Endorsement: Barack Obama

We here at BOTC spent the night watching the most likely final debate between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. We had hunches about who we wanted to endorse before hand, but we wanted to wait until after the debate to make our choice, just in case. You never know--maybe Senator Clinton would have offered a rousing speech about the value of urban civic space. But, of course, she did not.

So we offer our endorsement of Barack Obama for the Democratic Presidential Nomination. Although both talked about the investment in infrastructure, we feel that a President Obama would make more robust investment in urban infrastructures. Obama possesses an idealism that will most likely produce urban renewal-like programs on the scale of LBJ's Great Society, which will prove very lucrative and thrilling to architects and urban designers.

Even though the physical city of Cleveland was not talked about much, our fair city would be a perfect testing laboratory for radical and progressive design endeavors that can conflate issue of urban shrinkage, landscape urbanism, new public housing paradigms, new economy geographies, green technologies, and endowed transportation corridors. If a President Obama is true to his word, our cities will be the fertile territories for an American urban rebirth.