A Public Vision for Ground Zero Dan Oppenheimer, AlterNet June 24, 2002

In 1993, Adam Honigman was working at the World Trade Center when a truck
packed with explosives exploded in its basement. On September 11, he
watched the towers collapse from his office in Greenwich Village. "One job
more or less," he writes, and "it could have been me there this time."

Now, he'd like the City to memorialize its dead by not rebuilding the
towers. He writes of the joke about how the Twin Towers were built of the
boxes the Empire State Building and Chrysler Building came in, and he
pleads that we not "dishonor the dead, missing and this city with ugly,
rectangular crates."

His comments can be found, along with hundreds and potentially thousands of
other, on www.downtownnyc.org, a website launched on May 20 to host
discussion among the public on the redevelopment not just of ground zero
and the surrounding areas that were physically damaged, but of all of Lower
Manhattan from Houston St. down. Now that the last of the rubble - a thirty
foot steel column - has been removed from ground zero, the redevelopment
game is officially on; the website is an effort to assure that the public
becomes a player.

To address the expanse of Lower Manhattan, the site's bulletin boards are
grouped into fifteen topics. Each of these topics is devoted either to a
specific place, like the World Trade Center, or to an issue, like the
future of Arts & Culture in Lower Manhattan. Within each there are further
categories, and as the website evolves there will be further still, but the
structure and design of the site remain simple. You click on one of the
topics, choose from one of the sub-topics on that page, and then, as the
bright red link says, "Read Comments and Add Your Own."

Appropriately, for a site dedicated to incarnating the will of the public,
the ownership of www.downtownnyc.org is unclear. Its main sponsor, the
source of its legitimacy, is the Civic Alliance to Rebuild Downtown
Manhattan, the largest of the many non-profit coalitions and alliances that
have formed in the last eight months to influence the course of the
redevelopment. The producer and manager of the site is the Project for
Public Spaces (PPS), a New York-based non-profit urban planning firm.

Ownership aside, the purpose of the website is clear, and it is driven by a
simple philosophy, that the people who live and work in a place - the
stakeholders, in urban design vernacular - are best equipped to manage its
development and future. It is these stakeholders, according to PPS's recent
book How to Turn a Place Around, who "know from experience which areas are
dangerous and why, which spaces are comfortable, where the traffic moves
too fast, and where their children can safely walk or bike or play."

And it is the hope of the project that their website can become a place
where the public goes to articulate its expertise.

Public participation has been an avowed goal of the parties involved in the
redevelopment of Lower Manhattan, but the public's response has proven more
passionate than anyone anticipated. When the Lower Manhattan Development
Corporation (LMDC), the state/city group chartered to coordinate the
rebuilding, held the first of its public hearings on May 23, the crowd was
hostile. "We don't feel the Lower East Side is represented in the process,"
said Margaret Hughes. "The LMDC talks about being open but so many
decisions have already been made."

And there were further complaints: Chinatown was being ignored; the issue
of affordable housing hadn't been adequately addressed; no one seemed
interested in rebuilding the towers. "It's absolutely inconceivable to me,"
said Louis Epstein, "that they would rebuild without rebuilding the towers.
It's like deserting your dead in the battlefield."

"The LMDC needs us," said Harriet Festing, head of Marketing for PPS.

"They don't know any more than we do, than the public does, about how this
thing should go, and I think they realize that. I was at the meeting, and I
felt badly for them. They don't really have a mechanism for incorporating
public opinion, and there's no way they can process, in a meeting like
that, a thousand people with a thousand different opinions. "

One of the services the website can provide, argues Festing, is a
structured, continuous source of opinion from the public. Though the site
has only about one hundred and fifty registered users at the moment, they
are shooting for twenty thousand by the end of the year, and Festing
believes if they can attract that many people then those in charge - the
LMDC, the Port Authority, the Governor, the mayor, the developers - will
have to take notice, and will want to take advantage.

So far, most of discussion on the website has been about the future of
ground zero. Eileen Shay, who lost her younger brother Robert on September
11, writes of taking an out-of-town friend to see the towers on September
7, four days before the attacks. "He looked up in amazement at the Twin
Towers," she writes, "and I looked up with him and simply stated that "New
York is the greatest city in the world.'" Eileen is pragmatic on the issue
of rebuilding: "We should definitely put office buildings on the site," she
writes, but "not as high because I believe we would have a hard time
finding people to occupy the area."

The challenge for the project, assuming they are able to solicit comments
from thousands of Shays and Honigmans, is how to sell the information, how
to package it. When I asked Festing what PPS would do with twenty thousand
people with twenty thousand different opinions, she acknowledged that she
didn't know. "We'll do an analysis, a report, but I can't tell you what
exactly it might look like."

Nor do the people at PPS know what the site would even look like with that
many comments. "Maybe we'll do it like Amazon does," said Julie Caniglia,
the web producer, "with a few comments on the main page and a link to the
rest. I don't know yet."

Some of their uncertainty is a consequence of the speed with which the
redevelopment is progressing, a speed they've had to match in the
construction of the website. The rest of the uncertainty, however, is an
expected product of their philosophy, that the public should create the
narratives that define what a public space - in this case a virtual public
space - becomes. The site, therefore, is designed precisely to encourage
the formation of these narratives, with maps; suggestions collected from
workshops; links to other urban design websites; slide shows with images of
what other cities have done with similar types of places. "We have already
divided the space up into topics and issues," says Festing, "and within the
comments we may begin to see patterns emerge. We may even see people
connecting there and then organizing on their own. A body of individuals
can cohere, can coalesce into a group that might actually get something done."

Everyone whom I spoke to at PPS was up front about the fact that their
motives in developing the site are not disinterested; they too are trying
to sell something. Though they are not being paid for their work on
www.downtownnyc.org, what they learn from this project will help them pitch
the service to their paying clients, and the press they get - this article,
for instance - won't hurt either. But nobody in New York is disinterested;
it wouldn't be the city it is if its people were. What gives the website
its credibility is precisely that the interests of PPS and the Civic
Alliance and the public coincide. Information if what they all have to
sell; it's all that they have to sell.

If the LMDC and the Port Authority have political capital, and the
survivors of those killed have moral capital, and the private developers
have capital, the public has what one might call stakeholder capital. And
though the degree of public participation in the redevelopment will not be
determined by the success of one website, it will be determined by the
extent to which someone or something can find a way to channel the city's
millions of voices into a collective voice. The expertise is there; the
question is whether the women and men with the money can be made to listen.

Sally Ionidies used to take the A/C train to the Chambers St. stop. From
there she would cross over West St. - "awful to cross," she says - and head
to Hudson River Park, often picking up a jug of apple cider at a farmer's
market along the way. The last time she went, the entrance to the park was
closed, and she wants to know why there were no signs indicating when or if
it would re-open. Jesse Marsh says of Fulton St., which runs into the
former World Trace Center plot, that it should become a pedestrian-only
thoroughfare. "Allow Street Fair vendors," he writes, and "charge $20 per
day or $100/week."

Eric Wallach wonders "about the abandoned theatre that sits unused and
falling apart less than a quarter-mile south of Houston Street on the East
River?" He would like to see it restored and asks, into the digital ether,
to no one in particular, to everyone: "Can I help?"

Dan Oppenheimer is a freelance writer living in New York City.


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