Shannon Basset [Re] Stitch Tampa, an international design ideas competition, challenged designers to consider innovative design ideas and strategies, employing connective urban landscapes and ecological infrastructure as an underlying framework for the post-war coastal city. The competition brief posited that this framework might operate as a catalyst for the economic redevelopment, as well as the landscape and urban recovery of Tampa, Florida. These strategies might physically reconnect a fragmented city, its urban fabric punctured with urban vacancies and significantly impacted by foreclosures during the financial crash, as well as earlier suburban expansion and urban renewal agendas. The Obama administration's announcement in 2010 of 1.25 billion dollars of federal stimulus package monies earmarked for a high-speed rail connection between Orlando and Tampa, to be the first in the United States, was the initial catalyst for the large scale infrastructural re-thinking of the city. While the high-speed rail was not implemented in the