Can Crowd Sourcing Be an Avenue for Innovation

Crowd sourcing has had its place in many types of innovations across various industries and now is helping city planners revitalize urban areas. This clever town is putting the community's ideas to work.

“I’d like to buy culturally conscious books and cards that represent me,” writes one commenter. A few others keep their requests for Brownsville, Brooklyn, pretty simple—a Burger King or a Chase Bank would do.

These are comments left by residents of Brownsville in response to a prompt to tell city officials “what’s missing” in their neighborhood. The answers populated an online map, a tool used by New York’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) in a new planning project. Earlier this month, Mayor de Blasio and the HPD released the Brownsville Plan, an outcome of a year’s worth of planning by the community and municipality, which will create 2,500 new affordable homes and spruce up the neighborhood’s cultural and recreational facilities. According to the comments on the map, these are very welcome additions.

“As [New York] continues to grow and change, community residents should have a voice in shaping their neighborhoods’ future,” said HPD Commissioner Maria Torres-Springer at a press conference held this month. The Brownsville Plan is very much reflective of Mayor de Blasio’s push to involve the neighborhood in city planning—a core message he promoted in 2014.