A Civic Assessment of the Lower Manhattan Planning Process

“What can a planning process achieve when an entire city of professionals, officials, advocates (and sometimes adversaries) unites behind one goal?”

An extraordinary mood of collaboration, unanimity of purpose and shared responsibly characterized the spontaneous coalescing of the civic community in the weeks and months following 9/11. In conference rooms and university classrooms, crowds of planning and design professionals, community advocates, union representatives, public officials and others came together week after week to discuss the principles and goals that should guide the planning and rebuilding process for Lower Manhattan. From this discussion a handful of coalitions and projects emerged, each with a slightly different focus or niche, but all with the goal of ​“raising the bar” about what to expect for the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan. Some of the most prominent groups and projects included the Civic Alliance to Rebuild Downtown New York, New York New Visions, Rebuild Downtown Our Town (R.Dot), the Labor Community Advocacy Network (LCAN) and Imagine New York, who each published reports and position statements in the fall and spring of 2001-2002 that helped to shape the direction and objectives for the rebuilding process.

The strongest and most clearly supported sentiment that emerged from this process, culled from hundreds of years of collective planning experience of the diverse group of professionals who took part in these efforts, was that rebuilding after September 11 – particularly because of the unprecedented and tragic nature of this unique challenge – needs to be unsurpassed in its public participation, transparency and accountability to the public. This was the overriding theme of civic efforts, and was in part self-actualized by the outpouring of work by the civic community that framed the planning process even before the public agency charged with overseeing the rebuilding - the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) - was created.

Precisely because of the outpouring of people’s time and concern and dedication to the task of rebuilding in the fall and winter of 2001-2002, there were great expectations about what the rebuilding process could achieve. Specifically we wondered: what can a planning process achieve when an entire city of professionals, officials, advocates (and sometimes adversaries) unites behind one goal? The first three years of the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan provide the best case study from which to answer that question.

The Civic Alliance’s September 2002 Planning Framework, which forms the basis for this retrospective report, was written as a consensus document of the Civic Alliance after a series of eight meetings each exploring an aspect of the rebuilding process in turn. It is an apt point of reference because it flows from the contributions and input of a very broad range of organizations involved in the rebuilding process for Lower Manhattan. Released in draft for the Regional Plan Association’s 2002 Regional Assembly, which drew about six hundred people to discuss the content of the report, it was revised in the following months after the extensive input of the working groups of the Civic Alliance. Its thoroughly-vetted recommendations largely represented the consensus of the civic community and the high hopes and expectations for this vital planning responsibility.

The purpose of this Assessment report is to evaluate the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan in light of the goals set out for it at the outset of the planning process by the civic community. It is not meant as a critique of a single agency, entity, or group of actors, but of the entire rebuilding process that has been formed from a complex interplay of people, policies, timing, politics, and tragedy. The report chooses as a benchmark the goals of the civic community because they represent a hopeful and prospective framework for the rebuilding that captures the mood and expectations of the period in which they were drafted. While some of the goals may no longer seem current, a surprising amount of the recommendations are still very relevant, and continue to guide the civic desires for the direction of the rebuilding. As this process moves forward at the third anniversary of September 11, this report highlights the successes, failures and the opportunities that still exist to realize the potential handed to us in tragedy to remake a district, city and region for the better.