Envisioning the Next New York

On February 10, 2003, The Next American City sponsored a panel discussion to celebrate its launch. Over three hundred people attended “The Future of the City: Envisioning the Next New York” at the New York University School of Law. At the panel, four of New York’s most prominent urban thinkers imagined the future of the nation’s largest city.

Alexander Garvin, a Yale professor deeply involved in the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site, Paul Goldberger, architecture critic for The New Yorker, Hugh Hardy, a leading national architect, and Joseph Rose, former New York City Planning Commissioner and a leading New York developer, considered the ways in which design, politics, economics, government regulation, and public participation contribute to the evolution of American cities. Panelists fielded questions from the moderator, Vicki Been, Professor of Law at New York University, and audience members. The following excerpts from the panel discussion were selected by Anika Singh, one of the event coordinators. 

From the South Bronx to Southampton

Vicki Been: While we all understand that the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site is obviously going to change the landscape of lower Manhattan, the broader question is, “How will the redevelopment affect the city as a whole and the metropolitan area as a whole, from the South Bronx to South Hampton?”

Hugh Hardy: I’ve been interested to see how [Mayor Bloomberg]’s plan for Lower Manhattan could be used as a way to think about the city as a whole…because it’s such a simple approach with three parts. The first is transportation—access from, to, back, forth, up, down, is it the car, is it the [Metropolitan Transit Authority], what is the access to this place? Is it your feet, is it a boat? The second is community building. Although context in my profession is getting a bad rap in some quarters, I don’t see how you can discuss community without discussing context. It’s impossible—we’ve learned that about cities.

And then the third is public space. This is the one that fascinates me the most because the great public space in New York is, of course, its streets. You go into the outer boroughs and see these wonderful communities coming together. Yes, the parks are there for recreation or as an oasis, but it’s really the streets that define community, that really tell you where you are—not public space in the European sense. But the mayor’s calls for the creation of new public places, that to me is a phenomenon that’s quite new, that is definitely influencing the city as a whole.

The Balance of Power

Been: Let me follow-up on the point that all of you have made about the broad civic engagement that’s taking place as a result of the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site. How is that civic engagement going to affect the balance of power between the private development interests, the public realm, government, and the wide variety of stakeholders that are involved in development?

Alexander Garvin: I think one of the things we have to remember is this is New York City and the citizens of New York City have played an active role in shaping that city for decades. The community revolution began in New York City. We were the first city to have community planning boards, to have in our charter fifty-nine boards that meet regularly and express their opinions on things that are happening in their communities. We have regularized it and we have been doing that for half a century since Mayor Wagner [Robert Wagner, Mayor of New York City, 1953-1965] started at the Planning Commission as the Commissioner with community boards. This is not a new thing. What is new and what is important is the widespread public participation—the likes of which we have never seen before. We have had more than six million visitors to the web site of the [Lower Manhattan Development Corporation]. People from all over the world are now participating… There are advancements in technology that allow that participation to go far beyond simple public hearings.

Paul Goldberger: I think the most profound thing that we have seen has been—and this gets us a little bit back to the point about civic engagement—the extraordinary outpouring of not only interest but of particularly opinionated feeling on the part of the public. This has been expressed not just through public hearings but through unusual events such as the Listening to the City event at the Jacob Javits Center [New York’s main convention center] last summer—where, and this gets back to [Garvin]’s point about technology, where people actually were able to, in effect, vote on certain aspects of various projects and we saw the entire nature of the development process change.

In fact, the most antiquated and indeed almost irrelevant part of the public process now has been the old-fashioned public hearing, which seems to shed the least light and have the least effect on anything. Whereas the other forms of public engagement, such as that event or the web site as [Garvin] said or the exhibition downtown, have always seemed to me to have a much more significant effect on the direction than the public hearing, which was once the only means by which a public agency interacted with the public. It now is still there as a kind of relic but it’s the least effective, least meaningful [part] of the complex process.

And the other thing that has shifted in power somewhat, I think, is the role of architecture and design—which certainly has risen as we have watched things play out over the last six or eight months downtown. I tend to be skeptical of those architects or critics or others who hail this as the golden age of architecture’s great power. I think they will be disappointed, because I do not believe in fact that architecture can, in and of itself, be a savior or indeed that it has inherent political power. I don’t think aesthetics do that. I think they need the support of people who actually have real political power. And it’s a great mistake to confuse aesthetics, however great, with political power. Nonetheless, the relationship between aesthetics and political power is certainly more subtle and more intimate now than it was in any time in recent memory. And watching that play out will be very important.

Design Regulations and the Banal Middle

Hardy: You both make me think about design guidelines, and I wonder if you think they have been successful anywhere. They were an earnest effort—not to control design, of course, but to stamp out the bad things. Are there any examples?

Goldberger: I think that’s what they do. I think design guidelines are a safety net. They prevent awful, horrible mistakes from happening. But they also, almost invariably, prevent anything creative, fresh, interesting or different from happening. They force things toward a banal middle. And there was a point, I would say probably around the creation of the current Battery Park City master plan which is now more than twenty years ago, when it seemed like the trade-off was worth it. It was worth giving up anything new, creative, fresh and different, which we didn’t particularly trust in those days anyway, in exchange for being protected from the awful. Now we are less entranced with the results there, and I think properly so.

Garvin: I’m in great measure in agreement with both of you. But I would like to give you two examples of cities that have design guidelines that have been, I think, successful. And they are Santa Barbara, California and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Now it may be that you think this is enshrining styles that are not avant-garde—

Goldberger: It’s certainly that. Even if one thinks it’s wonderful, one would have to agree it’s that.

Garvin: I would argue that people set about creating the new “Old Santa Fe style”—because it is an invention, it did not exist. And I would say the same thing is true of the Mediterranean-California style that does not exist in Italy, France, Portugal or Spain. But nevertheless both of these communities have created something of quite great value out of design regulations. So I would say it really depends on the community and the design regulations and what they’re trying to do. But, by and large, I agree with both of you that we’ve taken this far too far and gotten very little for the results.

Goldberger: You’re right, even though I happen to believe that Santa Fe is an adobe theme park. The reality is it’s a very nice adobe theme and as such it is rather better than what it would have been had it been developed in a laissez-faire fashion. And I think to be fair to poor old Battery Park City, which these days it is so fashionable to dump on, I think the idea behind it was to try to distill the essence of a kind of New York-ness and replicate it. I think the nature of New York is such that it is not easily translatable and distillable in that way (and we’re also by nature as New Yorkers a little suspicious of any such attempt) so therefore it didn’t come off quite as well. 

New York and the Global City

Been: One of the things that Battery Park did is that it brought into the city a fair number of people who had been in the suburbs. And, of course, one of the questions that New York faces today is how much competition will we face from other cities, other countries, and from the suburbs? What do you think the main competition is going to be, and what’s the best way for New York City to meet that competition?

Garvin: We’re already winning, because the flight to the suburbs is the problem of the twentieth century. What we now have is growing density in existing cities. We have people moving back to cities—we have a growing population in places like New York City… Our competition today is with Hong Kong and Tokyo and London. And if you go to London you can take the Heathrow Express and come from the airport in fifteen minutes every fifteen minutes. And until and unless we have something like that in New York, we’re going to lose the competition to London and Berlin. So I would say we need to think about New York in international terms, and that is in fact our strength. New York City is today the great city it is because of immigration that has brought in the most creative people, and not just from other countries but from other parts of the United States. And we need to think of how we place ourselves in the global context and not in the suburban context at all.

Goldberger: I would absolutely agree with everything that [Garvin] has just said. There is no question we are a global city, however, I think we’re naive to think that our position and our fundamental economic strength can’t still be eaten away by the loss of some of our tax base. It may not be the larger, more visible things, but in a way it’s almost like termites eating away at our foundations when we lose some of our tax base, either to the suburbs or to what in a normal rational world would still be part of the city, which is the enormous agglomeration of businesses in what once used to be known as Jersey City across the Hudson. We could call that the suburbs, but in fact those are businesses that are there to take advantage of New York without paying a fair share of the cost of maintaining New York.

On one level, we are still better off as a region for having those jobs there and not in Austin or Denver. But they are still compromising our economic strength. However, we are set up under an utterly irrational political system that is not going to change, so we have to sort of cope with it—the metropolitan region is in fact divided among three different state jurisdictions, innumerable different counties, and the five boroughs and the mayor, so that we have so many competing political jurisdictions—and the governor, three governors. And that is not going to change. Despite all of the intelligent, thoughtful, and generally correct things that the City Planning Commission has done over the years to try to build up Brooklyn and Queens as secondary centers to Manhattan, without any such activist engagement Jersey City has just sprung up like a weed, far more potent economically. The reason, obviously, is taxing jurisdictions.

Pataki, You’re No Mitterand

Goldberger: Everyone does feel an emotional stake in the future of [the World Trade Center site], so it is natural that we would feel a desire for a consensus. Planning is not a simple matter of democracy… I don’t think you make great planning decisions that way, nor does great leadership always come from the world of architects and planners. Where it traditionally comes is at the level of public leadership, and if we go back to the Grands Projets in Paris, which lately have been invoked a certain amount as we talked so much about Ground Zero as an extraordinary series of impressive public works by great architects of the world.

Regardless of what you think of the Grands Projets or the architects who did them, they were really made possible not by the architects themselves but by Mitterand. And I think it is fair to say that Governor Pataki is not Mitterand… So I think we are seeing right now an extraordinary and unusual planning process that is taking in public input in an impressive way, yet we do run the risk of being seduced by this into believing that it’s all a matter of putting something up to a vote, and I worry about that as much as I worry about indifference to the public.

An Affinity for Winning

Audience Member: Today’s New York Times has this sort of breathtaking new idea, which is not a new idea at all, of course—the vast redevelopment of [Manhattan’s] West Side. It’s the most logical expansion of the [Central Business District] of Midtown and of New York’s growth as a whole… And I guess the question is, are we up for it? I’d like to think this is the city that built Grand Central and Pennsylvania Station at the same time. But over the next ten or fifteen years, could we realistically develop two enormous expansions of our two great business districts?

Joseph Rose: If you look at our past record, we’re in big trouble. If you look at the recent generations, the last forty years, we haven’t laid new track. But they’re not mutually exclusive—Lower Manhattan and the Far West Side. In Lower Manhattan, the key thing to keep in mind is that we’re playing for a hundred million square feet that already exist. And what we’re playing for on the Far West Side is the capacity to grow, and if we don’t have the capacity to grow, then that economic competitiveness will be severely undercut. Maybe not in the time horizon of the next five years, but over the next twenty—absolutely.

Hardy: And they are different financial structures in each case. It’s not the same pile of money at all.

Goldberger: It’s not a zero sum game between them. But I do think, or I would like to think, that we are more amenable today to boldness and vision than we were a decade ago. And I don’t know that I can provide tangible evidence of that; it’s more an instinctive sense. But I do think that we have come almost to the end of the age of obstructionism as the dominant mode of public participation. There is an eagerness to see things happen, as well as an eagerness to see things not happen.

Garvin: I think there are many things beyond just these two. We talked about [New York City’s 2012 Olympic bid]. There has been a major effort on the part of the city to create regional sub-centers in Long Island City and in downtown Brooklyn. This is a big important city, and to suggest that we can’t do many things is to misunderstand New York. We are now on the threshold of doing great things, and whether that is a ferry system that people used to laugh at when I talked about it for the Olympics, or whether it’s creating a new Long Island City, or whether it’s getting airport access, we are going to do this. We have no choice; we are competing with London, and Berlin and Hong Kong, and if we don’t, we’re going to lose in that competition. And New Yorkers—there’s one thing about New Yorkers. We like to win.