The following article is reprinted from the June issue of Public Administration Times

Community Planning Process Underway for Lower Manhattan

New York, NY - Whether it's to sound off about the traffic on West Street, or put forth ideas for a memorial - people have a new community planning web tool to help them get involved in the rebuilding of downtown in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks.

'Rebuilding A Community' (www.downtownnyc.org) is an initiative of the Civic Alliance, a coalition of more than 75 business, community and environmental groups representing a cross-section of New York and the Region that is providing a broad "umbrella" for civic planning and advocacy

Image of the existing conditions on West Street in Lower Manhattan

efforts in support of the rebuilding of downtown New York.

Information and ideas from the site will be used by the Civic Alliance to inform its recommendations and reports to the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the joint State-city Corporation that is overseeing the revitalization of Lower Manhattan. In the larger context of planning efforts, the 'Rebuilding A Community' website acts as a "nuts and bolts" counterpart to "ImagineNY," another project that solicits narratives and pictures from the public, in that it allows the public to provide a high level of detail in commenting on specific places, issues, and proposals.

"We're talking about specifics," says Julie Caniglia of Project for Public Spaces (PPS) - Civic Alliance member and one of the driving forces behind 'Rebuilding A Community'. "We're asking people who know and use downtown intimately - residents, workers and others - to contribute their local knowledge to help build a vision for a revitalized downtown. The website will evolve both as a major information resource, and a place where people can publicly discuss the issues while visioning, planning and rebuilding takes place."

"Consensus is not what makes a good urban design project. In fact, we often say that consensus leads to mediocrity."

The goal is to get people involved in creating a new downtown - not simply react to plans that are presented to them as a fait accompli.

By gathering public input, the website builds upon a planning process developed by PPS, whose work on public spaces and amenities focuses on involving stakeholders in a project from the outset. This creates a prime opportunity to gather local knowledge and ideas for creating successful places, and also fosters stewardship and partnerships that can contribute to the success of a place. The result is that people develop a stake in a place, because they helped determine how it should look and function.

Although public input will be solicited from the outset, the website's creators do not strive for that oft-coveted-some might say mythical-endpoint: consensus. "Consensus is not what makes a good urban design project. In fact, we often say that consensus leads to mediocrity," says Ethan Kent of PPS. "Consensus in this situation would likely lead to bland, one-dimensional, unresponsive spaces."

Map detailing the five segments of West Street being re-evaluated (Map originally prepared by the Regional Plan Association and modified by Project for Public Spaces)

So why build this website, if not to get people to agree on a solution? According to PPS, 'Rebuilding A Community' is not an effort to build consensus but an attempt to empower and facilitate smaller scale efforts from a broader range of interest groups. As Kent explains, "The community is allowed to take ownership,

and the process reveals a wider range of issues and opportunities."

Although design professionals tend to be initially resistant to this kind of community-based approach, they often find themselves relieved of the stress that accompanies conventional consensus-building techniques. When local users are involved from the start, designers and development organizations are freed from having to push their proposals and perpetually defend them against public scrutiny. They are allowed to participate more creatively and collaboratively without a high degree of opposition and competition - acting as resources that make the project move quickly, attain cost effectiveness and long-term success.

"By focusing on sections of streets and specific places as well as general issues, the ego of a large project and its power players is grounded and diffused."

The rebuilding effort will be an enormous task by any measure, but PPS hopes the website will temper, and perhaps negate, the tendency to view lower Manhattan as another large-scale urban design project. One of the main objectives of 'Rebuilding a Community' is to break down the whole into its smaller, more manageable parts. An urban area that seems impossibly complex at first becomes easier for people to grasp once they think about it block by block, one piece at a time. "By focusing on sections of streets and specific places as well as general issues, the ego of a large project and its power players is grounded and diffused," says Kent.

"Looking at it as a large project like Rockefeller Center or Grand Central station is what threatens its success and promotes the narrow interests of architects and development organizations vying for power," Kent says of lower Manhattan. "All great urban design projects have eventually given themselves over to the public in some way.

Barcelona's La Rambla, which is one of many examples on the "Rebuilding A Community" website meant to illustrate the possibilities of particular spaces

The ones that do not work were allowed to be controlled by entities that still try to prevent the people using it from feeling any ownership or creative connection with the space. This could easily happen in downtown New York."

With the help of 'Rebuilding a Community,' that shouldn't be the case this time around.

'Rebuilding a Community' was created and will be maintained on a pro-bono basis by Project for Public Spaces, as its contribution to the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan.