Design writer Allison Arieff revisits one of the WPA 2.0 projects that made it to the final round: Berkeley professor Nicholas de Monchaux's Local Code. The project, as you might deftly recall, proposed aggregating well over a thousand "remnant parcels" owned by the city that can't be sold off. Overlaid with public health data, says de Monchaux, we find all that extra asphalt's also located most in areas that are most lacking in a "safe and healthy environment." Those sites are an "archipelago of opportunity" for San Francisco and other cities. Writes Arieff: "It’s hard to overestimate the extent to which this information can help us to think about larger systems and their interrelationships, so that we see a building as not just a building but an ecological infrastructure." [Opinionator, previously]
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