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The Post-Doctoroff Metropolis

by Sandy Ikeda
Tue, 11 Dec 2007 at 8:58 PM

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Until recently, the complaint among old-school city planners had been that "after Jane Jacobs you couldn't build anything big." Indeed, following decades of Robert Moses's heavy-handed regional planning and costly mega-projects, smaller-scale planning (or not at all) and attempts to practice "community participation" became more common in NYC and elsewhere from the 1970s through the 1990s.

The pendulum now seems to be swinging dramatically and forcefully the other way. For one thing, earlier this year Moses got an enormous and mostly glowing retrospective exhibition spread over three venues around the City, which was published as a coffee-table book, "Robert Moses and the Modern City." Meanwhile, his great adversary, Jane Jacobs, whose "Death and Life of Great American Cities" did much to pull the intellectual rug out from under Moses-type central planning, is currently having her own (appropriately enough) much more modest tribute at the Municipal Art Society.

Of greater practical importance, however, was the 2001 mayoral election of Michael Bloomberg, who appointed Daniel L. Doctoroff deputy mayor of economic development. Mr. Doctoroff immediately became the prime political force behind a breathtaking surge in ambitious big-scale city planning proposals that included the ill-fated Jets Stadium on the far West Side of Manhattan (now the site of the Hudson Rail Yards development), Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, and the "PlanNYC 2030" initiative, to name just a few.

Mayor Bloomberg announced last week that Mr. Doctoroff will be leaving his administration in February to take the presidency of Bloomberg L.P. Not surprisingly, in characterizing Mr. Doctoroff's legacy, many have compared him with Moses, perhaps less for his ruthlessness (though some of his detractors believe, when it comes to ruth, he certainly could have used much more) than for his ability to put mega-projects back into polite public discussion and onto the policy agenda (despite the Jets Stadium fiasco and loss of the 2012 Olympics).

So at a time when Moses's image been experiencing a Nixon-like rehabilitation, we would expect that whoever replaces Mr. Doctoroff will for some time to come continue to plan monumentally, for better or more likely for worse.

On the other hand, Mr. Doctoroff appears to differ from Moses in at least one important way. Moses built his decades-long empire on a foundation of public money, especially from federal tax revenues for public housing and the construction of local and regional highways and from public-bond issues for just about everything else.

In contrast, one of the principles that the more business-minded Bloomberg/Doctoroff administration has pushed, for example in the proposed Brooklyn Bridge Park (BBP) and elsewhere, has been financial self-sustainability of operations and substantial private investment up front. That means private investment would have to pay for much of the start-up and infrastructure of the park, and that revenues from condos, a hotel, restaurants, and such would have to cover operating costs.

Some of Mr. Doctoroff's critics have seized on this as an example of bad public policy that will result in the commercialization of a majestic public space. But without a significant number of other uses that can complement the park's greenery, a space the size of BBP (extending over a mile from just south of the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, north under the Brooklyn Bridge, and up to the Manhattan Bridge) can easily turn dull and dangerous. Financial self-sustainability, and the diversity of uses it imposes, could actually work in this case to turn what otherwise might have been a forbidding dead zone at night and during colder seasons into a "mixed-use" public space that can attract users throughout the year and during more hours of any given day. That in turn would make the park safer and more interesting in the long term. Add more private water transport to the waterfront and extend shuttle service to nearby subway and bus lines, and things look even more promising.

Perhaps fostering a great living city is a matter of combining Jacobs's understanding of the micro-based spontaneity of urban development with something like Mr. Doctoroff's principles of public finance. (Moses had neither.)

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