"From the beginning of this unprecedented redevelopment process, R.Dot has been at the table, helping to shape and create a meaningful dialogue about Lower Manhattan's future."
- Dan Doctoroff, Deputy Mayor, NYC

If the horrific memories of the September 11 attacks endure forever, then so too will our memories of the great human selflessness and heroism that emerged in the aftermath. Alongside the indelible images of planes colliding and towers collapsing, we will remember scenes of incredible heroism and volunteerism: firemen rushing into the burning buildings, lines of blood donors wrapping around the blocks in front of city hospitals, and growing piles of clothing, food, and water bottles spontaneously donated for Ground Zero rescue workers. In the days and weeks following the attacks, the challenge to traditional charities like the Red Cross, newly-formed charities like the September 11, and for the city, state, and federal governments was how to direct the flood of philanthropic funds and overflow of goodwill - not only how to compensate victims' families, but how harness this mass initiative into a strong vision for lower Manhattan's economic recovery and rebuilding. In order to find the answers, New York needed to begin asking the right questions - which is where groups like R.Dot came in.

R.Dot, a citizen planning organization that became a vital part of the city's planning process, began small, with a single conversation over lunch between Beverly Willis, an architect and president of the Architectural Research Institute, and Susan Szenasy, Editor-in-Chief of Metropolis magazine. It was September 12 and, even in their state of trauma and shock, both women felt an impulse to do something constructive. "We decided that we should try to find out what the people in Lower Manhattan were feeling," Willis remembers. "We knew the right people - the artists, designers, city planners, the activist people and the museum people." Both of them understood that people in the design world had an enormous amount to contribute to the process of rebuilding that lay ahead, and were determined that their voices should be heard early They sent out an e-mail to see if people were interested in meeting, and Lori Beckleman of the SoHo Guggenheim offered space in the museum's downtown branch. About fifty people showed up to the first two meetings, and eventually the group, dubbed R.Dot for "Rebuild Our Town Downtown," grew to involve approximately 500 people - dedicated, talented people who, by asking the right questions and presenting their findings to the city government, attempted to help the residents of Lower Manhattan attain a higher quality of life in the wake of great tragedy.

Among the groups that formed after 9/11, R.Dot was unique both in its organizational structure and approach to making recommendations for Lower Manhattan. Given its ambitious scope and the high caliber of the professionals who joined its ranks, R.Dot can be seen as a prototype of a "Citizen Designer" response to a catastrophic event. The group's methodology was simple: concentrate on a number of different key areas - retail, street design, arts and culture, youth - provide a comprehensive survey for each one, then publish a series of position papers as quickly as possible. R.Dot was subdivided into committees on housing, retail, economic development, and youth, and infrastructure as well as a steering committee. Each committee undertook the research for each position paper and made recommendations. Then, the papers would be distributed to key decision makers, such as the members of the Governor's and Mayor's offices, City Council, City Planning, Community Boards, other city departments, civic organizations, and professionals in fields such as finance and real estate (Rae Rosen, the chief economist of the Federal Reserve Bank, contributed to the first paper). R.Dot then met with these organizations and individuals to discuss the issues they had raised, request feedback, and suggest ways their ideas might be successfully implemented.

Underlying this entire enterprise was a simple yet powerful philosophy that distinguished R.Dot's from similar organization; its members believed that only when the city was seen through the eyes of the citizens who lived and worked in it everyday could any attempt be made to determine how that city might best be reconstructed. R.Dot was a citizen's movement first and foremost. Among its more integral contributors were the members of the steering committee Carole Artigiani, James Biber, Albert Capsouto, Professor Jean Gardner, Roland Gephardt, David Hupert, Theodore Liebman FAIA, Gerard Major, Ellen O'Neill, Brent Oppenheimer, Rafael Pelli, Ron Shiffman FAICP, Linda Silverman, Liz Thompson, and Paul J. Vicenti Esq.

To extent that R.Dot did use traditional urban planning policies, it did so without that discipline's normal broad-brush strokes. R.Dot wanted to see how the city was used by its inhabitants and then, rebuilding accordance with those findings, rather than impose any grand schemes from above. R.Dot wanted to know things like: Do you shop on impulse or do you plan your purchases? Do you socialize after work near your place of work, and if so in what way? What means of transport do you use to get to work? Would you consider alternatives if they were available? Where do you live and what do you consider to be the boundaries of your personal "neighborhood?" What do you like most and like least about your neighborhood? This type of information, combined with a more formal analysis of such things as median incomes and census tract data, offered up what might be termed a "living" portrait of the city. R.Dot's next task was to present this information in a way that was both compelling and easy to grasp Willis wrote much of these papers, Szenasy edited them, and Tribeca designer Roland Gephardt illustrated them. Brent Oppenheimer was the lead writer of the Street Management position paper; George Gordon Chang did the retail survey and analysis for the retail paper; Carole Artigani wrote the Youth paper.

Rather than producing the usual kind of position paper, hard on the eye and harder on the brain - something likely to be thumbed through and promptly forgotten by harassed decision makers under pressure - Gephardt came up with a "mapping concept", which presenting the research that had been collected and recommended by the committee that was both powerful and instantly comprehensible. Anyone reading or looking at the R.Dot paper on, say, retail, would be able to grasp rapidly and at a glance of the illustrations the way different retail categories were clustered across the downtown landscape. By asking the right kind of questions in the first place about what sort of data was important, and then presenting it in such a graphic manner, R.Dot offered an incomparable resource to an administration, and a state, urgently in need of answers.

R.Dot was of course far from the only group formed in the aftermath of 9/11 to help in the city's reconstruction, but it was among the first and it offered perhaps the broadest scope of vision, both in terms of its underlying approach and in a literal geographic sense - R.Dot alone considered the whole of lower Manhattan south of Canal Street, not just the World Trade Center site. Beverly Willis, R.Dot's co-chairperson, has called this approach of considering underlying concepts first "pre-conceptual design." She points out " while the concepts behind them may be timeless, good ideas are good for a short duration only and must be implement quickly before the political agenda of others dilute them. They then lose their originality." It was an approach and a presentation that garnered much attention, and R.Dot and its members were featured on the front page of The New York Times, newspapers across the US, as well as on major national television and in the international press and TV. On May 19th, 2003, R.Dot was awarded the Lawrence M. Orton Award by the American Planning Association's New York Chapter for "Excellence in Urban Planning."

The political situation at R.Dot's conception was one of turmoil, and not simply because of the attacks themselves. The city had finally introduced term limits in the November 2001 elections, with the result that virtually every elected city official had lost their office and been replaced. The city faced this unprecedented crisis with an untested new mayor and new administration, and without even the benefit of working telephones in City Hall phone service there wasn't fully restored until February 2002.) In addition, the large number of groups that were created to offer advice, such as the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC), had yet to be formed, meaning that R.Dot was the only significant citizen planning group to step into the breach. There was no master plan in effect for in Lower Manhattan, despite, numerous proposed master plans (the most recent being in 1966.) R.Dot saw an opportunity to implement ideas that would address elements missing in Lower Manhattan neighborhoods and connect them.

It acted fast: by February 2002 it produced its first interim white paper draft, Rebuilding Lower Manhattan and the World Trade Center, followed by four others before the year was out - on Youth, Managed Streets, Retail, and Arts and Culture. There would then follow a year before its Neighborhoods & Housing in Lower Manhattan position paper was issued in April 2004, which pointed out in great detail, among other things, just how unexpectedly divided Lower Manhattan was economically, with what amounted almost to a schism between a remarkably wealthy "Western Block" and a disadvantaged "Eastern Block." It was impossible therefore to make broad assumptions about "Downtown Manhattan" as a single cohesive economic unit when planning for its future.

And what was to become of the so-called footprints of the World Trade Center Buildings themselves? R.Dot was the first organization to call for an international architectural competition to find a suitable solution that would both honor the dead and allow for the practicalities of every day life to continue on the site. When the first eight proposals were made public by the LMDC, R.Dot, which had worked intimately with the families of those lost on 9/11, was quick to voice their collective opinion that the designs lacked the emotional impact such a monument must have and "lacked the ability," as Willis said, "To touch the heart." Largely due to R.Dot's persistence on this matter, future designs continued to be produced and that an open public forum, involving artists, victims' relatives, city officials, and the public at large, helped choose a design that promises to live up to the historic import of the occasion it memorializes.

Recognizing the importance of bringing people together to discuss potential solutions, R.Dot organized a number of public roundtables. On November 10th, 2003it held a discussion entitled Neighborhoods and Housing in Lower Manhattan, hosted by Goldman Sachs and funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Contributing organizations included the Regional Planning Association, the Civic Alliance to rebuild Downtown Manhattan, and the Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental Design. There were also participants from government offices, including those of Governor George Pataki and Manhattan Borough President Virginia Fields, and representatives from Community Boards # 1 and 2. R.Dot's intention was to develop on the ideas laid out by Mayor Bloomberg in his 21st Century Vision for Lower Manhattan, and which would find its formal presentation in R.Dot's later Neighborhoods & Planning position paper. A few months later it organized a second panel, entitled Arts and Culture in Lower Manhattan: Giving Visual Artists a Voice in Planning. For R.Dot, the importance of visual artists was central to the task at hand. Not only were artists one of the principal economic engines of urban life, but also they created a sense of place, of cultural self-awareness, without which no true new community could ever be created. And artists - hardly the most organized and politically experienced of groups - needed R.Dot's help in establishing a cohesive voice that the dealmakers and politicians would take heed of. As a result, the city initiated a policy of having representatives of all city departments' meet on a regular basis to better coordinate the cities' resources in Lower Manhattan.

R.Dot has never been a traditional kind organization; indeed, its members barely thought of themselves as an organization at all. They had no interest in fund-raising unlike other organizations that quickly emerged such as Wall Street Rising, and they did not conceive of themselves as lasting beyond the period of time necessary to face the immediate crisis - "perhaps three years at most," as Beverly Willis puts it. Their currency of exchange was ideas, and their constituents the public at large, not businesses or politicians. Unlike other groups, R.Dot did not set out to create a base of power. It received initial funding from the ARI, an organization founded by Beverly Willis, and through grants from the Sloan Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation, and in-kind donations from Chase Manhattan Bank. The intellectual capital it was able to depend on - all those millions of hours of invaluable professional help freely and willingly given

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Resulted in a vision for an improved quality of life for those living in the shadow of tragedy. R.Dot can be seen as a model of organized, forward-thinking citizen response to catastrophe. For many, R.Dot embodied the spirit of organized volunteerism and philanthropy that is uniquely American, and that is, ultimately, a powerful testament to the resilience of the human imagination.


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