Trust a guy who's never built a Web site to come up with the best online design happening in the new millennium. His name is Jair de Souza, he hails from Brazil, and thanks to him, a hoard of talented Web designers have created sites about their hometowns for the recently-launched "my city" project.

Sponsored by the Banco do Brasil Cultural Center in Rio de Janiero, "my city" is both a series of 46 Web sites and a 24-screen installation. Souza, the project's curator, handpicked the designers involved, and took care to include a lot more than the usual honor roll of bleached hair and earrings from the US and Europe. "We wanted to represent the cultural diversity of the planet," he says. "We spent six months researching Africa, Asia, and Central and South America. It was tough to find good work, and tougher to find correct addresses."

In the end, his team sent out invitations to cities as far flung as Jakarta, Kiev, Singapore, Havana, and Skopje, Macedonia. The response was heavy enough to surprise even Souza himself. "For a good design firm to dedicate two to four weeks to conceptualize and produce a site without being paid represents a tremendous effort," he says.

Just how tremendous that effort could be is even more surprising. One contributor, The Test Pilot Collective, spent nearly a month producing a prodigious 200+ page nonlinear narrative about Mineapolis, Missouri. Asked about the amount of work, Test Pilot's Michael Cina shrugged. "It was a cool idea," he said. Similar was the reasoning of Clandrei, which employed nearly twenty people to build a site that follows seven different residents around Kassel, Germany on seven different days. "The idea was experimental," says Kai Brunning, "and we like experiments."

Nor was it all just fun and art. Dmitri Utkin of Moscow's Factory 512 signed on to show the world that "us Russian guys know how to design too." He might have wished he hadn't. His site about his home town of Ivanovo, an apparently depressed former communist stronghold, satirizes the city's glorious past as the "City of Redness." When Utkin showed this less-than-flattering work to his friends in the town, they informed him he couldn't present the city without permits from the proper authorities. "They were serious," he adds, "I couldn't do anything but laugh."

Luckily, the city fathers of Ivanovo and elsewhere have a more effective way to fight back. Anyone who wants can contribute a project on their own city to the "my city off" section of the site. Souza hopes this will develop into a vibrant community with contributions from all over the world.

"The most interesting thing about the project is the people who participated in it," says Souza. "They really worked hard to create their sites, and most sent them to me before the deadline. Isn't that incredible?"

There's a lot of things incredible about this one. Not least of which is Souza himself, who's just finished his first Web-based project: this one.

Adobe editor Joe Shepter's hometown is the World Wide Web.