Beyond Window Dressing Democracy

Architectural Record, September 2002

As the abundant tributes to those who fell in last September’s terror attacks unfold this month, the eyes of the world will turn to Ground Zero for an expression of the nation’s resilience and a portrayal of its deepest-held values in the plans to rebuild. They will see American values at work, it’s true, but not the ones Americans are most proud of. They will see public agencies that have allowed the public to believe representations they had no intention of honoring. They will hear officials that talk about what they can’t do instead of seeking a compelling vision and finding a way to get it done. They will not see a process in place to achieve a result equal to the gravity of the event.

It is unclear yet whether the agencies managing the redevelopment of the site, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ) and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) understand what a serious breach of public trust their actions this summer represented. Can you promise one kind of process (an “open” one based on a blueprint of planning principals LMDC presented in Spring) and secretly replace it with another (a program requiring the replacement of exactly the 11-million destroyed square feet) and expect people to ratify the result? Can you favor undisclosed interested parties who stand to benefit substantially from state, local, and federal aid (Silverstein Properies, that holds the lease on the buildings and Brookfield Financial Properties that owns the adjacent World Financial Center) and expect the public to keep faith in official promises?

What should have been an orderly, confidence-building process has degenerated into a sordid (but all too familiar) New York City political brawl.

The unraveling of the planning process could not have come at a worse time–in the midst of a corruption-inspired meltdown in the financial markets. The Port Authority’s prediction that delay would damage recovery looked at press time to be a self-fulfilling prophecy–but not one that the Port seemed ready to take its share of the credit for. A New York Times report only days after the plans were unveiled described a continuing exodus of firms from Lower Manhattan. Companies expressed dismay with the rudderless redevelopment and the lack of progress on long-needed transportation improvements and other amenities that were supposed to be the focus of post-September 11th planning. Even the New York Stock Exchange–the very keystone of downtown’s financial-district preeminence–floated the idea of building a satellite trading floor outside the city.

No one should underestimate the difficulties that face Ground Zero planners. Whatever is built must unite the concerns of an enormous variety of people who have both financial and emotional stakes in the place. But creating complex, large-scale projects with a high level of public participation is no longer rare worldwide–it has simply become something of a lost art in much of America and particularly in New York.

Until July, the Port and LMDC were certain they knew it all. Architects and officials from Berlin and London, convened by Creative Cities, a multidisciplinary nonprofit based at New York University, found Alex Garvin, LMDC’s vice president for planning, and Anthony Cracchiolo, representing the Port Authority, to be “complacent,” “parochial,” and “uninterested in what other cities are doing.” There is now evidence of at least a partial change of heart. A wider variety of designers may be introduced to the process, including younger firms and those outside the U. S. If officials truly learn from best practices worldwide (from which the items below are culled), they could build the Lower Manhattan the city and nation deserve, and they could forge a model for other cities to emulate.

Work with information, not preconception

Planning 101 should have told Garvin and the Port that you can’t devise a development with enormous potential impact on the city without accurate information. As one observer pointed out, “you are building for what might be 150 years!” Pushed to show “progress” by politicians and the press, LMDC and the Port tried to shortcut the data collection process.

Unfortunately, neither the city nor the Port have planned strategically in the past, and so had little data and no coordinated long-range plans to give the consultants they hired, Beyer Blinder Bell, as a starting point. The urban designers were forced to come up with their proposals with only the crudest understanding of the transportation possibilities or the district’s urban-development potential.

Lacking any vision of what Lower Manhattan could be, Beyer Blinder Bell fell back on generic real-estate formulas. How could anything inspiring–or appealing to tenants–come out of the massive, overbearing lumps they presented last July? Did anyone look at whether architecturally and environmentally innovative buildings in London, Berlin, or Frankfurt might enliven a district brutalized for decades by lowest-common-denominator developer boxes? Can anyone know what to plan without comparing lower Manhattan’s economic possibilities with those of other business centers–locally, nationally, globally?

Don’t solicit “input”; create dialog

For all the lip service to openness, the LMDC has adopted an imperial “we know best” attitude about involving people with a stake in the outcome at ground zero. Cities that redevelop successfully recognize that people want their voices heard, but most also want to hear ideas from others–including designers and planners. (In the numerous public forums held after September 11th, citizens voiced support for a number of ideas they had gleaned from the work of such expert-volunteer consortia as New York New Visions.)

An “electronic town meeting” in July plans hastened the demise of Beyer Blinder Bell’s plans, and has been, therefore, declared a success. It is, however, dubious as a model for public participation. It is one-way (“you, the people, tell us, the public servants, what you want.”) It allows politicians to hide behind such “consensus” (“I’m only doing the peoples’ will”) rather than requiring them to exercise leadership or ask important questions. And, as Michael Sorkin notes [Critique, page 000], the information gleaned is processed to boilerplate bullet points. The process precludes a dialog based on ideas rather than encouraging one. (See for yourself: www.listeningtothecity.org.)

Facilitated dialogs on a smaller scale, however, are more promising, especially on such an encumbered site. They can engage specific interests (local businesses, the nearby Chinatown neighborhood) in defining their key interests and concerns. Consensus is important, but small workshops can “try on” a variety of ideas, even unlikely ones. Further dialogs, across a broader spectrum of stakeholders can attempt to reconcile the concerns raised in the smaller groups, stirring in real data and expert analysis. Many cities use charrettes or other kinds of hands-on workshops to turn talk into engagement: acquainting people with the issues at stake and helping them see the full range of possibilities (see also “Form Follows Process,” March 2001, page 127).

Such interactive processes, when well run, usually identify key areas of agreement or consensus (even among interests nominally at odds), while highlighting the areas of greatest contention, which can then become the focus of planning and design effort. Real dialog energizes people, and helps them bond with the possibilities of the redevelopment, adding constructive momentum to the project.

Be a great client

Large, complex projects steeped in controversy–such as Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum, in Bilbao; the transformation of central Barcelona; the Jubilee Line in London; Sir Norman Foster’s Reichstag, in Berlin; I. M. Pei’s Louvre; and Richard Meier’s Getty–owe their success to clients of vision and tenacity. Their architects are the first to tell you so: “Who is the client?” Frank Gehry asked LMDC’s Garvin last May in what turned out to be a prescient exchange. “I can’t tell who is in charge.” (It was at a presentation of student work that Gehry, Zaha Hadid, and Garvin had overseen at Yale University.) Hadid was also concerned that LMDC did not seem to know where it wanted to go, even before an urban-design consultant had been chosen. “You need someone like Ralph Fehlbaum at Vitra [the German furniture-design company], someone who will put in the effort to make something remarkable,” she added.

Great clients understand that highly talented architects make more than pretty shapes. These clients don’t saddle their architects with the limitations they perceive at the very beginning (as the Port Authority did), because they know that dedicated designers can often overcome limitations. Such clients are aware that a brilliant design can rally support, soften opposition, and open purse strings. They recognize how architecture can benefit a city, and can articulate both their vision and the designer’s approach to skeptics, as well as to officials, taxpayers, and private interests who will be affected by the project or who must fund it.

In lower Manhattan, you can’t shortcut the “vision thing.” A rebuilding plan must propose answers to obvious, critical questions: what kind of place should the neighborhood be in the 21st century? What would it take to keep it a world financial capital? Or should it become less a “downtown” and more a mixed commercial and residential neighborhood? Almost all of these questions have been asked by someone, but the LMDC has not found a way to make a compelling vision out of the answers. Its blueprint remains little more than a laundry list of ideas. LMDC has yet to compare these ideas, to prioritize them, to consider what choosing any one of them would mean, or to engage in a real dialog about them.

Use design proactively

Projects of enormous urbanistic and engineering complexity seem to pop up every week or so in Europe and Asia, many featuring striking architecture. But what appears to be the product of a single hand is almost always the summation of a long process that exhaustively tests ideas. A design that looks like a singular, personal artistic vision subtly incorporates numerous community-driven aspirations. A site may be developed pursuant to a government-sponsored urban planning scheme over which is layered a district urban design. Parcels may then be handed off to developers who build from competition-winning designs. Each iteration represents a testing and critique of the previous team’s work. The product of such a process may be a bland compromise or a spectacularly scintillating work of architecture, but everyone involved is assured a voice and everyone knows that numerous possibilities have been considered along the way.

Architecture can play a key role in such a “what if” process. Consider the mammoth replanning of Rotterdam’s Central Station and the area around it. An elaborate consultation process involving citizens and business groups is typical in Holland. But throughout an 18-month planning process, Alsop Architects did not just poll the public’s will, but guided a dialog using what project director Stephen Pimbley calls a “sacrificial scheme”–a sketch design that embodied the architect’s early best guesses. “It was intended to stimulate a conversation,” says Pimbley. “we did not want people to feel it was finished. And they felt comfortable seeing their hopes and dreams in what we were drawing.” The scheme is ready to go to the next stage, requiring architectural design of a large intermodal station. It will be a distinctive work, perhaps ultimately competing with Ben van Berkel’s Erasmus bridge as symbol of the city. And it is going ahead with little of the acrimony that often accompanies such large-scale change. Playful blobs, an Alsop signature, suggest a future in a planning-stage report, rather than assert what it is. At the same time, drawings and diagrams clearly present the key elements necessary to proceed.

Critics have suggested LMDC hire one great designer or sponsor an international competition (editorial, Record, May 2002, page 23). Mark Robbins, director of design at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), who stepped down last month, offers a more nuanced view: “I think it’s unrealistic to attempt the master stroke all at once.” He favors competitions, but competing teams in NEA’s New Public Works program also participate in intense conversations with clients and interest groups along the way.

It would be enormously difficult to structure a competition to produce a compelling, overarching strategy. A series of competitions, involving a variety of carefully considered scenarios, would test concepts around which consensus has developed–like restoring the streets severed by the Trade Center’s construction. Competitions could test little-discussed ideas, like whether a suitable commemoration could be developed out of the very fabric of the redevelopment, rather than as a stand-alone memorial, as politicking has so far dictated. “You want to generate proposals that fall between the fantasy scale of ‘ideas’ competitions, like the one Max Protech sponsored [March 2002, page 59],” says Robbins, “and LMDC’s very stolid approach, which does not further dialog.”

No process, however good on paper, can work if people don’t trust officials to take it seriously. The trust the Port and LMDC have squandered calls into question whether either agency is suited to manage so vast and complex a rebuilding. A proposal launched by unnamed city officials to arrange a land swap as a means to get the Port Authority out of the process was surprisingly well received, though such a swap will be complex and probably very expensive for the city. It represented an enormous rebuke to a huge, once powerful agency that long ago ceded the regional leadership it was formed to promote. LMDC, which was created to lead the rebuilding, failed, too, and it does not deserve to continue in existence if it cannot quickly right its course, taking a leadership role with defined powers, a defined agenda, an independent mandate, and a clear commitment to serve the public. With businesses voting a lack of faith with their feet, it could not be more urgent to build trust now, and build it fast.