In December of 2011, the TED conference, that popular purveyor of live-to-online talks, announced that it was giving its 2012 TED Prize not to an individual visionary, as is its usual procedure, but to an idea: The City 2.0.

This online initiative invites anybody with a digital connection to contribute ideas toward making their city better. In The City 2.0's crowd-sourced version of placemaking, you can go to an already-created page for your city, or create such a page of your city isn't represented yet, and put in suggestions.

Anthony Flint, writing in The Atlantic Cities, sums up the project as "a kind of global Wikipedia connecting citizens, political leaders, urban experts, companies, and organizations, with the goal of improving the 21st century city using up-to-the-minute crowdsourcing techniques. The ambitious goal is to create a clearinghouse for tools and methodologies and best practices to reshape cities around the world."

The initiative is not exactly original. As Nate Berg wrote in a another issue of Atlantic Cities, there is a similar setup in New York, called Change By Us. And The City 2.0 also seems to me to be a glitzier, globalized version of artist-designer-urbanist Candy Chang's  neighborhood-focused Neighborland.com, which you can read about in this week's feature section, in an article by Camille LeFevre reporting on Chang's talk at the Walker Art Center. (Chang's concept is powered by immediate desire, always a compelling way to put an idea forward. The Neighborland formula isn't "it would be good if we had—"; it's "I want--")

Berg reports, and voices, some skepticism about the Big-Idea orientation of the TED-endorsed project, given the nuts-and-bolts nature of urban change. "Building relationships with city officials and bureaucrats," he writes, "and working with small groups of composters and bike lane advocates and neighborhood economic development organizations is much different than picking 'ideas worth sharing.' Curating those ideas into a conference is a TED specialty. Putting them into action at the community level, like Change By Us is doing, would seem to fall slightly outside the organization’s core competencies."

Big Ideas Rock

But here's the thing: Big ideas are practical. Years ago, when I was an editor at Utne Reader magazine, I put together a section on social inventions—ingenious and useful things that had inventors, but are not objects—like Alcoholics Anonymous, the suicide hotline, and the block party. One thing I heard from most of the successful social inventors that I talked to—there are a lot of them in the UK for some reason—was that it's best to start big and scale down. Big dreams and desires create energy that stays with a project as it gets more realistic. Starting huge and even weird tends to preserve originality in the process too. One inventor's quixotic desire to employ every homeless person in East London in a gigantic performance festival turned into an annual circus put on by homeless amateur performers, to great success and acclaim. It helped some participants to get on their feet financially too.

So it seems to me that there's a place for ideas of every size and scale. Implementation, making-real, is absolutely crucial, of course, but seemingly impractical, airy ideas may generate more hope and mojo--and cooperation--than the usual boring, cookie-cutter examples of "work with the community" or "infrastructure improvement." Get those bike-lane advocates excited and things may go better.

The problem with The City 2.0 right now doesn't seem to be scale; it's more of an idea deficit.

Where Are the Ideas?

 I dropped by the Minneapolis and Saint Paul pages and was, in a word, underwhelmed by the contributions so far. One idea—better-labeled bus stops—from Minneapolis and zero from Saint Paul.

A glance around at other cities' pages showed that The City 2.0 is still embryonic just about everywhere—even the Berkeley, CA page boasts only three ideas. Generally there are more contributors registered, with names and photos, than ideas—suggesting that the initiative is mainly a social medium so far—a struggling Google Plus for urbanism geeks. The most startling ratio I found is New York's: 83 people, 6 ideas. Austin, Texas clocks in with a dozen fresh faces and no ideas at all.

I tried going overseas, thinking that an edgy, Euro-smart place like Amsterdam must have contributed a ton of concepts. The count: six people, one idea. London? Thirty-six to three.

Which I think is a shame. I also think that the Twin Cities, which is just teeming with bright people with clever and workable urban ideas at all levels of complexity, from improving bus benches to changing the tax code, has an opportunity here.

Let's make some news by being the most idea-prolific pair of cities on The City 2.0.