We are all of course trying to come to grips with what the events of Tuesday mean, and will mean. It has been a terrible disaster, and the immediate loss of life is incredible.

But we think it will have a major long-term impact on life here, economically, politically, morally, everyday life --- all for the worse. The retribution/vengeance sentiment is overwhelming, and so far almost no one is asking serious questions about causes. Our country hardly has clean hands when it comes to morality in its international conduct, but acts such as terrorism look very different when you are its victims. And a response of more terrorism, more military security, more threats and blusters and shows of force, more calls of "war," hardly seems the answer. And that all human life should be sacred, not just ours, hardly seems to be part of the immediate response.

There will also be major impacts on New York City in particular, and perhaps high-density big cities generally, in the direction of decentralization and further divisions and walls. I would guess a reduction in personal travel, more emphasis on electronic communication. Employment patterns will change; hyper-concentrations of jobs in service-center-oriented office buildings (and both the high and the low-paying jobs associated with them) will shrink. The benefits of the agglomeration economies that have accounted for the strength of select financial centers will be counter-balanced by new political considerations. I suspect the global status of at least New York City but perhaps other global cities will change, as multinational businesses change their spatial strategies in the search for security in more outlying areas, although perhaps within the same metropolitan regions. The construction of glamorous ever-higher trophy skyscrapers will stop; the towers in Kuala Lumpur and Frankfurt have already felt the threat, closing and evacuating the day after the World Trade Center collapse, and workers in the Empire State building are afraid to go up to their offices.

And "security" will become the justification for measures that can threaten the core of social and political life, even though one conclusion that might be drawn from what has happened is that physical measures can never provide real security in the presence of deep social, including international, differences. Despite that, surveillance will increase and the uses of public space will be more tightly controlled (Mayor Giuliani has pioneered this with his restrictions on assemblies near City Hall, and attempts to limit the use of streets for parades, in the name of security). And we may expect the almost unlimited funding that the FBI and CIA are likely to receive to result in massive invasions of privacy; Senator Trent Lott has already called publicly for a reduction in the weight given civil liberties in the interests of security. "Public space" will become less public; free access and free use will be severely limited. By contrast, controlled spaces, such as malls, will increase their attraction,

Many of us in the academic world have spent major efforts in trying to understand what is happening to our cities and to urban life in the era of globalization. Whatever we have thought and said and written up till now has been subject to a major shock from "outside the system" [although inside it in a terrible way], and will need significant reassessment.

Peter Marcuse
Professor of Urban Planning
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation
Avery Hall
Columbia University