As Kickstarter has grown over the past few years into the Internet’s go-to crowdfunding platform, it’s been tempting to try to apply the model to anything and everything in need of cash – to products, places, programs, public parks, potholes, you name it. But the concept has some clear limitations when implemented at the urban scale. Maybe a neighborhood could fund its own park and street improvements when City Hall can’t. But what about the communities that can’t afford to do that? Crowdfunding of community assets could potentially double down on inequality.
As we wrote last year, “Kickstarter urbanism” also bumps up against the twin problems that effective city solutions are rarely as sexy as a new bike design, while the bureaucracies for implementing them get much more complicated than Kickstarter can handle. As Alexandra Lange wrote last year for Design Observer, “a suitable funding platform for a watch is not a suitable funding platform for a city.”
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