these avenues is “crowdsourcing,” an enterprise driven by the expanded online presence of much of the earth’s population that taps the global marketplace and its associated pool of resources and ideas for solutions to opportunities from the personal to the globally relevant.
Crowdsourcing was originally defined as the ability of an individual or group to outsource work to the online crowd or mass. This term and idea have quickly become the portal of financial and innovative hope for governments, companies, and communities seeking aid from further afield than standard financing footsteps and ballot measures can carry.
This is not simply an offshoot of the recent global financial crisis, but an emerging trend with prime examples in the discipline of landscape architecture, from garnering finances to developing innovative projects: New York City’s High Line, the Market Street prototyping festival in San Francisco, and Toronto’s Projexity effort, to name just a few recent high-profile examples.
The High Line, possibly the most iconic landscape yet of the 21st century, began with a community group named Friends of the High Line founded by Joshua David and Robert Hammond, residents of the Chelsea neighborhood, to advocate for the abandoned elevated rail line’s preservation and reuse as public open space. Their group of interested community members has become a nonprofit financial power that ultimately developed one of the most innovative spaces in New York City.
Closer to home is the Market Street Prototyping Festival, an upcoming temporary installation event on San Francisco’s Market Street. Spearheaded by the SF Planning department, the effort bypasses standard protocol and operations of master planning and development by a government or corporate entity traditionally considered capable of handling such a massive project in lieu of an open-sourced and community-driven competition to re-invigorate San Francisco’s most vital street. This project is branding itself as a fresh, flexible and “crowd” driven approach to aid various organizations and communities in illuminating possible avenues for future success in their public space.
Projexity, a nonprofit company based in Toronto, has seen the broader opportunity and implications of crowdsourcing and begun organizing competitions on behalf of governmental organizations, NGOs, and communities large and small that hope to find and fund projects in the private and public sphere. Most recently, together with the Toronto Region Conservation Authority, Projexity spearheaded a competition to aid one of the most underserved communities in North Toronto, garnering very innovative ideas to help them fundraise and develop a new landscape master plan for low-income, high-rise housing that could become a global paradigm for social housing and amenity.
This idea of crowdsourcing as a contemporary practice springs from our now globally wired community, where a group that may occupy a small fraction of a town can become a linked network capable of far greater impact than previously imagined. The concept certainly owes a great deal to our slowly recovering economy, and the result that organizations are seeking every angle and opportunity to remain flexible while gaining valuable insight into success via competitive and less costly experimentation. Regardless of the reasons for the emergence of crowdsourcing, it is an upward trend that defies current development avenues and a concept that can be utilized toward great ends by ourselves and the communities with whom we engage.
