the cororn group realestate

October,2001

DearNeighbor,

Manhattanrealestate marketing
correspondence,October2001.

82
A City Transformed:
Designing 'Defensible Space'
ANTHONYVIDLER

The terrorist attack on the World Trade Center is propelling a civic debate
over whether to change the way Americans experience and ultimately build
urban spaces. Are a city's assets-density, concentration, monumental
structures-still alluring? Will a desire for "defensible space" radically
transform the city as Americans know it?
Formore than a century, architects and urban planners have tried to design
better forms for the modern metropolis. Some, like Le Corbusier, reimag-
ined the city in glass and steel, its transparent towers majestically spaced
amid greenery-prismatic objects in a huge urban park. Others, like Frank
Lloyd Wright,envisioned it dispersed in "broadacres,"spread across the fertile
prairie, each citizen given a plot of land.
All these plans grew out of a desire to counteract what were seen as the
central threats against life and happiness in the late nineteenth century:
lack of light and air, unsanitary and overcrowded conditions and congested
circulation that demanded the opening up of narrow streets and the restitu-
tion of "nature"in the form of green space, if not the dispersal of the entire city.
Such dispersal has, in fact, been taking place since the 1920s, as the
"metropolis" grew into the "megalopolis." The result was an uneasy com-
promise between clusters of skyscrapers in downtown redevelopments and
urban sprawl.
But the central city, for all its economic woes, has retained its strong
attraction as a focus of public interaction, a center of trade, finance, and con-
sumerism. In recent years, cities like New Yorkhave seen a return to livability
and a reconstruction of social and cultural services and neighborhood.
The last decades, however, have seen a major increase in terrorist attacks
on the public centers in Europe, the Middle East, and now the United States.
Dispersal ratherthan concentration is being talked about as the viable pattern
of life and work, where monumental buildings will give way to camouflaged
sheds, or entirely scattered to home offices.
Urban planners are ill-prepared to respond to this new reality. Fear of
aerial attack has preoccupied planners and architects since the First World
War and its Zeppelin bombardments. At that time, decentralization was the
watchword-a strategy that fit the polemics of the Garden City movement.

Grey Room 07 Spring 2002, pp. 82-85. iC 2002 Anthony Vidler and the New York Times 83
 Regional planning groups in Britain and America stressed the security
advantages of "spread"cities. Le Corbusier, in consultation with former mil-
itary officers, drew diagrams showing his project for a "Ville Verte" or
"Green City" was less susceptible to damage from above. Its wide parks and
narrow bands of apartment-buildings offered smaller targets.
But all such plans were drawn up to counter the threat of external attack,
rather than to protect against terrorism from within. Indeed, for many critics,
security has been seen as a threat to liberty-the surveillance of society as a
dystopia of secret cameras, invasion of privacy and the abuse of state power.
If planners considered security, it has been in the service of crime prevention
in the inner city or the retreat into gated "safe" communities of the suburbs.
Certainly the superficial result of the latest terror will be to confirm the
dark images of metropolis drawn by the Expressionists in the 1920s, and
popularized by Fritz Lang's silent masterwork, Metropolis-the city as an
untamed monster, a vision updated in the cyberpunk stories of William
Gibson, movies like Blade Runner and the Japanese comic books, Atari and
Metropolis, whose ruined streets bear a disturbing resemblance to the devas-
tation in downtown Manhatten.
There will be an understandable impulse to flee. The "new urbanism"
movement, with its low-density developments like Seaside or Celebration
in Florida, designed to replicate small-town life in premodern America, will
no doubt take the opportunity to denounce tall buildings as inherently mis-
taken. Certainly a number of firms will relocate outside New York in the
search for space and security; maybe a number of New Yorkers will move
to the suburbs.
The experience of the rest of the world indicates, however, that terrorism
alone will not decrease the importance of city centers for the public life of
societies. London, subject to terrorist bombings since the late Victorian age,
subject to the ferocious bombardments of World War II and to the spillover
of the violence in Northern Ireland, has always rebounded with strength.
Paris has been on the alert for terrorism since the Algerian War. Yet its
museums, monuments, and public spaces are continually filled. New York
will be no exception.
For real community, as evident over the last week, is bred in cities more
strongly than suburbs. The street as a site of interaction, encounter, and the
support of strangers for each other; the square as a place of gathering and
vigil; the corner store as a communicator of information and interchange.
These spaces, without romanticism or nostalgia, still define an urban culture.
Proposals have already been made that would change the nature of public
space: closing off Times Square to traffic;limiting access to railroad terminals;
reducing access to parks; adding more cameras and security personnel in

84 Grey Room 07
buildings. Such a world would hardly be worth living in and would inhabit
the very contact through density that cities encourage.
Yet it is true that urban public life has suffered major onslaughts in the
last twenty years, from the increasing privatization encouraged by reliance
on Internet to expansion of the mall-effect-whereby only the largest con-
sumer outlets survive. In the current crisis, it is all the more important that
the idea of public space, and its relations to urban community, be sustained.
This is why it is urgent that planners explore new designs that learn from
the difficulties of past utopias as well as avoid the nostalgia of anti-city
programs. We should search for design alternatives that retain the dense and
vital mix of uses critical to urban life, rethinking the exclusions stemming
from outdated zoning, real estate values, and private ownership, to provide
vital incentives for building public spaces equal to our present needs
for community.

This articlefirst appeared in the New YorkTimes on September23, 2001, WK6.

Vidler IA City Transformed:Designing 'Defensible Space' 85