Editorial comment: Our city in 2030

A collection of elephantine volumes, each six times the height and width of an ordinary book, gathers dust in a corner of The Riverdale Press office. They contain Mayor John V. Lindsay's master plan for New York City's future.

The film of dust on those books dims the ambition and idealism that once shone from their contents. What happened? "We all failed to come to grips with what a neighborhood is," Lindsay budget aide Peter Goldmark told Vincent J. Cannato, author of The Ungovernable City, a biography of Lindsay.

Now another mayor has put forward a comprehensive plan for the city's future. Best known for its call to institute congestion pricing - a toll on cars driving into Manhattan - Mayor Michael Bloomberg's PlaNYC also calls for massive new residential and commercial development to accommodate what City Hall believes will be a million new New Yorkers arriving in the next 25 years, and for new parks and mass transit to serve them. And it bills itself as a green plan that will reduce energy consumption, improve air and water quality and reduce global warming emissions by 30 percent.

Yet in planning for the New Yorkers to come, PlaNYC hasn't enlisted or considered the New Yorkers of the present.

Like Lindsay's planners, they have failed to come to grips with what a neighborhood is.

Despite the plan's ambitious scope, when an all-star cast of elected officials, community activists and academic planners took the stage at Cooper Union's Great Hall during an all-day symposium on PlaNYC, much of the discussion was about what isn't in the plan.

PlaNYC's chief architect Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff and his minions "didn't look at the needs and aspirations of people who now live in neighborhoods," said Tom Angotti, director of the Hunter College Center for Community Planning and Development. Their way of asking for feedback amounted to saying, "Give me your ideas and we'll decide if they're good," he continued.

"We had hoped for true collaboration," added a disappointed Miquela Craytor, deputy director of Sustainable South Bronx. For years, her organization has been working to establish the Bronx River Greenway, only to have the Doctoroff team dismiss their dream as "one-dimensional," and to urge that the ribbon of parks be reduced to an amenity to attract apartment house developers to build river-view housing.

Afflicted by the foulest air in the city, the result of heavy truck traffic, 15 waste transfer stations, a huge and growing sewer plant and a sewage to fertilizer plant, her community is also one of the city's poorest. The plan doesn't offer pathways out of poverty because it fails "to connect the dots," Ms. Craytor said, offering a simple example. PlaNYC calls for the city to plant a million trees by 2030. Why not create a nursery in the Bronx, she asked. Why not train and hire residents to maintain the plantings?

More broadly, PlaNYC fails to address New York's growing inequality - manifested in the divides between rich and poor, white people and people of color, Manhattan and the other boroughs. From a very different perspective from Ms. Craytor, Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrión Jr. called that failure "the missing ingredient." "We can do all the physical planning we want," but it will come to nothing, he warned, "if we fail to allow citizens to engage the economy." Predicting that in 2030 80 percent of New Yorkers will be Hispanic, black or Asian, he called for embracing demographic change, and pointed to the near destruction of the Bronx 30 years ago as the consequence of resisting it.

More pithily, Michael Sorkin, director of the Graduate Urban Design Program at City College, warned of the "Twinkie effect" - a city with "a soft, white center in Manhattan."

What the eminent sociologist Richard Sennett called the "Balkanization of neighborhoods" goes unrecognized in PlaNYC, even as neighborhoods grow more homogeneous and, as they do, become more detached from one another.

Anyone who has watched the transition of Kingsbridge from an Irish to a Dominican community and has seen the historic links between Riverdale and Kingsbridge grow weaker as a result would agree that Mr. Sennett's concerns are not misplaced.

Demographic change has been a source of anxiety in Riverdale, manifesting itself in periodic calls for a Fortress Riverdale mentality that sees our neighborhood on its hill not only as separated from the rest of the Bronx, but besieged by it.

How did Mr. Bloomberg's team miss these trends? How could they gaze into the future without asking questions about job creation, about education, about race and class, about equity?

Recalling the creation of the 1969 master plan, a Lindsay aide told Vincent Cannato, "There was a whole world out there that nobody in City Hall knew anything about."

Too big to serve as a door stop, Lindsay's master plan is too irrelevant to be recollected, except, perhaps, by historians of overweaning ambition.

Come 2030, will the number of New Yorkers who remember PlaNYC be as small as the number who today remember the Lindsay plan?

This is part of the January 10, 2008 online edition of The Riverdale Press.

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