Building Model

Less than a week after September 11, 2001, The Wall Street Journal's venerable architecture critic, Ada Louise Huxtable, penned a presciently pessimistic essay about the fate of Ground Zero. "Rebuilding on this site requires serious consideration," she wrote. "And yet ... if the usual scenario is followed, the debate will lead to a `solution' in which principle is lost and an epic opportunity squandered." And this is precisely what has happened: The Port Authority (PA), which owns the land, and Larry Silverstein, who holds the lease, paid lip service to civic groups that demanded less office space and more housing and cultural facilities. But, in the end--despite the enormous slack in downtown Manhattan commercial real estate--they are rebuilding roughly the same square footage as in the original World Trade Center. And they got away with it simply because, as Huxtable predicted, rational city planning gave way to "movers and shakers making big building plans under the expedient banner of physical and symbolic reconstruction."Exactly four years after Huxtable wrote her essay, the issue of massive urban reconstruction has reemerged, this time in New Orleans. And so the question naturally arises: How can New Orleans learn from New York? Lesson One: Local Voices, Local Control Part of the reason New York never rationally planned its rebuilding is that New York City itself had little say in the process. In the days after the attacks, local officials failed to take the lead on long-term planning; so in stepped New York Governor George Pataki, the PA, and Silverstein, who controlled the site before September 11. Because the PA is an unelected bureaucracy and Silverstein is a private citizen, this significantly reduced the chances for broad public input. The state did eventually create the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (lmdc) and tasked it with, among other things, incorporating ideas from civic groups and private citizens. But "it did not have enough power," says New York architect Margaret Helfand, founder of New York New Visions, a consortium of architects and planners. "It seemed like an advisory committee to Pataki." As a result, civic groups thought they were being heard, only to grow frustrated when it became clear the lmdc had only a limited say in the process. This left little room for a broad discussion of imaginative rebuilding possibilities. One idea that received significant attention among civic leaders would have buried West Street (which runs along the western edge of Ground Zero) and erected office towers above it, thereby relieving the pressure to build on the site itself. But it never received serious consideration. Even City Hall couldn't get its voice heard. In summer 2002, it offered to buy out the PA's Ground Zero stake by swapping it for the land under LaGuardia and Kennedy airports, currently owned by the city. But, because there was no way to force the PA to consider the deal, the proposal withered. "It was a closed process, with officials meeting behind closed doors, which made a charade of public consultation," says Michael Sorkin, director of the urban design program at the City College of New York. Avoiding this in New Orleans would mean setting up an lmdc-like body under the mayor's office, with exclusive decision-making powers but also an enforceable mandate to incorporate community input. This includes ward representatives, church leaders, urban-design experts, nonprofits, and homeless advocates as well as the public at large. Under Washington, D.C., Mayor Anthony Williams, the city's planning department convenes neighborhood meetings to discuss progress on its current projects and collect public input; these comments are then used to fine-tune the department's plans. Why couldn't a similar idea, though on a much larger scale, work in New Orleans? Lesson Two: Take the Time to Plan As Huxtable foresaw, Pataki and Silverstein failed to consider a variety of rebuilding strategies and instead pushed through a plan geared more toward meeting immediate political and financial goals than the long-term needs of the city. Claiming the obligation to rebuild as quickly as possible, the two resisted calls by civic leaders to put together a master plan. Instead, what they (and the press) commonly referred to as Daniel Libeskind's "master plan" was anything but--it was little more than a vague outline of one possible vision. It failed to take into account how changing demographic patterns or economic development (in recent decades, financial firms have been moving further uptown or across the Hudson to New Jersey) would affect Lower Manhattan and how the site would fit within it. It also lacked the sort of nuts-and-bolts schematics--precise guidelines for things like sidewalks and public spaces--to which the public could later hold the developers. Of course, even in an ideal political climate, New Orleans and the Gulf region hardly have the time to consider thoroughly all the alternatives. Nevertheless, there are serious questions that have to be answered. Should the Ninth Ward be reopened, or should it be razed for parkland, with its residents relocated on higher ground across the river? What sort of public transit system should be in place for them? To what extent should the rebuilding incorporate environmentally friendly design principles, such as neighborhood recycling and bicycle paths? As early as possible, local and regional architects, urban planners, and government officials should convene design conferences to answer just these sorts of questions. It's about "establishing a consensus vision," says Ernest Hutton, a New York architect and co-chair of New York New Visions. "The biggest problem for New Orleans is going to be balancing the need for speed with the necessity for doing it right." Lesson Three: Think Better, Think Regionally One of the things New York did right was to look beyond the immediate site to the region as a whole, particularly in planning how the site could be improved from the original World Trade Center. Lower Manhattan has steadily lost tenants to Midtown, in part because it is relatively cut off from regional transportation networks. While the Libeskind plan failed to address other aspects of future economic development, the city and state government did manage to wrangle $4.55 billion in federal funds for a new transportation center downtown, and they are looking for ways to fund a downtown link to the Long Island Rail Road and a rail connection to Kennedy Airport. In New Orleans, rebuilding authorities should consider the city as part of a regional economy and figure out ways that New Orleans can complement, rather than simply compete with, cities like Houston and Atlanta. Given the importance of seaborne trade to coastal Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, one idea might be to create a tristate port authority to coordinate the growth of regional shipping capacity. "You can't focus on New Orleans alone," says Bob Yaro, president of the New York-based Regional Plan Association. "You have to have an economic development strategy that looks at the whole megaregion, which stretches from Houston to Pensacola." But, for all the potential for grand schemes, planners need to realize that the best plans are often those that look the least impressive on paper. Historically, proposals to radically rebuild cities have failed. At the same time, in the wake of disaster, it is all too common for business interests to promote narrow-minded, profit-driven projects by disguising them as blueprints for rejuvenation. That has been the outcome in New York, where Silverstein's promises to rebuild Ground Zero bigger and better have slowly eroded, exposing his real goal: recuperating his lost office space. In New Orleans, the business community is already imagining the future city as a lucrative cultural artifact- -Venice on the bayou. "I think of New Orleans sort of like Venice, which has a real water problem yet is a national treasure in Italy," Pres Kabacoff, CEO of New Orleans-based real estate firm HRI Properties, told BusinessWeek Online. Avoiding such "Disney-fication" requires strong leadership that ensures public funds are spent on the core issues of reconstruction, such as housing and utilities. Done correctly, the rebuilding of New Orleans can create a sustainable, equitable city. Given the scope of the rebuilding and the money to be invested, New Orleans is clearly not New York. But, if the Big Easy doesn't learn from the Big Apple, it will end up making the same mistakes.