A City Transformed: Designing ‘Defensible Space’

Abstract

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? For more than a century, architects and urban planners have tried to design better forms for the modern metropolis. Some, like Le Corbusier, reimagined 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 restitution 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 compromise 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 consumerism. In recent years, cities like New York have 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 rather than 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.