We missed this article from the Village Voice when it was published in late July. It's a nice survey of the various campus building projects in New York City, with some introspective commentary. 

But will these schools really need all of this space once it comes online? Ten years from now, will we be downloading courses via Facebook apps onto iPads? Could all that classroom space end up being about as useful as the new home once planned for the New York Stock Exchange? In 2002, the Big Board walked away from a $1.1 billion deal with the city, realizing advances in technology meant it no longer needed a physical trading floor.

It’s easy to understand why New York’s universities are optimistic. Last year, NYU saw a record 38,000 applications for freshman admission, four times what it received 20 years ago. Nationwide, college enrollment is predicted to grow 13 percent by 2018, but the U.S. Department of Education cautions that its forecast doesn’t factor in such potentially disruptive forces as the rising cost of college, the changing economic value of a degree, and “the impact of distance learning due to technological changes.”

2008 will go down in history as a turning point. Unexpected new events and ideas surfaced, changing the way we will lead our daily lives in the future. Financial turmoil abruptly altered the economic picture, forcing people to shift their thinking about everything from the household budget to global interconnectedness.

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In our view, this is the way forward in an era of budgetary constraints. A bottom-up method of decision making offers effective and cost-efficient solutions to the economic, environmental and social problems around us. For Project for Public Spaces, this is more than a fashionable theory du jour—it’s based on three decades of experience building and repairing communities around the world using an approach we call Placemaking.

Placemaking is central to many of the powerful trends shaping the world today. The stumbling global economy, a vulnerable energy supply, and loss of confidence in far-flung markets are balanced by an upsurge of interest in things local: producing local food; promoting local businesses; preserving local character; protecting local open space and public places; finding meaningful ways to belong to a local community.