There’s an intriguing video on YouTube that records in time-lapse filming the construction of a tower in Tokyo. It’s the Tokyo Sky Tree. The video depicts work over an extended period. (Although the description on YouTube somewhat misstates the timespan of the recording, it’s still fascinating.)
Link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb8MUeZrxbc.
Despite all its beauty, the video invites one to ask: who built this, why, and with what means? For the Tokyo Sky Tree, the builders are a combination of a Japanese railway and several Japanese broadcasters. The tower is designed, among other reasons, to transmit digital signals great distances past other urban buildings.
One could take pictures of a local project in a place like my town of Whitewater, too. The building wouldn’t be as large, but it would still be possible.
And yet…even afterward, the same questions would present themselves as they do for the Tokyo Sky Tree: who built this, why, and with what means?
For a place like Whitewater’s Innovation Center, the answers would be (1) the City of Whitewater and University of Whitewater-Wisconsin, (2) in part to house a publicly-funded anchor tenant, (3) with federal tax dollars and municipal debt.
I could take a picture of the building each week, for the full construction schedule, and the same would be true after each photograph.
It will be multi-million dollar public project when it’s one-quarter completed, one-half completed, two-thirds-completed, and when it’s wholly completed.
There’s no magic behind publicly-funded projects. When one takes ten or eleven million in taxes and public debt, using no money of one’s own, one can expect to find a contractor who’ll build something with it.