Architecture: How not to build a city—implementation at Battery Park City
1993; Elsevier BV; Volume: 26; Issue: 1-4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1016/0169-2046(93)90006-y
ISSN1872-6062
Autores Tópico(s)Urbanization and City Planning
ResumoBattery Park City in Manhattan has been hailed as a triumph of urban design and is considered to be one of the success stories of American urban redevelopment planning. The flood of praise for its design and recent criticism of its iconography obscure the lessons learned from the long struggle to develop the project. Nothing was built on the site for over a decade after the first master plan was approved and the redevelopment agency flirted with bankruptcy in 1979. This paper examines why the project took so long to get started and almost died in the implementation process. Both policy and urban design implementation are analyzed as the reasons for the initial failures are intertwined. The delays and problems in the implementation process at Battery Park City were largely a product of the political policy debate that created the original master plan. The major failure of the 1969 Plan was experimentation with a megastructure. This complex urban typology is unsuited for incremental implementation by multiple developers over a period of decades. New York's political and economic cycles exacerbated the policy and physical planning faults. The 1979 urban design plan was not only cheaper, but easier to implement using traditional urban development techniques. Changes to the policy environment permitted a nimble agency to redevelop much of the site during the boom of the 1980s.
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