CUNY
Faculty Experts
Join Collaboration on
World Trade Center Future
Before September 11, the Newman Real Estate
Institute at Baruch College had a busy and important agenda
planned for the year—developing strategies for the financing
of middle-income housing and for resolving the architectural
future of the far west side of Midtown. After the terrorist
attack, however, the Institute"s Advisory Board almost
immediately began to juggle these long-standing tasks and the
urge to focus on perhaps the single greatest land-use and real
estate challenge New York City has ever faced: deciding whether,
how, and under what political and economic constraints the World
Trade Center site should be returned to use. In the end, the
Board compromised. It decided to do both.
The Institute is a unique civic resource, established to address
all of the kinds of issues that will have an impact on the future
of the WTC site. Executive Director Henry Wollman observes,
“We are a real estate institute set within a university framework
where questions of value, purpose and meaning may be asked about
real estate action. We are also part of the City"s great
public university, which takes the whole citizenry of New York
as its constituency.”
Drawing upon noted urbanists throughout the CUNY faculty, a
new Newman Institute/CUNY Urban Consortium was formed
in association with Rutgers University"s Center for Urban
Research and the Port Authority. This major collaborative initiative
will be charged to develop a series of strategy papers defining
issues and alternatives for New York City.
First in a series of forums for government and industry will
be a January 11 all-day conference on “Rebuilding Alternatives/Alternatives
to Rebuilding.” High on the agenda will be the broad discussion
of social and moral issues impinging on future land-use decisions.
Among other topics to be addressed will be the economic impact
on downtown Manhattan and the rest of the city, the shaping
of a city budget, and the chronology and technological problems
of rebuilding.
The extraordinary range of CUNY expertise that will be brought
to the Consortium"s complex deliberations can be judged
from faculty already involved. From the Graduate Center come
John Mollenkopf, director of the Urban Research Group and Setha
Low of the Program in Environmental Psychology and Anthropology.
From Baruch College comes John Goering, director of B.S. Degree
Programs in Real Estate and Metropolitan Development in the
School of Public Affairs; Henry Wollman, director of the Newman
Institute; and Ellen Posner, coordinator of the Consortium.
Representing City College are George Ranalli, Dean of the School
of Architecture, Urban Design and Landscape Architecture, School
of Architecture Chair Lance Brown, and its Institute for Urban
Systems director Robert Paaswell, and Michael Sorkin, Director
of the Program in Urban Design. Also on the Consortium are Hunter
College's Stanley Moses, Chair of the Department of Planning
and Urban Affairs and Sean Ahearn, professor of geography and
founder of its Center for the Analysis and Research on Spatial
Information (CARSI). Queens College professor of economics Elizabeth
Roistacher is also a member. |
