I NY

摘要

The internet chat rooms, newspaper letters pages and comment columns are full to bursting with opinions about what should be done at Ground Zero. All human life is there but there is no consensus, merely a city grasping for a way to speak about what should replace the chunk of Manhattan that was wiped from the map on 11 September last year. In the middle of this debate stand the various parties charged with rebuilding the 6ha site, and the multifarious pressure groups, companies, survivors, victims' relatives and individuals that have a hand in the redevelopment, or think they should. Some of the most expensive real estate anywhere and one of the largest mass graves in the world. Never can a blank slate site have had so much economic value and been so emotionally charged. But there is more at stake for New York than just Ground Zero. Even before 11 September, there were moves to redevelop parts of the city, plans with public space at their heart. Two of them ― the landscaping of the Fresh Kills landfill site on Staten Island and the Brooklyn Academy of Music cultural masterplan ― are discussed here but there are others ― Brooklyn Bridge Park, the redevelopment of Penn Station, MoMA's move to Queens ― that are challenging the greatest city in the world to rediscover a more humanistic urbanism, to think outside of Manhattan, and outside of the commercial constraints that have cursed so much of its architecture in the past 40 years.