stephanieNY

I'm taking this class the second half of this semester called Bargaining Table. Kind of a silly name, but a really awesome class. We're learning about Environmental Impact Statements and the players involved in getting big city development projects passed and actually built. It's a pretty skewed system. So a developer hires a federal agency to do a reeeeeaaallly in-depth analysis of the effects of their proposed development on the neighborhood in every sense (shadows, noise, air quality, jobs creation, affordable housing, etc.), and they put together this enormous report. In the end, a project is either passed because of its benign effects, or not passed because of its adverse effects. But the thing is, the people that write the report are ultimately the people that either pass or deny a project. So, you guessed it, the reports are considerably biased and few projects actually get denied. Fascinating.

Our project in the next few weeks is to create an interactive tool in Adobe Flash that community organizations would use to educate the public about the EIS for the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, so that they can debate knowledgeably, instead of just picketing "Not in our backyard".

Aaaaanyway, I'm going to put together a sweet Flash animation in a few weeks. I'll post it so that you can play around with it, and maybe next time someone tries to build an office tower in your backyard, you can fight it hard with the facts.