Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
6 
Around Ground Zero
We needed not only to make a claim for a right to look,
but also to help realize it
New York, 2012— In the year following the attacks on New York and Washington,
there was a lot of critical commentary in the American press about the lurid voy -
eurism of gawkers at Ground Zero. The message seemed to be that people should
not visit the site. City authorities wanted to erect a forty-foot opaque fence
around it to keep the unauthorized out. I was part of a group of architects called
New York New Visions that fought for a transparent fence, a permeable border
through which people could view the scene (we called it “bearing witness”) and
pay respect to the dead. In a city where nothing of this scale had happened before,
it seemed important that people did look and that looking become a sanctioned
activity. I thought that we needed not only to make a claim for a right to look, but
also to help realize it.
One of our strategies was to make it easier for people to get to and around
the site. Around Ground Zero was a series of fold-out maps of the Ground Zero
site. Working with others at New York New Visions and a team of volunteers, we
printed three versions, updating them as the site changed, first in December 2001,
then in March and again in June 2002. We distributed them on the streets around
Ground Zero for free.
I was inspired in this by the work of a group in Bosnia called FAMA. In the
1990s, during the war and the siege of their city, they created hand-drawn and
mass-reproduced tourist maps of Sarajevo. They charted buildings that were
destroyed, sniper locations, and the sites of significant events in the war—partly
as an ironic critique of the way the war in Sarajevo had become a matter of spec -
tacle and fly-in, fly-out tourism, but also seriously, as a record of and a guide to a
place that could often seem rather confusing or disorienting. I had visited Sarajevo
in 1999, after the war, and used the map to navigate that city.
 
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