It's all kicking off in NYC, over the recently announced plans for the redevelopment of Ground Zero. Not least in the the New York Times Editorial, headed 'The Downtown We Don't Want':
"(T)hese are dreary, leaden proposals that fall far short of what New York City - and the world - expect to see rise at ground zero."
... and more forcefully, the New York Times letters page, headed "Downtown Visions: Remembrance and Resolve" e.g.:
"Development proposals for downtown Manhattan are bereft of imagination and look backward instead of to the future. We are thus confronted with the paradox that the devastation caused by backward-looking madmen will lead to a homage to the past. None of these proposals remotely represent New York City as a town of dreamers and strivers. The world's great architects have been shut out of what is possibly the recent past's greatest urban building site. A minimum level of fairness would require the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation to reject these proposals and throw the site open to a global competition."
[New York Times site requires registration, free]
It's a complex problem: a private development with perhaps the largest amount of public interest ever seen (apparently, 40m+ people tried to view the plans on the LMDC's website, overloading its server and slowing Internet traffic throughout the north-eastern US).
