Ross Bender wrote:
Public parks, to wax poetic, are the living, breathing hearts of cities.
But all of them are artificial creations. How can any of them be in fact "true
public"?
hmm... maybe it's not a question of artificiality, but
rather who's making the public space the living, breathing
public space it is, whose public space the living, breathing
public space belongs to... and based on what george thomas
was saying, it sounds like people have a strong, almost
instinctive, sense of that. "New York folks are smart," says
former New York City planning commissioner Ron Shiffman.
"They know where they're wanted and know where they're not
wanted."
Opponents of the Atlantic Yards project don't really fear
that its open space will be commandeered by heroin
addicts; they worry that a design executed on behalf of a
single developer will tacitly tell average Brooklynites
to stay away. Their frustration is deepened by a
perceived dearth of transparency and public dialogue. In
contrast to the well-received citizen forums that helped
to shape the design for Bryant Park, Ratner has been
accused of riding roughshod over his critics in Brooklyn.
(A recent non-disclosure agreement between his company
and the Olin Partnership prevents the display of site
plans and drawings in this story.)
"New York folks are smart," says former New York City
planning commissioner Ron Shiffman. "They know where
they're wanted and know where they're not wanted."
Shiffman sits on the advisory board of Develop Don't
Destroy Brooklyn, along with longtime New Yorker staff
writer Philip Gourevitch, former Major League pitcher and
author Jim Bouton, and several dozen other notable locals
who oppose Ratner's plans. Early drawings that depict the
demapping of some streets--the ultimate public space--to
increase greenery and pedestrian corridors inside the
development are part of what has Shiffman and his allies
exercised.
"Olin is very talented. I wouldn't in any way want to
diminish his stature or the quality of what he is doing,"
he continues, "but the open space, while beautifully
designed, it's really courtyards of buildings, not really
public space."
There is a degree of irony here. The newfound confidence
in big American cities is at least partially the legacy
of privately funded successes like Olin's watershed
intervention in Bryant Park--not to mention the design of
Battery Park City, London's Canary Wharf, and Penn's West
Philadelphia campus. Where once was abandonment, there is
now vigor and gentrification. By that metric, Olin has
earned the right to be self-assured--maybe even to the
point of thinking that he and Gehry can make up for their
client's perceived shortcomings. Yet if superlative
design has had a hand in bringing contemporary downtowns
to some kind of tipping point, it now has to respond to a
new set of circumstances.
“You really have to worry about whether what you're
doing, even if it's for a private corporation, is the
right thing for the greater public good," Olin says,
voicing that landscape-architecture melancholy again. And
what that means in terms of publicly accessible open
space is a hard thing to fathom.
I forgot to include the url of the article--
http://www.upenn.edu/gazette/0707/feature1.html
-- it's definitely worth reading in its entirety. to be
sure, it does touch upon all those difficult questions
involved -- when do ends justify means, whose vision is
superior, should consumerism trump citizenship, when do
design models become outdated, whose goals/needs are really
being met -- but I'll leave it to you to guess who wins in
the end.
the article, btw, is entitled "Mr. Olin's Neighborhood"
..................
UNIVERSITY*CITOYEN
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