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September 14, 2004
After the World Trade Center: Rethinking New York City
| Title | After the World Trade Center: Rethinking New York City | |
| Author | Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin (eds) | |
| Publisher | Routledge, New York & London | |
| Date | 2002 | |
| ISBN | 0-415-93479-6 | |
| Reviewed by | Jane Szita | |
| After September 11, 2001, New York City changed forever. This collection of essays from 17 New York urbanists, edited by social critics Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin, considers the nature of the change, and attempts to re-vision the city’s future. Providing a panaromic portrait of the city and its eminence as the “capital of capital,” the accounts do not let us forget that something was rotten in the Big Apple even before Ground Zero. The attack is analysed as exposing, rather than causing, the current economic and social crisis in which the city finds itself. Taken together, the essays see the disaster as an opportunity to recreate the city in a more genuinely democratic mould, taking into account the full diversity of its communities, and balancing the influence of big money and the city’s traditional power brokers. Inevitably, even while the book strives to look towards the future, it remains in part a lament for a lost age of innocence, however delusive that might have been. The elegiac theme undercores the enduring importance of the Twin Towers as a symbol, and is extremely suggestive of the (often unconscious) significance of buildings in our urban landscape: “Sometimes sinister, sometimes beautiful, sometimes just banal, they were icons of New York City — the best-known buildings in the world, the Everest of our urban Himalayas,” writes Michael Sorkin. Even through their indelible absence, the Twin Towers continue to inform the way we interpret the cityscape. | ||
Posted by Books Editor at September 14, 2004 09:33 PM