A 4 ½ day-long workshop to address urban design and planning issues for Lower Manhattan (south of Houston)  and implications for the WTC site and the region. The workshop is scheduled to take place from Friday evening, December 13 through Tuesday evening, December 17th, with a presentation of the results on Wednesday morning, December 18.

What are the goals?

Who is the audience?

The findings from this study will be presented to the same groups described in the outreach strategy with emphasis on LMDC/PA, the City of New York, Lower Manhattan residents, and victims' families.

Who is participating?

Three interdisciplinary teams (of about 8 members) will each be assigned one of the three Lower Manhattan scenarios.  Disciplines include: architecture/urban design, landscape architecture, development, planning, plus, as appropriate, experts on housing, office/commercial, cultural development.  Several resource people will "float" among teams to address cross-cutting questions of transportation, economic development. Each team will also have a resident of Lower Manhattan and someone with a direct relationship to the victims.

How will the "design brief" for the workshop be developed?

There are two major dimensions to this:

1. The Economic Development Working Group of the Civic Alliance has generated employment, population, tourism and other parameters for each of the three Lower Manhattan scenarios.  These are being fleshed-out in terms of the other dimensions of the CA Planning Framework (Transportation, Urban Design, Civic Amenities, Sustainability, Social and Economic Justice).
2.  RPA has launched an aggressive outreach campaign to elicit responses to the work that has been done as well as add new dimensions - especially the regional dimension - to the three Lower Manhattan scenarios.

Who are the constituents of the outreach process?

There are numerous constituencies for this process: residents of Community Boards 1, 2and 3, victims families, residents of the five Boroughs and Northern New Jersey, City and State agencies, others.  We will meet with as many of these groups as we can before the workshop. Representatives of these constituencies will be asked to serve on an Advisory Committee that will review the work of the workshop teams in a "mid-course correction" on the third day of the workshop and again at a final review.  This Advisory Committee will also help create the on-going outreach venues for this work.

How does this relate to the official LMDC process?

This will be complimentary to the current LMDC/PA design effort which is focused primarily on the architecture and urban design of the 16-acre WTC site based on a preferred program dominated by new Class A office space.  By putting the WTC site in its larger context, this work will create a physical and policy-based planning framework within which the designs of the six teams can be evaluated.  It will also suggest a range of acceptable program alternatives for the WTC site informed by the three potential Lower Manhattan futures.

Why are we doing this?

We believe that it is impossible to understand the future of Lower Manhattan and the WTC site outside of the context of the region.  LMDC has described the Lower Manhattan context for the current design exercise, but we believe that the Lower Manhattan context itself must be part of the design exercise and the subject of a robust public discussion.  From a strategic point of view, we believe that by expanding the purview of the planning and design exercise to Lower Manhattan and the region, it will be possible to address a much broader array of agendas and build a bigger constituency for doing the right thing on the WTC site itself.