New York Undead: Globalization, Landscape Urbanism, and the Afterlife of the Twin Towers

Abstract

A tricky business, that of understanding New York. The city is always on the move, forever shifting. (Mario Maffi) Although the two towers have disappeared, they have not been annihilated. Even in their pulverized state, they have left behind an intense awareness of their presence. No one who knew them can cease imagining them and the imprint they made on the skyline from all points of the city. Their end in material space has borne them off into a definitive imaginary space. (Jean Baudrillard) Cityspace A metropolis forever in the making, New York City is a constant reminder of the mutability of urban landscape and the radical impermanence of the city. Since the terrorist attacks of 2001, the city has also become a notorious symbol of the links between globalization and violence. These issues, as they relate to post-9/11 New York, inform an urban landscape architecture project called Lifescape. Under construction since 2008, Lifescape is an ambitious, long-term plan to transform the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island (Figure 1) into a public park and recreation area. There are two reasons for this interest in a project to rehabilitate a garbage dump, and both are connected to a broader interest in the interplay between the material and imaginary spaces of the global city. First, Lifescape marks a significant effort to reclaim and re-imagine a derelict landscape that is connected in both material and symbolic ways to the lived space of the city. second, following the events of 9/11, the wreckage from Ground Zero was transported to the Fresh Kills Landfill, which was specially reopened to accommodate the 1.2 million tons of material. As one commentator has noted, Fresh Kills ... is not just the place where, for more than 50 years, the rest of the city sent its potato peels, broken dishes and every kind of household trash. For several months after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the sad bits of busted buildings and broken lives were sifted on mound 1/9 of Fresh Kills, piece by shattered piece. (DePalma 1) Crucially, the Lifescape project acknowledges the presence of these remains and envisions a commemoration of the Twin Towers and the recovery :. effort in the form of a giant earthwork monument. How this monument evokes the memory of the towers and how it connects the park's landscape back to New York's cityscape remain significant concerns. Lifescape's transformative vision and, in particular, its plans for a 9/11 earthwork monument illuminate the ways in which the Twin Towers continue to haunt the contemporary imagination, exerting an almost ghostly presence over the skyline of New York. The argument is that Lifescape works simultaneously to reveal and conceal the mutability of urban landscape, attesting not only to the extraordinary versatility of urban space but also to the imaginative ways in which-responding to an experience of collective trauma-such space can be recycled, renewed, and remade in the present era of 21st-century green, global connectedness (Hamilton 14). As such, the Fresh Kills Landfill relates in a number of interesting ways to New York as a global site. The most obvious connection is that, as the location of the World Trade Center Recovery Operation, Fresh Kills played a key role in the federal investigation of 9/11 and its efforts to understand how and why New York's symbolic center of transnational corporate capitalism succumbed to terrorist attack. In the process, Fresh Kills also bore witness in the most detailed and intimate way possible to the violence and horror involved in the destruction of the vertical architecture of globalization. Over a ten-month period, during which the landfill was designated a federal crime scene, the debris from Ground Zero was meticulously sifted and sorted in search of human remains, personal effects, and objects of everyday life. The resulting process of inspection and introspection-fueled in the national imagination by both the media and traveling exhibits such as the New York State Museum's WTC Recovery Exhibition-contributed to wider public efforts to work through the trauma of 9/11. …