Over the past few weeks, with the deadline for the IfUD’s By the City / For the City design ideas competition drawing closer, we have been contacted by many planners, artists, and architects about entering, but for whom early July is a particularly busy time. As a result, we have decided to extend the deadline to July 31st, 2011, to give everyone working on entries some breathing room!

Our goal in creating By the City / For the City is to reflect the incredible range of ideas, skills, and efforts that go into shaping public space, and so we will document it all in An Atlas of Possibility for the Future of New York, a book whose contents are being created by the hundreds of people who have participated in the process at each stage.

Ultimately, the decision to extend the competition deadline is rooted in our desire to give designers more time to visit the website, choose a challenge somewhere in the five boroughs that represents an opportunity where design could bring transformative change, and create a brief proposal that gives visual form to those ideas. All entries will be published in the Atlas and celebrated at the first-ever Urban Design Week festival in New York this September 15-20.

While the deadline has been extended, we strongly encourage designers and artists who plan to enter the competition to register by July 24th so that we can better plan for the printing of the Atlas in time for UDW. Anyone with questions about the competition can contact us at urbandesignweek@ifud.org. Good luck to all who enter!