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BEFORE WE REBUILD, WE NEED TO RETHINK
As the September 11 anniversary approached, a vigorous debate broke out over the future of New York City. Hereés what it boiled down to: Should there be streets running through the former World Trade Center site, or should there be a superblock?
That it came to this deadening level of discourse shows how quickly banal practicalities subsume visionary thinking. Ités a sure sign that whatever happens at ground zero will be firmly rooted in the tried and true — the past. Pick your vision of 21st-century New York: streets or superblock? Coke or Pepsi?
In other words, we should prepare to lower our expectations. Though the towers, it is now generally agreed, will not be rebuilt to their former height, we should expect pretty much the same thing — an old-fashioned office complex. That in itself represents a missed opportunity. The World Trade Center was a monumental anachronism, a perfect representation of the prevailing urban vision of its time, the late 1960s. New York then teetered on a precipice: Its working-class economy was collapsing and neighborhoods were being torched. The future of the city, the thinking went, depended on linkage to the suburbs, and thatés what the World Trade Center was built for. With its vast subterranean rail terminal and lucrative shopping mall, it was state-of-the-art technology for the tidal flow of commuters that would keep New York alive. Office workers would never have to set foot on a city street.
By the 1990s, the split between city and suburb, the tidy division of work and life, began to be obscured by a new urban culture — fueled in part by new industries like digital media and information technologies — that knew no such distinctions. The city became a city again.
Ités not exactly clear how or why this happened. It surely had something to do with quality-of-life improvements like the huge drop in crime and the modernization of the subway system. But the renaissance was also brought on by larger economic trends. For years, it had been forecast that advances in IT would make dense, old-style urban hubs obsolete — as business became more information-driven, you could conduct it from anywhere, so why endure the costs and hassles of a big city?
It turned out, though, that cities like New York offered another, harder-to-define mode of communication: an informal human network that springs naturally from high densities. Yes, anybody with a Bloomberg box can get up-to-the-millisecond financial reports, but the ubiquity of this data is precisely what devalues it. The more precious information is exchanged in idiosyncratic ways — in taxis and subway trains, at cocktail parties and coffee shops. Such casual networks exist everywhere, but nowhere are they as complex as in New York. Nowhere else do they cut across so many disciplines, cultures, and layers of expertise. The arrival of superpowerful information technologies made this informal network immensely more valuable, giving New York an edge in the 21st century that nobody figured it would have. Ités not the city and the suburbs anymore; ités the city and the world.
So where does this leave us with ground zero? How can a mere complex of office buildings represent and extend this idea? Most of all, ités essential that the rebuilding not simply replace one dogma with another; if thereés one thing we have learned from New Yorkés most recent renaissance, ités that the cityés future may be all but unrecognizable from its past. On Web sites such as Build the Towers and DowntownNYC, thereés an outpouring of schemes, some outlandish, some oddly plausible. But those are all just dreams. The real decisions will be made by problem solvers, dutiful line drawers who will shoehorn in all the demands of various constituencies: a large memorial, enough retail and office space to replace what was lost, and a-cultural facilityé — a bonus to make us all feel good.
PICK ONE: CITY STREETS OR SUPERBLOCK
Jesse Seppi, who runs a virtual-design firm called Tronic Studio, has a better idea — one that might introduce a glimmer of originality into a project that promises to be anything but. Seppi suggests a rebuilt office complex with-a museum of terrorism that presents unfiltered information about whatés happening right now — live feeds, graphics, maps. Almost like a Times Square effect, information saturation.é The dispatches would extend the museumés reach well beyond the burbs to the entire globe. It would be more than a suburbanite-processing machine. It would be a World Information Center.
This is a big concept, but the execution wouldnét have to be. It certainly shouldnét compete with the deeply felt concerns about a proper memorial. It represents the kind of at-the-margins intervention that might make this overwhelmingly big project meaningful to New York as it now exists. And if thatés not possible, what the hell, give us the streets over the superblock — at least streets will have a safe, reassuring look, like the city we used to know.
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