Phase One: Getting Organized to Make a Difference—A Participatory Democratic Framework for Raising a Citizen Voice

Abstract

Immediately following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on Lower Manhattan, the process of developing a civic renewal social movement went through two distinct phases. What I called the “first phase” of coalition-organized public meetings focused on bringing citizens together as a community to grieve, to remember, and to create a broad public vision for rebuilding, a phase that lasted from September 2001 to September 2002. Then the civic renewal process entered a second, less visible phase that started around October 2002 and is the focus of chapter 3. Phase Two is characterized by more specialized efforts by individual groups of planners and architects and by their personal advocacy. This later phase aimed to influence a shifting cast of governmental and business decision makers. A third phase may be necessary to complete Lower Manhattan’s civic renewal process by institutionalizing ongoing processes of citizen education, empowerment, deliberation, and public voice.

We have every reason to think that whatever changes may take place in existing democratic machinery, they will be of a sort to make the interest of the public a more supreme guide and criterion of governmental activity, and to enable the public to form and manifest its purposes still more authoritatively. In this sense the cure for the ailments of democracy is more democracy. The prime difficulty, as we have seen, is that of discovering the means by which a scattered, mobile and manifold public may so recognize itself as to define and to express its interests.

—John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (1927)

The attacks on September 11, 2001, were an assault on American democracy. Fittingly, the rebuilding process has been the most democratic in history. The rebuilding effort has been transparent and inclusive.

—Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, Progress Report (2004)