Geopolitics of New York

Introduction

The attack on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 changed New York. Its effect impacted on every aspect of life in the city, and we cannot approach the analysis of the city through the field trip without confronting the events of 9/11 and their consequences. At the same time, there is something distinctly uncomfortable about packaged a human tragedy of this kind as a 'geography lesson'. But why? Physical geographers have little qualms about applying their geographical skills, knowledge and expertise to natural disasters, so why should 9/11 be different. In part it is a reflect of the sheer scale of the catastrophe, which these stark figures demonstrate:

· 2,823 people thought to be killed in the attack

· 150 people still officially registered as ‘missing’ one year on

· 343 firefighters were killed as the towers collapsed and 23 police officers.

· Around 1,300 children were orphaned

· Around 25,000 were safely evacuated from the towers.

· In the South Tower, everyone on the 78th floor hit by the plane died. Everyone on the 77th floor made it out alive.

· The energy released in the towers’ collapse was equal to one 20^th of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima

· Over one and quarter million tonnes of rubble were created; all of it carefully removed to the inappropriately named Fresh Kills landfill site on Staten Island by up to 3,700 trucks a day.

· Workers at Fresh Kills have found 1,000 wrecked vehicles, 50 handguns and 3,000 teeth.

· They also unearthed the remains of a Rodin sculpture. An estimated £100 million of art work was destroyed.

· Trapped in vaults beneath the towers were $200 million worth of gold, a fleet of secret service vehicles, and customs’ seizures including drugs and up to 400 weapons.

· 25,000 people were made temporarily homeless as the surrounding area was evacuated.

· 1,000 cars were left unclaimed in commuter car parks around the World Trade Center..

· In October, the US Postal Service was still receiving 90,000 letters a day for addresses at the World Trade Center.

· 422,000 New York residents are estimated to have suffered Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders as a result of the attack.

· The insurance bill is estimated to top $37 billion.

· The total cost of the damage is thought to be £71 billion, including the need for $4 billion of repairs to the subway and $3 billion of repairs to electricity and telephone networks.

· 100,000 jobs lost in lower Manhattan as a result of the attack.

But there are other tragic losses of life on a mass scale that do not effect us in the same way. Three other elements may be important. Firstly, we were all eyewitnesses. We all saw the television pictures. As Blake Morrison wrote, “None of us were there to see the siege of Troy, the fall of Constantinople, the burning of Rome, the Great Fire of London, but we’ve often wondered what they were like. This time there were cameras present.” (Guardian 14/9/01). Secondly, the event touched our post-modern fears. Mark Lawson thought of movies like Independence Day:

“What is the scene that citizens have most feared seeing for the past five decades? It is the sight of a great city enveloped in a cloud of dust and rubble. We expected it to be the nuclear mushroom cloud – the shape that has haunted our imaginations since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It’s an image we’ve already seen in the quasi-reality of Hollywood movies, which have regularly explored the deep fear that someone might, one day, take up the challenge to potency thrown out by America’s tumescent skylines.” (Guardian 13/9/01).

Thirdly, whether we have been there or not, New York is somewhere that is so familiar to us that this was almost for everyone a local tragedy. Blake Morrison again:

“The global village doesn’t exist yet, but London to New York has become a short hop. Vast numbers of Britons have holidayed and weekended there in recent years. Many work there. Some commute. There are people in the southern half of this country who know Manhattan far better than they do Glasgow or Manchester.” (Guardian 14/9/01).

Geographers need to confront such issues, to try to use our geographical knowledge to understand them.

The Geopolitics of Landscape

The concept of 'landscapes of power' was introduced in an earlier lecture, but we can return to it as a starting point in trying to understand the significance of the World Trade Center, and of Manhattan more generally. As noted in the previous lecture, New York was originally supposed to be a democratic cityscape:

“there were no boulevards or triumphal arches and very little open space; there was nothing aristocratic to offend a new democracy. Without palaces and monuments, the city seems to celebrate only itself; but it is egalitarian, homespun. Secretly, the Commissioners ‘longed to lay out New York like Washington’, Edith Wharton says, thinking of temples and ornamental Malls, but they ‘laid it out instead like a gridiron, lest they should be thought ‘undemocratic’ by people they secretly looked down upon.’”

Michael Pye (1991) Maximum City, p 266

However, the democratic city soon became a plutocratic city, dominated by its financial elite – and the landscape rapidly came to represent this. Manhattan is where Sharon Zukin coined the term ‘landscape of power’ – a power expressed in the side-by-side contrast of affluence and poverty, power and powerlessness. Nowhere, Zukin observed,

“is the dialectic of concentration and exclusion, power and vernacular, more visible than from the elevated subway train crossing the East River between Manhattan and Brooklyn over the Manhattan Bridge. …… Facing the Statue of Liberty, on the Manhattan side of the bridge, tall towers of steel, concrete, and glass create a layered panorama of twentieth-century finance. The neo-Gothic minarets of the Woolworth Building - the world’s tallest skyscraper when it was completed in 1913 - delicately point to the World Trade Center’s mammoth modern boxes, built for Wall Street’s global expansion during the 1960s. These are flanked in turn at mid-height by the large, postmodern structures of the World Financial Center and Battery Park City, whose decorative mansard roofs and indentations fill the remaining pockets of cloud and sky.”

Sharon Zukin (1991) Landscapes of Power, p 184

The key signifier of this modern landscape of power is the skyscraper. As Zukin again comments,

“if architecture can abstract power, the built form of downtown - sleek, dense, tall - embodies the growing outreach of capital investment and the enormous concentration of authority where investment decisions are made.”

Sharon Zukin (1991) Landscapes of Power, pp 185-6.

The skyscraper was an architectural form invented in Chicago in the late nineteenth century, but it was in New York that it came to maturity. The initial impetus for building high was the demand on land in the rapidly developing city. But developers soon realised the symbolic importance of the skyscraper. When Joseph Pulitzer commissioned a new 26 storey headquarters for his New York World newspaper he regarded the building as,

“an expression of the highest ideals of American journalism: dedication to liberty, justice, democracy, and ‘true Americanism’. The building was also intended to broadcast the supremacy of the World over all its competitors.” (Bradford Landau & Condit 1996, p 197).

Similarly when what is often regarded as New York’s first ‘real’ skyscraper, the Flatiron building, was built in 1902 the photographer Alfred Stieglitz described it as “a picture of new America still in the making…. The Flat Iron is to the United States what the Parthenon was to Greece.” (Bradford Landau & Condit, 1996, p 304). The Flatiron building was innovative because of its building material and it was such innovations – steel frames, escalators and so on – that enabled skyscrapers to rapidly accelerate in height at the turn of the twentieth century, and indeed to demonstrate power through the command of these resources. Most importantly, skyscrapers represented the power and importance of the corporations which backed their construction. It was these corporate competition which fired a building boom in the 1920s culminating in a fierce race and contest between the Bank of Manhattan Building on Wall Street and the Chrysler Building to be what was then the tallest building in the world (as we shall see in a couple of weeks) – and spurred the construction of the Empire State Building a few years later.

The Empire State Building soon became the classic icon of New York – and it is a mark of this that it is rarely associated with the company which bankrolled it, General Motors (Chrysler’s chief rival) but rather became a geopolitical icon representing the power and global importance of America as it assumed superpower status around the time of the Second World War. The iconic status of the Empire State Building was celebrated in the movie King Kong, and it is perhaps significant that some New Yorkers remember the remake of that film with the World Trade Center replacing the Empire State Building as the first time they began to take notice of the twin towers.

If the Empire State Building symbolised a golden age for New York; the construction of the World Trade Center was intended as part of a re-assertion of the city’s power and status after periods of recession and decline in the post-war era. It was to proclaim global leadership, and the name itself suggested this. There are other World Trade Centers, the Ronald Reagan World Trade Center in Washington DC for instance, but only the one in Manhattan was known simply as The World Trade Center. Its architect, Minoru Yamasaki, had lofty idea about what would symbolise:

“The World Trade Center should, because of its importance, become a living representation of man’s belief in humanity, his need for individual dignity, his belief in co-operation of men, and through this co-operation his ability to find greatness.”

(quoted in The Times, 12/9/01).

For most people, however, it symbolised capitalism and New York’s place at the heart of the world’s economy:

“Yamasaki…endowed the city with these twin 1,360 ft towers, which acted, on the great stage of Manhattan, as a kind of giant anchor for a city whose greatness is built on transport, immigration, trade and reaching for the sky. That the city’s principal buildings resemble out sized space rockets should be no surprise. From around the turn of the last century, in these machines for making money, New York lifted off into the heady heights of global capitalism…. The skyscraper is such as symbol of American values and of New York in particular that no one could imagine it vanishing from the skyline, unless unwontedly and by terrorist action.”

(Jonathan Glancey, The Guardian Saturday Review 15/9/01)

“The World Trade Center had come to supplant even the Empire State Building as the city’s signature. It was New York’s present, not its past. The completion of the towers was a recent chapter in the story of mankind’s most audacious urban undertaking – Manhattan – which most of the citizenry could summon with its own memory rather than from city lore.”

(Ed Vulliamy, The Observer, 16/9/01)

Thomas Friedman, a New York Times columnist, searching for a way to demonstrate the significance of the loss to an Egyptian journalist, put it more simply:

“The World Trade towers were our pyramids built with glass and steel rather than stones, but pyramids to American enterprise and free markets, and someone has destroyed them.”

(Friedman, New York Times 28/9/01)

Costing £500 million to build, the World Trade Center with its two towers at 1,368 feet and 1,362 feet and four surrounding buildings, covered a 16-acre site and housed more than 10 million square feet of office space. Around 60,000 people worked there. The complex included a shopping mall, restaurants, a subway and transit station and a 250 room hotel. It was, in short, a mini-city. And like any city it had its own social structure and social geography; its own internal landscape of power and political geography. As a poignant report in the New York Times observed, like any city the World Trade Center needed to be serviced, and generated its own formal and informal service economies, operating in the twilight of legitimacy with workers whose disappearance may never be recorded:

“in the self-contained city that the trade center truly was, there were also many people – undocumented immigrant deliverymen and Albanian window washers, Polish maintenance workers and single men and women without close family – who may not appear on formal personnel records or whose absence might simply not register with enough people that someone would come forward to search….. Part of the culture of the trade center, for example, depended on Mexicans and other immigrants – many of them men supporting families back home – who hustled breakfast orders to corporate offices, carried flowers to secretaries and washed dishes in the concourse restaurants. Estimates of the number of these workers who were in the towers last Tuesday morning range from a few dozen to as many as 10 or 15 times that number”

(‘Those at Towers’ Margin Elude List of Missing’, New York Times, 17/9/01)

The oppressive side of power contained within the World Trade Center was manifest not just by the inequalities of employment inside, but felt also by many of those who lived and moved in the environment around it. The construction of the World Trade Center, and the subsequent development of Battery Park City on the landfill created from the tower’s foundations, were controversial and contested actions – opposed by those who saw a working class part of Manhattan disappear. The developments were pushed through by the Rockerfeller brothers – David, as president of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation; and Nelson, as Governor of New York State – both scions of what was at the time the wealthiest family in the world. The Battery Park City development was supposed to open up a new area of public space along the waterfront, but as campaigners pointed out, the route of access through the World Trade Center and World Financial Center excluded many from feeling they belonged there:

“How public is public space, when it has been embedded in a context that raises such formidable social barriers that the masses of ordinary working people (not to mention those out of work) would feel uncomfortable entering it? How many poor families may be expected to cross the raised bridge into that citadel of wealth, the World Financial Center, and wander through the privileged enclaves of South End Avenue and Rector Place before reaching their permitted perch along the waterfront?”

Philip Lopate quoted by Fainstein (1994) The City Builders, p 183

Indeed, despite the eulogies for the World Trade Center after September 11, many New Yorkers never viewed it with affection. Darryl Pinckney, writing in The Guardian admitted that,

“No one I know loved the World Trade Center, or recalled their first visits to it, in the way that they remember being taken by grandparents up to the observation floor of the Empire State Building. I don’t know of any city poets who sang the praises of the two towers in the way that an earlier generation put the Empire State Building into the city’s literature.”

(The Guardian, 13/9/01)

Francis Morrone, in his Architectural Guidebook to New York City, was more vociferous:

“it is the height of those two towers that is the reason the World Trade Center is so reviled by New Yorkers, for the towers are an arrogant intrusion into the jagged splendor of the beloved skyline. I submit hat no matter how well designed the twin towers might have been, their impact would have been identical. The best thing about the view from the indoor and outdoor observation decks of Two World Trade Center and the recently reopened restaurant atop One World Trade Center is that they are the only high vantage points in New York from which the World Trade Center itself is not visible.”

(Morrone 1998, p 57)

Ironically, in March 2001, when the lease on the World Trade Center was renegotiated, the New York Times suggested that New Yorkers were ‘learning to love the World Trade Center’:

“King Kong was probably the watershed moment” says Robert Fitch, referring to the 1976 remake of the movie in which the gorilla, desperately in love with Jessica Lange, scales one of the towers, “If King Kong could love it, who are we to disagree?”

“Another turnaround involved the views. While one tower housed an expensive restaurant, Windows on the World, the other offered an observation deck that was deliberately inexpensive. ’Rank and file New Yorkers came to embrace the building.... It’s really won the hearts and the minds of New Yorkers”

The article also noted that to the rest of the world, the World Trade Center had become iconic. It quoted Angus Kress Gillespie, the author of a history of the WTC, 'Twin Towers':

“If you’re treating it as poetry, it stands for capitalism, for free trade, for private enterprise, and by extension, for the American dream.”

The Global City

The significance of the World Trade Center, however, was not just what it was, but where it was. Urban theorists such as Saskia Sassen (1991) have identified New York as a ‘global city’ – one of a handful of cities whose economic activities are pitched at a global level, and which act as nodal points for the global economy. Fainstein (1994) suggests three reasons for the emergence of global cities: (1) the greater size and velocity of world capital flows; (2) the increased need for centralized command and control posts in a decentralized world economy, and (3) the extensive technical infrastructure needed by the finance and business service industries. These factors act to concentrate economic power in global cities, and, in terms of New York, that means concentrating economic power in Lower Manhattan, around the World Trade Center.

Was it this concentration of economic power that made the World Trade Center a target for bin Laden? There are two main theories about what the terrorist attack was intended to achieve. The first suggests that the aim was mass destruction, as has been the strategy of Islamic fundamentalist terrorists in Israel. Some commentators speculated that the terrorists expected the towers to topple, cutting a path of destruction through Manhattan and killing maybe a hundred thousand. Other writers, such as Martin Amis, suggested that as a qualified engineer, Osama bin Laden would know what the likely impact of the planes would be, and would know that the towers would collapse. If this were so, it was knowledge tragically unknown by those with responsibility for responding to the emergency. Most likely, the terrorists had no more idea than anyone else of the scale of the catastrophe they set in train. The second theory is that the World Trade Center was targeted for its symbolism. The attack on the Pentagon, it is argued, targeted American military power. The fourth plane is speculated to have been heading for Camp David, or the White House or the Capitol – each symbols of US political power. By targeting the World Trade Center, so the theory goes, the triangle was completed by the challenge to global capitalism. As Faisal Bodi noted, this would fit the imagery of America’s key icons held by many in the Muslim world:

“Inside America, the Trade Center, the Pentagon, Camp David and Capitol Hill are all seen as symbols of global US power and prestige, of the triumph of democracy. Outside, in the Muslim world, they are popularly regarded as symbols of terror and oppression.”

(The Guardian 12/9/01)

However, if this was the terrorists’ motive, their choice of target was in many ways cruelly ironic. To insiders, the World Trade Center was not so much a symbol of the greatness of capitalism and the free market, but of its vulnerability and dependence on the state. It was developed by the state-owned Port Authority as part of a strategy by Mayor Lindsay to use state investment to support the financial services economy of Lower Manhattan (Buck and Fainstein 1992, p 55), and when it opened at a time of recession, it was the state which moved in to ensure surplus office space was filled (Fainstein 1994). Similarly, the businesses which did locate in the World Trade Center were often not the blue-chip corporate leaders, as Ian Parker noted in The Guardian:

“If you trusted the symbolism, as the terrorists seemed to, then the World Trade Center was the financial heart of America. In truth, that heart lies a few blocks to the south and east. The people who run the world work on Wall Street. The twin towers, destroyed by their own breathtaking persuasiveness, were Wall Street’s back office, its overflow. Here were the insurance companies and recruitment agencies, the service people. Brokers and corporate lawyers did have offices here, but this is also where you found payroll clerks and accountants and technicians.”

(G2, 17/9/01)

Moreover, Osama bin Laden is in many ways an unlikely anti-capitalist. He is the son of an Arab tycoon and was a millionaire by the time he was 14. That year he visited Sweden with his elder brother, Selma, to look for business, and returned the following year with more of his 55 brothers and sisters, now infamously posing with their pink Cadillac. Selma went on to become a partner in an oil venture with a Texan businessman by the name of George W Bush. By the early 1990s, when his terrorist career really began, Osama bin Laden had inherited an estimated fortune of £200 million. When the Americans bombed a factory in Sudan which they suspected bin Laden was using to produce biological weapons, they got the connection right but failed to realise that it was a civilian pharmaceutical plant, part of bin Laden’s legitimate business interests. Most grotesque of all, are the rumours that bin Laden’s agents engaged in insider trading in the week before September 11, investing in industries likely to benefit from the reaction to the catastrophe and selling stock in those likely to be hit. In a similar way, the terrorists didn’t quite fit the model of religious fundamentalists motivated by faith. As one expert on Islam puzzled: “they are like no other fundamentalist that I have studied. It appears that Mohamed Atta was drinking vodka before boarding the aeroplane: it seems incredible that an avowed martyr of Islam would attempt to enter paradise with vodka on his breath. Another alleged hijacker seems to have frequented nightclubs in Hamburg. I have no theory to offer but would just like to note that these seem to be very unusual fundamentalists indeed.” (Karen Armstrong, The Guardian 13/10/01).

More than capitalism, or the infidel, therefore, the terrorists appear to have been targeting western civilisation, and all that New York represented in that respect. In a piece originally published in Harpers magazine, novelist Don DeLillo argued,

“the primary target of the men who attacked the Pentagon and the World Trade Center was not the global economy. It was America that drew their fury. It was the high gloss of our modernity. It was the thrust of our technology. It was our perceived godlessness. It was the blunt force of our foreign policy. It was the power of American culture to penetrate every wall, home, life and mind.”

(reprinted in The Guardian Saturday Review, 22/12/01)

The Manhattan skyline was the key icon of this demonised culture and civilisation. And the World Trade Centre was the most distinctive part of that skyline. Salman Rushdie has described growing up with a poster of the Manhattan landscape on his wall as a child in India and believing in its myth of opportunity. The Manhattan image has the power to attract as well as repel, drawing in as it does, thousands of Arab immigrants each year, just in same way as it has always attracted migrants from all over the world searching for a better life. The New York Times remarked in its ‘learning to love the World Trade Center’ article that

“Even illegal immigrants have joined the chorus. According to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, stowaways on freighters in New York Harbor have been found carrying only a crumpled postcard of the World Trade Center.”

The multicultural heritage also sets New York apart from other American cities. To the rest of the world, New York may be the epitome of Americana – but to many Americans it is not really accepted as an American city. John Short (1991) in Imagined Country quotes the writer Tom Wolfe noting that when the first astronauts came to New York for a ticker tape parade, they did so with trepidation, sharing with most military personnel the perception of New York as an alien city – too full of non-nationals to be trusted:

“Like most military people, including those in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, they didn’t really consider New York part of the United States. It was like a free port, a stateless city, an international protectorate. Danzig in the Polish corridor, Beirut the crossroads of the Middle East, Trieste, Zurich, Macao, Hong Kong. Whatever ideals the military stood for, New York did not. It was a foreign city full of a strange race of curiously ting malformed gray people.”

Tom Wolfe (1980) The Right Stuff, p 290, quoted by John R Short (1991) Imagined Country, p 43.

That suspicion is heightened for many by the presence of the United Nations in Manhattan – for the far right the United Nations is nothing more than an anti-American conspiracy, with one Nevada town even declaring itself to be a ‘UN free zone’. The combination of the presence of the UN and the ethnic mix of New York’s population means that global geopolitics often get played out on the streets of the city. In 1999, a local newspaper for Manhattan's East Side ran a tragically prophetic front page, imposing the headline 'The War Zone' over a picture of the United Nations building, and observing that: "As international tensions mount, the East Side is becoming ground zero for heated protests and heightened terrorist alert."

New York also generates its own conflicts, its own political geographies. Its attraction to immigrants may be as the ‘land of opportunity’, but too often the experience of New York is one of inequality. As we noted last week, the social polarisation of Manhattan is extreme – home to some of the richest individuals in the world, yet with one in fifth residents living in poverty. It is a division that is written into the landscape, and is reproduced in the governance and policing of the city. Conflicts and antagonisms were generated which have been thrown into uncertainty by September 11. Before September 11, the New York Police Department were not the people’s heroes, but a force discredited by corruption, racism and brutality. In 1999 the shooting of Puerto Rican immigrant sparked angry demonstrations against the police and raised tensions between the black and white populations. Before September 11, Rudy Guiliani was not an unimpeachable leader – Time magazine’s Person of the Year – but a controversial figure whose policies were seen as a strategy of divide and rule. He was vilified by the left for his role in introducing zero tolerance, cutting welfare, backing gentrification and selling off community gardens on the Lower East Side – a mayor in hock to the developers and the police unions. Even among his erstwhile supporters he had become a lame duck figure, forced to withdraw from an anticipated contest for the New York Senate seat with Hillary Clinton due to ill health and an affair.

The Geopolitics of the Street

9/11 turned American patriot suspicion of New York on its head as patriotism became the reference point for solidarity and recovery. At first people did not know how to react – so they took their cues from Hollywood, by gathering outside television shops, watching events unfold on the models displayed in the window, because that is what people do in disaster films. Then came the need to do something, to show solidarity. So they stood along the Westside highway and cheered the trucks going towards Ground Zero to remove the rubble. Solidarity turned to patriotism. In this once allegedly unpatriotic city, American flags appeared everywhere, as they did across the country. As rescue workers raised the flag at Ground Zero – in a re-enactment of a famous scene from World War II, America’s biggest flag maker quadrupled its weekly output from 30,000 to 120,000 to meet demand. The flag could mean many things – as Ed Vulliamy wrote in the Observer, unlike many national flags, the stars and stripes is a flag with which people across the political spectrum are willing to identify:

“Flying the flag in New York last week said many things. First it expressed bitter grief, it was a flag of mourning. There were no black flags, no black ties or ribbons – they were included in the Stars and Stripes. The flag of the United States was a way of saying that the city was aware, every waking second, of its 5,000 inhabitants buried in a mass grave beneath the rubble of two iconic buildings that had vanished from the skyline; that New York had tried to imagine what it must have been like on those stairwells when the world collapsed; that – and it was no exaggeration – nothing would be the same in New York again.”

(Observer, 23/9/01)

Around the world too, the American flag was hoisted as a symbol of solidarity with the US people, as did other gestures such as the playing of the Star-Spangled Banner at the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace, and the subtle adaptations to the Last Night of the Proms Concert – broadcast live of US network television – dropping jingoistic British anthems and celebrating American music. Other patriotic acts were more overt. Tattooists reported a rush on patriotic tattoos and commemorations of September 11. Many carried messages of revenge. Job applications to the CIA jumped from 2,700 a month to 6,000 in the three weeks after September 11. In this way, banal exhibitions of patriotism became demands for military action and revenge. In polls between 75% and 85% of the American public supported military action in Afghanistan. But in New York support was lower (though still significant).

Even before September 11, New York’s politics were always more liberal than most of the USA. It has traditionally been a staunchly Democrat city. It had voted overwhelmingly for Gore, not Bush, in the November 2000 presidential elections, and had elected Hillary Clinton to the Senate on the same day. Ex-President Bill Clinton had located his office in Harlem, which we represented as a kind of ‘homecoming’. As film-maker and satirist, Michael Moore, wryly observed:

“If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him!”

Michael Moore

Less than a week after September 11 peace demonstrators started to gather in Union Square – New York’s new memorial park, as close to the exclusion zone as they could get, where thousands of personal memorials had spontaneously appeared. Some of the peace protestors had lost family members, friends of colleagues in the attacks. Part of New York’s reluctance was that they had experienced the horror of war first hand, and did not wish it to be revisited on others.

Alongside this was the sense that the line of us and them was less easy to draw in multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, cosmopolitan New York than in other parts of the United States. It might have been all too easy to identify Arabs as the ‘enemy’ in states that were almost entirely white. Minority populations of Arab or Asian origin in these areas found themselves targeted and victimised in the weeks following September 11th. There were at least four fatal vigilante racist attacks, one of which in glaring ignorance picked on a Sikh, presuming from his Asian appearance that he must be Muslim. More broadly there was a more subtle discrimination against Arab Americans, manifest in distrust and unease – the liberal Doonesbury cartoon strip ran a story showing one of its main characters panicking when finding himself seated next to a man of Arab appearance on a flight to a memorial service in New York. The innocent Arab turns out to be a palm pilot salesman (in a later strip the same unfortunate salesman is picked up by the FBI and interrogated about his ‘pilot’ training). In this uneasy climate, all Arabs tarred with the same brush. As a Palestinian poet resident in New York, Suheir Hammad, despaired:

“one more person ask me if I knew the hijackers. One more person assume no arabs or muslims were killed. One more person assume they know me, or that I represent a people, or that a people represent evil, or that evil is as simple as a flag and words on a page.”

(‘First Writing Since’ by Suheir Hammad)

Yet there are 6 million Muslims in the USA. This may be a small proportion of the US population, but it means that there are more Muslims living in the US than there are in Libya, or Jordan, or the Lebanon, or Tadjikistan or the Philippines. It is six times as many Muslims as there are in Britain. And one of the largest concentrations of Muslims in the USA is in New York. It is perhaps ironic that one of the classic views of the World Trade Center-crowned Manhattan skyline was from the Brooklyn Heights across the East River. Just a blocks back from the esplanade lies Atlantic Avenue, which has become established as the centre of New York’s Arab population. Arabs in New York have been in many ways a fairly prosperous ethnic group, Many worked at the World Trade Center. Many were killed. But they have never been a particularly visible or controversial ethnic group in New York – just 1.5% of the city’s population is Muslim. Until now that is. Now Muslim New Yorkers are finding their identity rapidly remoulded:

“I am so used to thinking about myself as a New Yorker that it took me a few days to begin to see myself as a stranger might: a Muslim woman, an outsider, perhaps an enemy of the city….. As I become identified as someone outside the New York community, I feel myself losing my power to define myself and losing that wonderful sense of belonging to this city. In a way, the open city becomes closed.”

(Anika Rahman, ‘A Manhattan Muslim’s Tale’, The Guardian, 20/9/01)

Some Arabs and Muslims went out of their way to demonstrate their American patriotism. Others tried to hide their background. One Lebanese restauranter took down the ethnic description of his restaurant hoping that people might think it to be Greek. And to their credit, many New Yorkers went out of their way to try to embrace the city’s Arab and Muslim community, including Giuliani. As Arabs became more uneasy about America, so they could increase their solidarity with New York. As Suheir Hammad again remarks,

“I have never felt less American and more New Yorker, particularly Brooklyn, than these past few days. The stars and stripes on all these cars and apartment windows represent the dead as citizens first, not family members, not lovers.”

Suheir Hammad, First Writing Since.

All these elements combine to create a distinctive New York reaction to September 11, but at the same time, to some extent, New York lost control of its tragedy. The event immediately became an attack on America. September 11 was therefore a tragedy whose impact was immediately both local and global. The world’s media was clear that the story was ‘America Attacked’, yet in reality it was never that simple. The citizens of 62 different countries were killed in the attack. In the makeshift registry office issuing death certificates to relatives of victims, interpreters for 20 languages were available. The revised figures no longer suggest that it was Britain’s worst ever act of terrorism, but it is close. For many countries it will be their greatest loss to terrorism. Mexico and Columbia both suffered losses in double figures. Many of those who died were Arab by background, or Muslim by faith.

The geographer Neil Smith, in a highly personal account of a visit to Ground Zero, observes how the events jumped and crossed scales:

“As I walked back north I tried to think how this could have happened. How are we to explain this? What could anyone have been thinking to cause such mayhem, misery and loss of life? The news media treated the destruction of the trade towers and the plane crash at the Pentagon as highly local events and simultaneously national affronts – an attack on America, CNN labelled it after an hour of coverage – but what connected these different scales of response. Why were attacks on two cities construed as a national attack? Of course the symbolic choice of targets by the hijackers was neither random nor the act of madmen; they were prime symbols of worldwide US economic domination and military power. Before it was manufactured as a national event, therefore, these attacks were simultaneously local and global events.”

(Neil Smith, on Critical Geography Forum e-mail list)

More than this though, the scaling and re-scaling of the tragedy were the products of geopolitical reasoning about the appropriate response. By describing these two localised attacks as ‘an attack on America’, patriotism was stirred, the American public was rallied behind the President as Commander-in-Chief and the right of America to respond established. Similarly, by emphasising the impact of the attacks on countries beyond the US and scaling the attacks as a global tragedy, the right of the US to react unilaterally was restricted, and the necessity to build an international coalition created.

A World Turned Upside Down?

New York Times columnist William Safire, remarked a couple of weeks after the attacks that :

“Legend has it that when Lord Cornwallis formally surrendered to General Washington at Yorktown, ending the Revolutionary War, the redcoated band played The World Turned Upside Down. The same song is being played today in the aftermath of the September massacre. Life will never be the same, we are told with dreary unanimity. From now on, everything will be different. We have to learn to live with dread.”

(Safire, New York Times 27/9/01).

Tony Blair was equally melodramatic in his speech to the Labour party conference, one week after the event, which was broadcast live in the United States:

“In retrospect the millennium marked only a moment in time. It was the events of September 11 that marked a turning point in history, where we confront the dangers of the future and assess the choices facing humankind.”

(Tony Blair)

So, how might the world have changed? Firstly, there is a geopolitical argument which argues that in the ensuing ‘war on terrorist’, new alignments and coalitions were formed between countries that had been one-time enemies. In Blair’s words, a new world order forged. But far from being a new campaign against injustice and poverty, the construction of the ‘anti-terrorist’ alliance meant forgetting many things – that sanctions had been imposed against Pakistan because its abandonment of democracy in a military coup two years previously; that the west had raised concerns about the treatment of political prisoners in Uzbekistan; that the west had, too, criticised Russia’s brutal suppression of rebels in Chechneya; that key ally, Saudi Arabia, was at best an illiberal and undemocratic regime. This was not so much a new world order, than a minor re-arrangement of conventional alliances.

But perhaps in other ways the world has changed.

·        Time space compression has taken a momentary jump backwards as flights are cut and routes are abandoned. Some regional US cities now have no direct flight to major centres for the first time in decades. Increased security measures us making flying a lengthier procedure and potentially more expensive

·        Americans are either staying at home or finding alternative ways of travelling. There has been a rediscovery of the train, forcing Amtrak to place an emergency order for more carriages.

·        E-mail and the internet are likely to come under greater surveillance.

·        Civil liberties in both the UK and US have been sharply and largely quietly restricted in new anti-terrorist legislation.

·        The impact on the world economy is estimated to be worth about £165 billion, raising fears of a global recession. The airline industry in particular has been severely – with some carriers such as Swissair spinning almost uncontrollably into crisis. Routes have been cut, services limited and jobs laid off – all with wider repercussions. Compare the 13,000 job losses announced by British Airways this morning with the job losses at Corus in south Wales or those resulting from the Foot and Mouth crisis. In total, British Airways has cut a quarter of its workforce since September 11. The aerospace industry too has been hit, as orders for new planes have been cancelled. And as Americans avoid travelling, tourism suffers.

There have been more profound changes too – at least superficially. Neil Smith notes that he hears the President of the World Bank stating that “Conquering poverty is the conquest of justice” – sentiments echoed in Blair’s speech, and in recent speeches by Bill Clinton. Andrew Rawnsley noted in his Observer column that September 11 could lead a revival of the state:

“the helpless victims of the attack were bankers, stockbrokers and management consultants; the heroes of Manhattan were public sector workers, firecrews especially, and elected officials. The masters of the financial universe are suddenly exposed as terribly weak. In time of crisis, the people turn for protection to the durable state.”

(Observer 30/9/01)

Wall Street high flyers, brokers and consultants are said to be reconsidering their priorities. Rediscovering the value of life and of family. Gordon Gecko, it is said, is dead. Who knows? Maybe values will change. However, if the historical significance of September 11 at a global scale is unproven, the historical significance for New York is undoubted. On 12^th September, the London Times suggested that:

“The political and social geography of the city seems destined to change.”

But what did they mean by this? The comment was not expanded upon, but I can think about a number of ways in which the political and social geographies of New York can be anticipated to have changed. Firstly, the economic geography will change. Companies are beginning to re-assess the wisdom of clustering together and of clustering their staff and resources on one site. Dispersed offices are coming into vogue. Some companies are looking to relocate at least in part to Brooklyn or New Jersey. Lower Manhattan may never again be quite the nerve centre of the world economy that it was before September 11. Secondly, it is not just business that are moving but people too. In the 1980s and 1990s a trend of de-urbanisation in Manhattan was reversed as the middle classes drove gentrification to colonise places like the Lower East Side and Battery Park City. Now there is talk of a ‘second white flight’ – motivated this time by fear of terrorism rather than by fear of crime and racial prejudice.

Thirdly, there was a new geography imposed in the regulation of the city space during the crisis, with exclusion zones, barriers and pass-points; and at one time, bans on one-person cars entering Manhattan. Neil Smith described this as “the new geopolitics of Lower Manhattan, with its barricades, dark zones, speeding emergency vehicles with sirens, ground zero, no-go zones, armoured vehicles and troops with machine guns, seem the local expression of a new global reality – boundaries being drawn hard and fast and global marshall law.” Fourthly, the politics of the city are perhaps changing too. Will the new found ‘hero’ status of the police department revive its reputation and marginalise protests against it for brutality and discrimination? Will the role of the police, fire department and hospitals in responding to the crisis lead to a new veneration of the public services in New York? Or is the new political climate best represented by the surprise election of as mayor of a Republican, Michael Bloomberg – backed by Guiliani, but also benefiting as voters looked to a self-made billionaire to lead the reconstruction of their city. When it comes to geography though, Bloomberg’s support was as polarised as that for Guiliani – largely white, and largely drawn from the more affluent or at least comfortable suburbs.

Already there are signs of the city slipping back to its old ways. In the weeks following September 11, crime fell sharply. By Thanksgiving, it was back to its old levels. The occupancy rate in Battery Park City is back over 75%. In March 2002, Merrill Lynch moved 1,200 of its employees back in the World Financial Center. The director of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation commented:

“There is no question in my mind that New York City is the world financial center. It has been damaged by the events but certainly not destroyed. Things are moving in the right direction. Wall Street is still Wall Street and it always will be. And $30 us better than $50 uptown – that will attract people back.”

Most of all is the debate about what should replace the Twin Towers. How to fill the void. And the void did weigh on the consciousness of New Yorkers. The World Trade Center has gone, and the many people who habitually navigated themselves through Manhattan’s grid of streets by its presence have lost a reference point. New Yorkers are needing to re-orient themselves, to get used to the hole in the skyline:

“My mind is so used to seeing those towers from so many different angles – from the car, as a child coming home from trips; from a new boyfriend’s roof; from the bridge, washed in orange light – that it cannot seem to accept their disappearance. It keeps rebuilding them.”

(Katie Roiphe, The Guardian, 13/9/01)

From a mental rebuilding, the emphasis has moved on to the plans for the physical rebuilding. Certainly the towers are unlikely to be rebuilt to the same scale. Firstly, the owners were only insured for the loss of one tower at any one time, and are currently engaged in legal action arguing that there were two separate events on September 11 to allow them to claim twice. Secondly, the demand for the office space is unclear. There was already a glut of office space before September 11. In one sense that day solved the problem. Thirdly, even if there were the demand, the question remains of whether people would be willing to go back to work in such towering high profile blocks. Or did the era of building big die when the staff of one displaced bank refused to move into temporary accommodation halfway up the Citicorp Center skyscraper?

But the financial imperative had ruled. Yet this is now more than a landscape of corporate power. It is now a memorial space. As Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin have commented in their introduction to After the World Trade Center:

"The World Trade Center was the eye of a needle through which global capital flowed, the seat of an empire. However anonymous they appeared, the Twin Towers were never benign, never just architecture. Recovering this site for the living city is, therefore, inescapably political. Political, to be sure, because New York now takes a place in the long line of cities that have been damaged or nearly destroyed by terrorist and military attacks stretching, through the recent past, from Hiroshima and Berlin to Sarajevo and Kabul. Political because of Wall Street's role as an epicenter of world capitalism. Political because of Manhattan's site at the nexus of financial and real estate development - the city's most important industry. Political because of the power-brokering that will determine Downtown's future development. Political because of the growing clash between hallowed ground and buildable space."

Sorkin and Zukin (2002), p xi.

Three lobbies emerged. Those who wanted to rebuild exactly as before, as a demonstration of defiance. Those who wanted to build higher, to reclaim the title of the world's tallest building. And those who wanted not to rebuild, but to create a memorial to those killed. An open competition was organised, entered by architects around the world, but became befogged in disputes between the various interested parties - the site's owners, the New York Port Authority, jointed owned by the Governors of New York and New Jersey; the buildings' leaseholder; and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, charged with managing the redevelopment. This latter body is itself subject to criticism:

"Unfortunately the public agency that holds the power to make decisions about the site, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC), is cast in the old Port Authority mold. A committee of the powerful with only one representative from the local residential community, it's chaired by a Republican deal-maker and former director of Goldman Sachs (itself about to move its entire equity trading department to a new billion-dollar complex in New Jersey). This Robert Moses-style authority has been given huge powers of legal circumvention and freedom from democratic oversight. On the bright side, this reversion to cronyism and the rule of money has been offset by the formation of numerous new civic associations bent on studying the rebuilding issue and producing schemes for renewal. None, however, has any real authority. Though the LMDC declared an initial 'listening' period, it has held no public meetings. What it actually hears remains to be seen."

Sorkin and Zukin (2002), p ix

· Eventually a model by architect Daniel Libeskind had been selected, combining office space, a garden-filled column that would be the world's tallest structure, and a sunken memorial garden. Further details can be found here. As Libeskind describes itt:

“You look down, you see the void, you look up, you see light. In order to heal you’ve got to have a scar.”

Yet doubts remain as to whether it will actually be built in this form.

New York has changed, and is changing. But how and why? If New York has changed, one old hand, Tom Wolfe suggests that it changed before September 11 – it was changing due to a stock market slump, to the collapse of the Democrat party machine, to the growing representation of Latinos in the police force, to the new wave of Asian immigration and so on.

References

Bradford Landau, S. & Condit, C W (1996) Rise of the New York Skyscraper.

Buck, N & Fainstein, N. (1992) A comparative history, 1880-1973, in S S Fainstein, I Gordon & M Harloe (eds) Divided Cities: New York and London in the Contemporary World.

Darton, E. (1999) Divided We Stand: a biography of the World Trade Center.

Fainstein, S S (1994) The City Builders: Property, politics and planning in London and New York.

Gillespie, A. K. (2002) Twin Towers: the life of New York City's World Trade Center.

Morrone, F. (1998) The Architectural Guidebook to New York City.

Pye, M. (1991) Maximum City

Sassen, S. (1991) The Global City.

Sorkin, M. and Zukin, S. (eds) (2002) After the World Trade Center

Zukin, S. (1991) Landscapes of Power.

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