After the World Trade Center attacks, planners, neighbors, and Mayor Bloomberg supported reweaving the site into the city's street grid, in the process undoing "a painful planning error of the 1960s." Security concerns seem to have won out, however.
"With the blank slate offered by a catastrophic attack, planners, soon joined by the mayor himself, saw a chance to re-establish a great crossroads in the middle of ground zero: Fulton and Greenwich Streets, tying the second World Trade Center into the city — north, south, east and west," writes David W. Dunlap. "Now, however, they see that vision slipping away, as security concerns trump urban planning."
"The Police Department has proposed encircling the site with a fortified palisade of guard booths, vehicle barricades and sidewalk barriers," he explains.
“The argument that these measures will disconnect the site from the rest of Lower Manhattan ignores the fact that people largely experience the city on foot and on bikes,” said Richard C. Daddario, the deputy police commissioner for counterterrorism, in defending the plan. “The measure of connectiveness should not be the volume of vehicle traffic passing through the site.”
FULL STORY: World Trade Center May Be Isolated Again, This Time by Security Measures
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Urban Design for Planners 1: Software Tools
This six-course series explores essential urban design concepts using open source software and equips planners with the tools they need to participate fully in the urban design process.
Planning for Universal Design
Learn the tools for implementing Universal Design in planning regulations.
