New digital technologies have figured critically in the process of deciding the future of Lower Manhattan after September 11th, not only supplying the infrastructure for soliciting public input but also opening new channels of communication between citizens, designers, advocacy groups, and decision-makers. This research builds on ethnographic work on organizational responses to September 11 and on the early stages of public dialogue about the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site. One component of the current research is a comparative longitudinal study of participation in three public forums held to discuss the future of Lower Manhattan, forums that relied on face-to-face, exclusively online, and mixed technologies of deliberation. The project's second component focuses on the online dialogues themselves. A discursive analysis of a sample of the twenty-six online discussion groups that accompanied the face-to-face forum will identify the conditions that facilitate or obstruct group discussions to approximate the equality, reflexivity, reciprocity, and openness that scholars have seen as hallmarks of authentically democratic deliberation.
The third and fourth components of the research turn to the process by which multi-vocal public dialogues are translated into "public concerns" and then into design plans. By compiling an archive of all the websites devoted to Lower Manhattan redevelopment issues and tracking changes in the form and structure of the websites over time, the project will examine how old and new advocacy groups are adapting to a political landscape in which new deliberative technologies may be challenging traditional mechanisms of citizen participation. In the fourth component of the research, the focus is on communication between citizens, on one hand, and architects and public officials on the other. Analysis of the website database will chart whether and how architects and urban planners are capitalizing on new digital technologies to involve residents more directly in design. Interviews with representatives of the agencies charged with overseeing the development process will examine whether and how they are relying on internet-mediated representations of the public in their decision-making-and with what effect.
