After the World Trade Center: Rethinking New York City

After the World Trade Center: Rethinking New York CityMichael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin (editors), Routledge, 2002

Uncertainty, anxiety and ambiguity would seem to be the key responses to the question of what should happen to the site of New York's World Trade Center (WTC) in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, judging by the tone and themes of this collection of essays by 19 leading New York-based authors and academics from the realms of architecture, urban planning, sociology, history and political science. 'After the World Trade Center' adds up to a challenging but problematic volume of writing.

While the human tragedy that resulted from the collapse of these vast buildings is palpable throughout the volume, there is a pointed absence of sentiment about the loss of the structures themselves. The Twin Towers are acknowledged as iconic and imposing, but several authors regard them as fundamentally arrogant, imposing and inhuman. The editors' introduction states bluntly: 'The World Trade Center was the eye of a needle through which global capital flowed, the seat of an empire. However anonymous they appeared, the Twin Towers were never benign, never just architecture.' Likewise, in the essay 'When bad buildings happen to good people' political scientist Marshall Berman writes: 'Those first buildings were lousy, but there was something grand and inspiring in the global vision that underlaid them. That grandeur is what led many younger people to adopt them as symbols of the city. But maybe we can symbolize New York in ways that are more imaginative, playful, and humanly sensitive next time round.'

As discussions about the future shape of the WTC site throw up radically different proposals, a split is emerging between those who would build nothing on what is now hallowed ground and those who want business as usual, who even want two new towers, bigger and better. In her exploration of the symbolism of the towers and their loss, sociologist Sharon Zukin for one is keen to see New York reshaped rather than rebuilt. 'We don't need to build more superblocks and mammoth centres, we need many, smaller centres. We need to rebuild a lower-scale Downtown where life hums and throbs on every block. This is what the World Trade Center has taught us.'

Whatever misgivings architects and urbanists had about the tone and scale of the WTC development, for many New Yorkers the fear is that without the Twin Towers, New York will not be New York. This is true of many younger inhabitants, writes environmental psychologist Setha M Low after interviewing students of all ages. 'Their fragile sense of place attachment requires the physical presence of the buildings to mark the skyline and hold constant what is right and wrong,' she writes. Like many of the other authors, Low herself does not relish the rebuilding of an office city on the WTC site. Instead she hopes that the area around Ground Zero will become a complex space with 'gardens of reflection' and open plazas where people can come together. She asks: 'Will our search for security and desire to ward off anxiety continue to create fortified public spaces, rather than a 'Union Square' where people can express their grief, love and humanity?'

While the book contains practical discussions of how Ground Zero and the wider WTC site could be redeveloped and of the transportation needs of the city, many of the essays explicitly deal with Manhattan's history. Some readers will perhaps find it strange that the past rather than prediction should predominate in a book which is billed as being about what to do in the aftermath of 9/11. However, the eradication of the WTC was so complete, so rapid and unanticipated, so localised and yet so universal, that it is appropriate that before discussions of what should follow, an examination of what was and what was lost should take place. Indeed, some authors give the impression that they regard the creation of the Twin Towers have been be a form of assault on the city in their own right. So much of the book deals with what is absent, missing, lost. It is not just the loss of the Twin Towers that haunts these pages, but the communities like Little Syria and vibrant business and retail districts like Radio Row which were erased to build the World Trade Center.

What emerges from the many explorations of the past is that the history of Manhattan is one steeped in conflict, violence and destruction on a grand scale. In the piece 'Manhattan at War' historian Edwin G Burrows underlines that in its 380-year history of Manhattan has been shaped by war and invasion, often on a global scale. The island and its community started life as a bartering chip in the imperial ambitions of the Dutch, British and French. War has variously brought it boom, as when it was a garrison town, but it has also brought devastation. Manhattan has often been ravaged by fire, notably during the War of Independence in 1776 and again in the 1860s during the Civil War at the hands of Confederate arsonists. Fear of invasion has long shaped the island's topography: Battery Park is named after a massive, long-gone artillery position.

The history of New York would seem to be as much about forgetting as it is about commemoration. Few people know that terrorism in New York did not start on September 2001, historian Beverly Gage points out in her examination of the now barely recalled Wall Street bomb of September 16 1920. Forty people died and hundreds were injured in an outrage for which nobody was caught. However, this bombing heightened mistrust of outsiders, of immigrants. 'The bomb outrage in New York emphasises the extent to which the alien scum from the cesspool and sewers of the Old World has polluted the clear spring of American democracy,' wrote the Washington Post in 1920. The destruction of the Twin Towers, Gage writes, has forced contemporary New Yorkers to choose between two traditions: one which is insular, and another which welcomes and embraces people from the world over. These two traditions are evident in 'Letter to a G-Man', in which Moustafa Bayoumi, an associate professor of English at Brooklyn College, explores the way in which the development of the World Trade Center erased the district called Little Syria. Like so many city centre residential areas New York's thriving Arab quarter was displaced in the 1950s and '60s to make way for single use commercial development.

The importance of retaining a sense of place and history in whatever it is that follows the World Trade Center is underlined by historian John Kuo Wei Tchen. There is a healthy post-war tradition, he states, of challenging 'top-down' development schemes which starts with Jane Jacobs' defence of the West Village, and the campaign by Greenwich Villagers, Italians and Chinese residents against controversial city planner Robert Moses' Lower Manhattan Expressway. Tchen argues that the best monument would be to ensure that the city, state, private sector and the Port Authority (which created the Twin Towers) allow the creation of a livable community. 'If we can harness that amazing collective goodwill we created immediately after the 9/11 attack, and give voice to those who have been displaced, we can certainly rebuild a Downtown guided by human scale values truly working for an inclusive public good.'