Week 8 Studio: Budget Under Cutback

Balance the district budget against an imposed service cutback, and say out loud — on the record — what you have chosen not to fund.

26 April 2027

The cut#

Remove 22% of the worksheet’s total eligible allocated monthly service outlay, once. The denominator is printed on the issued sheet and excludes tax moves and capital works. The amount is imposed. The composition is yours, and that composition is the design problem.

The worksheet allocates citywide category costs to the district; it is not a native district budget. The issued transit-heavy, coverage-heavy and balanced checkpoints apply whole-city controls, so any mismatch between your paper closure and the available control is part of the record.

Before you come#

Bring the unmodified Week 7 personal save, the three reference branches and the returned reverse-salient card. Keep both utility increments costed and ordered; the exercise does not assume either was built. Total the eligible outlay before 13:00 and open the fiscal and land-value views.

Seal one prediction before any slider moves: which line you expect to cut, and which of fiscal performance, mobility performance or livability you expect it to cost. The desk crit compares that sentence with a settled branch, and the difference is evidence rather than an error to hide.

Line zero#

The cheapest closure is to leave both Week 7 utility increments unfunded. At 13:10 the room costs that option properly, reads the water, sewage and pollution evidence, then refuses it. The first entry on the corridor budget sheet instead allocates spend to the water-production and sewage-treatment increments, protecting them from the cut.

Everything else is chosen inside that fence. Reducing the bus fleet from four to three saves an allocated ₡1,200/month and produces a calculated headway of 8 minutes: 24-minute round trip ÷ 3 buses. A roughly 10-minute observed headway is branch-specific if the round trip lengthened. Setting the citywide parks and recreation category to 60% is likewise a branch control, not an Ockley Green building setting.

In the room#

Pairs first compose the closure on paper: line, current monthly figure, cut figure, saving and the named metric that carries it. Only then map it to an issued branch, take its 08:00 readings and open the prediction at the desk crit.

At 15:05, the roster speaks or submits each line in a fixed form while the room does not respond:

“I have cut ⟨line⟩ from ⟨figure⟩ to ⟨figure⟩ a month. What I have chosen not to fund is ⟨item⟩. The metric that is paying for it is ⟨fiscal performance / mobility performance / livability⟩, and this week it reads ⟨figure⟩.”

Tobias enters the line on the shared corridor budget sheet while you enter the same sentence on your signed unfunded list. Spoken, written, recorded or seated equivalents use the same evidence and clock. The final read-back is continuous and receives no comment.

What you take away#

Keep <student ID>-w08 and the named reference branch as separate files. Leave with the branch-labelled readings, signed unfunded list, your corridor budget column, the opened prediction annotated where it was wrong, and three captioned screenshots: the fiscal view, the land-value view, and your branch’s 08:00 reading. Upload by 21:00. Next Monday’s public-realm plan must fund every monthly line from this column and keep the ₡5,100 treatment increment funded and visible as a protected line.

Any monthly surplus left after the cut accrues toward an uncommitted capital reserve rather than spending itself. Note what it is not yet spent on: the proposed Kerrow cross-town link, an east–west connection from the corridor to the Pellow cells, is the standing candidate. That decision is not made this week — finalize it in Week 11 before the Friday 21 May memo, then defend it at the Week 12 jury.