Managing the Metropolis: Planning in New York City

Abstract

Planning and managing an urban cosmos like New York City face some tricky challenges. This chapter starts by analyzing some New York peculiarities in urban planning, for example, the fact that metropolitan management in the New York case extends across three different states. The situation is further complicated by the use of sometimes contradicting methods as well as different attempts to outline the area that could be termed metropolitan New York. Topography and physical shape were often responsible for tranquillity and isolation of different settlement niches, at least in the city’s history. This may explain the deeply rooted localisms that are scattered all over metropolitan New York, making urban planning more difficult. In regard to planning, the chapter resumes there is sort of an organizational pandemonium in the New York area, with a sometimes stifling coexistence of both public and private agents. More often than not, New York planning has been dominated by individual persons, not always to the city’s benefits. Finally, the chapter looks at some major fields of urban planning in recent decades, mainly architecture and transport. It concludes by shortly discussing the problems that are to be expected for the new millennium.