In This Issue:

– With no Design Guidelines, a Less than Coherent – But Acceptable – Outcome at Ground Zero

– Lessons from Vancouver

– Two New Books Add to the Land Use Debate

– Calendar

With no Design Guidelines a Predictable – but Acceptable – Outcome at Ground Zero
On the eve of the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the future World Trade Center site came into focus yesterday with the release of designs for towers 2, 3, and 4. Designed by world class architects Lord Norman Foster, Sir Richard Rogers and Fumihiko Maki, the buildings are all innovative and striking in their own ways. They do not, however, adhere to a unifying set of design guidelines, because one was never completed. As a result, while impressive individually, as a group the buildings fail to evoke the themes strived for in the original Daniel Libeskind master plan for the site.

It was clear from the beginning that developer Larry Silverstein was not content to abide by Libeskind’s master plan. The brief honeymoon period of public goodwill, which followed the Innovative Design Study and the selection of Libeskind as master planner for the site, was followed by the developer’s proclamations that he would change or modify aspects of the plan. By June 2003, things had gotten so worrisome that RPA and the Civic Alliance countered Silverstein’s threats by releasing worst-case-scenario renderings of what Ground Zero might look like as a hodge-podge of uncoordinated, banal office towers. With an eroded master plan and lack of design guidelines, how far off from the designs are we today?

Yesterday’s unveiling of Towers 2, 3, and 4 transcends the Civic Alliance’s mocking images in architectural quality, but can’t help but recall the hodge-podge of four (including the Freedom Tower) distinct architectural visions. Coming before the adoption of long-promised but never-realized commercial design guidelines for the World Trade Center site, these three distinct buildings represent the very different visions of three renowned talents. This is a predictable outcome of a master planning process that fell apart, bit by bit, over the last four years. Provided these designs proceed without the alterations that have beset every other project on this site, it will fall to the last major unfinished piece of business at the World Trade Center site to unify and pull together the ambitious and disparate architectural visions at Ground Zero: a master public realm plan for the streetscape of the World Trade Center.

Yesterday’s unveiling did include some pleasant surprises for the civic and design communities who have advocated for attention to the street life and public realm of the World Trade Center site at the ground level. Gone is the retail arcade proposed by the Port Authority in November 2005, which would have erased Cortlandt and Dey Streets under a three-story glass canopy connecting Towers 3 and 4. In the new designs, Cortlandt and Dey are extended as city streets between Church and Greenwich streets, offering multiple levels of street-fronting retail in the Rogers and Maki buildings.

Another positive outcome is the presence of distinct tower bases, rising between 65 and 85 feet from the street, which will create a more human experience at the street level, divert dangerous wind conditions that can result from sheer walls, and relate to each other as building neighbors. Atop these bases reside slender towers, “more slender than they need to be,” noted one pleased architectural insider who attended the presentations yesterday. Slender towers recall the volumetric renderings first proposed in Libeskind’s master plan, which defied both the orthogonal conformity of the World Financial Center across the site and hit the streets at interesting diagonal angles.

But while the restoration of the skyline is an important calling of the rebuilding process, what matters most is the experience of these buildings at the street level, where their users enter from the sidewalk. This underscores the need to create a public realm plan and design review process for the streetscape at the World Trade Center site. The moment has now passed for a set of commercial design guidelines that would shape the design of the four office towers at the World Trade Center site. Fortunately, some of the work produced by Studio Libeskind was clearly viewed by the three architects who released their designs yesterday. But the public realm of the World Trade Center site remains uncharted territory.

Like the public realm beyond the site, which suffers from uninspired city sidewalks, tawdry retail facades, utilitarian security fixtures, and endless construction disruption, the World Trade Center demands a uniform public realm plan that contemplates signage, sidewalk materials, benches, façade treatments, landscape design, etc. One day, when the eventual tourist, office worker, family member, resident, sets foot on these hallowed 16 acres, they should feel apart from the City itself and experience a public realm that is graceful, welcoming and attractive. They should know from anywhere they go on the site that they are in a special place.

– Petra Todorovich, Senior Planner

In Vancouver, Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad
A meal at a much hyped-restaurant rarely lives up to expectations, which is perhaps why I didn’t like Vancouver as much as I had hoped to during a recent one week trip there in August.

Long held up as a model for urban planning on both a city and regional level, Vancouver tends to be praised for several characteristics. First, there was the region’s ‘failure’ to build freeways back in the 1970s in and around the city. This reportedly caused neighborhood business districts to thrive, and for big shopping malls to not take root because they lacked the fertile soil of exit-ramps and clover leafs from which to grow.

Second, there was its waterfront, which included both a series of beaches and connected waterfront walkways and parks.

Third, there was its new prototype in downtown living in the form of scores of tall towers that were transforming the central business district into as much a place to live as a place to work, if not more so.

So how did the city live up to its billing? Well, two out of three isn’t bad.

The city largely lacked big grade-separated highways, and it seemed to work fine without them. We drove from Seattle and the interstate-style highway we followed simply turned into a regular city street, without fanfare. Remarkably, rather than causing any kind of congestion, traffic seemed to move fine. Also true to its reputation, I found that the city had lots of likable neighborhood business districts, too many to get to know on a one week trip.

Most of these neighborhood business districts, such as the Kitsilano area where we stayed, were old streetcar districts that in the 1920s would have been known as the suburbs. They had functioning alleys and walkable streets. They were lovely, but more a model of great historic preservation and adaptive reuse than contemporary urban planning.

Further out from these old streetcar neighborhoods you came to new subdivisions sprouting up amid farms and fields in a fashion that could only be called sprawl. This hardly seemed a model for other regions.

The city’s waterfront also lived up to expectations. While it was true that many of the outer areas like Kitsilano had allowed private homes to take over their waterfront, the downtown proper was ringed by a wide, expansive waterfront park with room not only for bike and walking paths, but large grassy areas and beaches. It made our Hudson River Park, nice as it is, look like a skinny afterthought. Designers and developers the planned Brooklyn waterfront park should definitely visit Vancouver, if they haven’t already.

Much of the money for this waterfront came from the developers of the many tall towers that have sprouted, poppy-like, from the small downtown, and it is here that expectations were not fulfilled. I like verticality, but most of these towers seemed inhospitable and soulless, lacking any kind of urban edge. Most, like the ones in the Coal Harbour district, seemed to have four blank walls and a front door set on a small plaza or park. They were “high-rise gated communities,” in the words of a colleague.

Many of the new towers built in the last few years, like the ones near the stadium and Coopers Park, were built in better fashion in what some are calling a new model of towers on top of townhouses. Essentially, a city block is ringed with townhouses, and then one or two relatively skinny towers are built on top of them. Theoretically, this seemed like an excellent model but I found the actuality hard to love. The new townhouses had a kind of faux, phony quality to them. Perhaps that will change with age.

Another aspect of these towers I didn’t like was that too many tall ones had been built too close to the water. There had been some attempt to step the towers down in height as they approach the water, but not enough.

Although many cities would envy Vancouver's success in encouraging downtown living, Vancouver may have too much of a good thing. The city government has placed a moratorium on the approval of more residential development until a study can be completed on the long term effects of more towers. One concern is that residential development may gradually push the downtown away from being a business center. This has happened in European cities like Amsterdam, as well as to a degree in Toronto. Residential gentrification and tourism have displaced office employment, at enormous expense to regional economies and transportation systems.

The obvious parallel is Lower Manhattan. Expensive office buildings are already being converted into residential towers there. This is a favorable trend in some ways. But given the concentration of transit lines there, it would be a loss to the region if Lower Manhattan dropped away as a business center and became a residential center instead.

Of course, not everything about a city can be filed under the heading of “urban planning.”

The city’s setting overall was as spectacular as billed, with high mountains ringing the cities, and lots of water and beaches along the water’s edge. The beaches were cold and brown by Atlantic standards, but they were still quite nice. The city also had a lot to love in its general style, which seemed to be a kind of Amsterdam on the Pacific. Both pot and prostitution were essentially legal, and there was a live and let live attitude that was refreshing.

The city is linked at the hip economically with Asia, particularly Hong Kong and new go-go Chinese cities like Shanghai. This has given the city gobs of money to play with, and to do things like transform its waterfront. All in all, it’s a city and region worth watching, but its path should not be followed blindly.

– Alex Marshall, Editor, Spotlight on the Region

Book Reviews:

This Land: The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of America
(John Hopkins 2006), by Anthony Flint

Americans and their Land
(Michigan 2006), by Anne Mackin

Judging by the way it raises passions, you’d think land use was a matter of life and death. Writers on subjects like suburban sprawl or urban renewal, including myself, I have to confess, often reach for the flame thrower before they have even clearly identified the nature of the target.

Two books recently out on the subject will help do just that. While very different from each other, both help a reader get a clearer picture of what is happening in this country with regards to development. Regardless of what position you hold in the fierce growth debates, these books will be helpful.

Both Flint and Mackin hail from Boston and have connections to that smaller district called Harvard. But despite the books’ common geographic origin and somewhat similar titles, they are very different books that complement each other. (Full disclosure: I know both Flint and Mackin from my own days in Cambridge a few years back.)

Mackin, a trained landscape architect and planner, and clearly a devout land lover, has written a primarily historical book that turns the intellectual earth to reveal deep, black soil long buried from the light of day, at least for most readers. Where else can you read about George Washington the land speculator, rather than Washington the General? Her strength is that her starting point is the land itself, rather than what is built on top of it, which is the usual focus of planning writing. She leads a reader through the development of the country from East to West, always focusing on the land itself, how we converted it from natural vistas to something to buy, sell, zone and subdivide.

Flint, until recently a reporter for The Boston Globe and a one-time Loeb Fellow at Harvard, has different strengths. Although he has very readable chapters that quickly summarize the history of development in this country, his book really shines when he goes out to places like Little Elm, a brand new subdivision along an old “farm to market” road well outside Dallas. He actually goes there and talks to individual home owners, and shows you why they buy homes there for what Northeasters will deem astonishingly low prices. He also shows us some of the more significant players in the sprawl battles, such as Andres Duany or the late Tom McCall of Oregon, and gives us a fuller picture of who they are and where they came from.

As a former newspaper reporter myself, Flint’s book reminded me of the virtues of solid reporting, which are increasingly rare in this Internet-charged world of vitriolic commentary. I actually love the current diversity of voices and the passion they have produced, but rarely do many of them bring new information to the table, and even rarer is that information reliable.

In their own way, both of these books help fill the gap.

– Alex Marshall, Editor, Spotlight on the Region

Questions Or Comments On What’s In This Issue? Send Them To The Editor Of Spotlight On The Region, Alex Marshall At alex@rpa.org

September 18, 2:00pm
THE FUTURE OF THE EAST END: Sprawl, the Public Realm, the Spirit of the Place. The AIA Peconic chapter of the American Institute of Architects has assembled a panel of planner, community leaders planners and professionals including Jonathan Barnett of the University of Pennsylvania Urban Design Program and Wallace Roberts and Todd to discuss both regional and local design issues facing the future of Long Island’s east end. The panel will convene from 2-5:30pm at the Methodist Church in Riverhead followed by an additional talk from 7:30-9:30pm at Vail Leavitt Music Hall.

September 21, 6:30 PM
Traffic and Parks - Can They Co-Exist? As new parks develop and congestion increases, will traffic need to be further curbed to accommodate park goers? Or can traffic and parks co-exist peacefully in our burgeoning city? Join Henry J. Stern, President, NYCivic, Parks and Recreation Commissioner Adrian Benepe, Transportation Alternatives' Executive Director Paul Steely White, and others for an evening of discussion and debate. Presented as a part of the Museum of the City of New York's ongoing Civic Talks series developed in collaboration with NYCivic. 1220 Fifth Avenue at 103rd St.

September 27, 6:30 PM
The Energy Task Force: New York's Electricity Roadmap. As recent brownouts and blackouts illustrate, bringing power to the five boroughs is a constant infrastructure challenge. Chairman of the Energy Task Force and Executive Vice President of the NYC Economic Development Corporation (EDC) Gil Quinones will be joined by Kate Ascher, Executive Vice President of the EDC and author of The Works: Anatomy of a City (Penguin, 2005), to discuss how New York City is addressing power distribtion, energy supply, energy consumption, and the "electricity roadmap" for the future. Museum of the City of New York, 1220 Fifth Avenue at 103rd St.

September 28 and 29
Regional Planning Comes of Age: a conference exploring the promise & practice of regional land use planning the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast states, on the 25th anniversary of the Pinelands Comprehensive Management Plan on September 28-29, 2006 at the Hyatt Regency in New Brunswick, NJ. To register go to www.regionalplanningcomesofage.org or write to: Regional Planning Comes of Age, c/o Pinelands Preservation Alliance, 17 Pemberton Road, Southampton, NJ 08088.

Through October 1
"Changing Streetscapes: New Architecture & Open Space in Harlem" The City College Architectural Center has documented the transformation underway with photos and architectural renderings of recent residential and commercial redevelopment, on view Tu-Su, thru October 1 at the NYPL Schomburg Center, 515 Malcolm X Blvd & 135th St, Central Harlem (#2/3 - 135th St station). (Temporary construction entrance at 103 W 135th St.) For questions, call 212.491.2200.

October 24
Informational Community Forum, with presentation and discussion, to be held at the (lower level) auditorium of the SUNY College of Optometry, 33 West 42nd Street, from 6 to 8 pm. Admission is free; RSVP at info@vision42.org by sending your name and e-mail address.