" title="the map village street editors"> the map village street editors

Via Urban Re:Vision:  Urban Re:Vision and the Central Dallas Community Development Corporation announced that “Forwarding Dallas” has been selected as the winning design from Re:Vision Dallas, an international design competition. The challenge, to transform a vacant inner-city block behind City Hall into a carbon-neutral community, drew hundreds of entries from top architecture firms and city planners in 14 countries worldwide.  “Forwarding Dallas” is the product of a collaboration between Portuguese-based architectural firms Atelier Data and Moov, and will run “off the grid,” acting as a working model of sustainability for cities around the globe. Ground breaking is scheduled for early 2011.

Central Dallas Community Development Corporation is a non-profit group who are developing this which I find inspiring.  In Toronto I was collaborating and observing different non-profits working in areas of urban greening, affordable housing, affordable creative spaces and building of public spaces.   Since I’ve been presenting that work back, it keeps coming up that in comparison to overseas, we have a sadly weak non-profit sector.   Off the top of my head I can only name something like the Brisbane Housing Company, and even they seem quasi-government. In matter of the built environment it feels like a vicious circle, where we generally rely on government to do too much, and where they can’t do it all, there are not strong groups to fill in those blanks.  While there’s lot of community groups out there for sure - how much wide impact, citizen participation, or negotiating power becomes a failed question of size, capacity, and funding.  A lot has to do with funding, which is why social enterprise models is probably the way of the future.