At a conference this month celebrating the 1961 Zoning Resolution, Deputy Mayor Robert Steel announced the city's 50th birthday gift to its 3,500-page zoning code: a set of "green zoning" proposals that would encourage energy-efficient construction, retrofits and installation of solar panels and green roofs.
Green is good. But the idea whose time has truly come after half a century is performance zoning rather than regulating on the basis of outdated categories.
In cities like New York and Washington, D.C., Julia Vitullo-Martin complains, law enforcement and city planners have installed jersey barriers, concrete planters and other "ugly measures that evoke fear rather than safety." In her op-ed for USA Today she calls it "militarized urbanism."
Hulking and obsolete, the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center may not look like a well-stuffed piggy bank.
But it is. Or could be.
At a recent meeting of Gov. Andrew Cuomo's Regional Economic Development Council for New York City, Regional Plan Association President Robert Yaro proposed selling Javits for redevelopment--netting the state $4 billion.
After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, prominent commentators argued that in an age of urban terrorism, tall buildings should become a thing of the past -- that cities should decentralize themselves and people should be encouraged to spread out around the country. New York magazine columnist Kurt Andersen contended that the Freedom Tower should be abandoned, calling it "a provocation to ambitious terrorists around the world."
Of course, Americans made their own decisions and -- contrary to all predictions -- moved to cities instead of away from them. Demand for living and working in tall buildings soared, and the race by developers to build the world's tallest resumed.
This is as it should be.
Despite once being a legendary city for food manufacturing -- Clarence Birdseye invented flash freezing here, for example -- New York for decades saw food processing slowly decline. Storied companies, like Stella d'Oro, Old London, Bazzini Nuts, and Schaefer Beer left the city. City officials used almost every tool at their disposal to stem the tide -- nearly always unsuccessfully.
Yet even as brand-name, commercial companies were moving out to the drumbeat of apocalyptic headlines, a food revolution had started and today continues to transform the rules and the dynamics of New York's $5 billion food processing industry.
