Phase Two: Getting Heard and Throwing Weight—Expert Advocacy to Influence Decisions

Abstract

Immediately following Listening to the City 2, from October 2002 to December 2005, a shift occurred from envisioning what Lower Manhattan could look like to actually redesigning the area as a blueprint for the rebuilding process. This was an ambiguous, power-laden struggle to throw democratic weight in which the civic renewal leaders tried to fulfill both their participatory democratic commitments and their more specialized professional goals for New York City. As this analysis will show, they were only partially successful in this two-pronged effort; nonetheless, they were more successful than current public perceptions may suggest.

The very idea of democracy, the meaning of democracy, must be continually explored afresh; it has to be constantly discovered, and rediscovered, remade and reorganized; while the political and economic and social institutions in which it is embodied have to be remade and reorganized to meet the changes that are going on in the development of new needs on the part of human beings and new resources for satisfying these needs.

—John Dewey, “The Challenge to Democracy in Education” (1937)

The attacks on September 11, 2001, were an assault on American democracy. Fittingly, the rebuilding process has been the most democratic in history. The rebuilding effort has been transparent and inclusive.

—Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, Progress Report (2004)