All Over the Map. Michael Sorkin
than its footprint, however, guarantees that we learn nothing from the tragedy and let the opportunity for better thinking slip away.
My studio is not far from the Western Union building at 60 Hudson Street, known to architects as the home of the New York City Building Department. Since September 11, this building has been the subject of unusual security, surrounded by concrete barriers and half a dozen police cars. It appears to be the only site outside the confines of Ground Zero to enjoy this level of fresh protection, and the reason seems to be the building’s longstanding role as the nexus both for telecommunications cables coming into New York City and trunk lines to the nation and the world, a logical next target for terror according to some scenarios. Ironically, a system at the core of urban disaggregation depends on joining huge dispersed networks on a single site.
Today, our dominant urban pattern—enabled by the instantaneous, artificial proximity created by phones, faxes, emails, and other global electronic networks—is the rapid growth of the suburban “edge city,” a sprawling realm, that has become the antithesis of a traditional sense of place. But this “non-place urban realm,” the location to which security-conscious firms are now retreating, is the result of more than just new communications technology. The suburbs were fertilized by massive government intervention in highway construction, by radical tax policy, by changes in the national culture of desire, by racism, by cheap, unencumbered land, and by an earlier fear of terror. The prospect of nuclear annihilation that made urban concentrations particularly vulnerable was on the minds of many planners during the Cold War, both in the USA and abroad. The massive de-urbanization in Maoist China was also the direct result of nuclear anxiety. This dispersal, from center to suburb, facilitated by the Interstates—our erstwhile “National Defense Highway”—was likewise more than simply good for General Motors: both the auto-maker and the USA were playing the same stratego-urban games.
The effects of this pattern of urbanization were in many ways antithetical to the presumptions behind the space of lower Manhattan. Here, concentration has long been considered crucially advantageous. The possibility of conducting economic affairs face to face, the collective housing of related bureaucracies and businesses (the famous FIRE: finance, insurance, real estate) that makes up the majority of business downtown), the dense life of the streets, the convenience of having everything at hand, are the foundation for the viability of the main financial district for the planet. Its characteristic form—the superimpostion of skyscrapers on the medieval street pattern left by the Dutch—has given downtown its indelible shape.
Any changes reconstruction brings must deepen this formal singularity, expand the possibilities of exchange, and broaden the mix of uses supported. While it’s a bromide to apologize before suggesting that the tragedy can be turned to advantage, the enormous disruption in the life of the city has already had a number of constructive effects. Here in Tribeca—ten blocks from Ground Zero—traffic is dramatically reduced on local streets, the polluted sewer of Canal Street is suddenly tractable, and deep civility abides many months later. The emergency car-pooling and limited access instituted as the result of the disaster are equally positive.
The radical act of the terrorists opens a space for us to think radically as well, to examine alternatives for the future of all of New York City. It is no coincidence that we have constructed a skyline in the image of a bar graph. This is not simply an abstraction but an extrusion, an utterly simple means of multiplying wealth. Where land is scarce, make more. Lots more. There is a fantasy of Manhattan as driven simply by a pure and perpetual increase in density. But while our dynamism is surely a product of critical mass, all arguments for concentration are not the same. Viewed from the perspective of the city as a whole, the hyper-concentration of the Trade Center was not optimal by any standard other than profit, and even that proved elusive.
Density has a downside in over-crowding and strained services, but this is not necessarily the result of the hyper-scale of any particular building. More critical than specific effects on the ground are the consequences for densities elsewhere. While anxiety over corporate and population flight to the suburbs comes from a general fear of both economic and social losses, the all-eggs-in-one-basket approach slights other areas of the city themselves in need of jobs, construction, and greater concentration. Manhattan’s gain has been the boroughs’ loss: the rise of the island’s office towers historically marks the decline of industrial employment throughout the city, and has obliged the respiratory pattern of one-directional commuting. A new means of producing wealth with new spatial requirements has—over the century—completely supplanted its predecessor.
With thousands of jobs already relocated out of the city, a solution to the “practical” problems of reconstruction can and must engage possibilities well beyond the confines of the downtown site. While the billions that will be available for new building—from insurance, from federal aid, from city coffers, from developers—are certainly needed to restore health to the enterprises formerly in or servicing the Trade Center, it seems reasonable to question—given the probable level of this investment—whether such massive expenditure should be focused exclusively here rather than throughout the city at additional sites of need and opportunity, places development could transform.
The majority of New York City’s population and geography does not lie in Manhattan: the island comprises only 8 percent of the city’s land area and 19 percent of its inhabitants. Moreover, according to the 2000 census, the residential growth of the island since 1990—slightly over 3 percent—lags far behind the explosive growth of Staten Island (17 percent) and Queens (nearly 15 percent) and the dramatic increases in the Bronx (10.7 percent) and Brooklyn (7.2 percent). Manhattan, however, remains the city’s economic engine, producing 67 percent of its jobs and 46 percent of its retail sales.
These imbalances have fundamentally reshaped the city. The great infusions of capital and the artificial fortunes of the last decade have propelled the price of real estate in much of Manhattan to the stratosphere, accelerating the flight of the middle class and the poor and making Manhattan increasingly monochrome. We continue to revere our island as a place of thick, urbane interaction, and cling to the fantasy of the great mixing engine of difference, of a city with many quarters housing many kinds of people. Increasingly, however, the differences in Manhattan’s neighborhoods are merely physical. This uneven development and accelerated metamorphosis has had dramatic effects, distorting the character of our urbanity decisively.
Here in Tribeca, we are at the end of a familiar cycle in which a neighborhood moves from a mix of warehouses, manufacturing, offices, and housing, to an “artistic” neighborhood, and now to the climax form of gentrification, an extreme high-end residential quartier. The corollary is that the jobs and people formerly employed here have either been eliminated or moved elsewhere: to the Hunt’s Point Market in the Bronx, to low-wage environments offshore, to the suburbs, or to the new bohemias of Williamsburg or Long Island City. We have scrupulously preserved the architectural character of Tribeca, but at the expense of its human one.
With the exception of Chinatown, Manhattan south of 110th Street has become a faded mosaic of former ethnic enclaves and cultural variety. Increasingly, the city’s ethnic and cultural quarters are being solidified outside the borough, in Flushing, Greenpoint, Dumbo, or Atlantic Avenue. Although the city remains a beacon for immigrants—both from home and abroad—the sites of intake and expression are not what they were, having been preserved to death. Manhattan is ceasing to be a place to get a start and becoming inhospitable to striving, less and less like New York.
But big changes can also suggest big opportunities for burgeoning neighborhoods struggling to find form, or merely to keep up. Not all disaggregation leads to sprawl; better, perhaps, to call it reaggregation. But it is also a notion that can be useful in cultivating character and encouraging development within more traditional, compact cities like New York, itself the central place for an enormous region. The point is not to make New York more like Phoenix or Los Angeles, but to make the city as a whole more like New York.
Because of its dynamic population and superb movement infrastructure, New York City can become a model of a new kind of polycentric metropolis, with Manhattan remaining its centro di tutti centri, its concentrated vitality unsapped. In fact, Manhattan is itself already polycentric: the disaggregation represented by, for example, the easy movement of financial and legal services firms from