Its taken me a few days to notice it (because both Stephen and I’ve been on mini-vacations from the internet), but the winners of WPA 2.0 contest have been announced.

The six winners propose harvesting biofuels from pools of algae fed by the underwater emissions of cars in the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, converting the Salton Sea from agricultural wastewater dumping ground to a hybrid of recreational uses, economically valuable micro-infrastructures, and artificially enhanced ecologies (that proposal is by Lateral/Infranet Lab), reconfiguring the US-Mexico border wall in thirty different ways, opening the Los Angeles waterworks as a series of public spaces activated by the presence of water, resettling climate-change refugees in the post-industrial landscapes of the Rust Belt, and reclaiming the discarded “unaccepted streets” of San Francisco as public parks.  My first impression is that the winners (generally) have found an excellent balance between offering believable proposals and transformative proposals, which is right where you’d like to see the winners of competitions situated.

The winners, jury, and “national policymakers” will be discussing the projects on Nov. 16 at an unannounced (as far as I can tell) location in DC.

Edit: Stephen informs me that the location will be the National Building Museum.