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March 2, 2011
Born of 9/11, an Effort to Rebuild Shattered Haiti
The New York Times
by Julie Satow
James P. Stuckey, humanitarian, philosopher, rebuilder.
Just four days after 9/11, James P. Stuckey, then a vice president of Forest City Ratner Companies, met with executives of Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield at Forest City’s headquarters in Brooklyn. Empire had been the fourth-largest tenant at the World Trade Center, and the shell-shocked executives were already thinking about new offices.
Mr. Stuckey promised them a building in 18 months, even though, he said, “they didn’t have any floor plans, they didn’t know who had sat next to who, or even where much of their staff was.”
Is it us, or does this sound a little bit like ambulance-chasing?
“Based on a handshake, we started to pour the foundation,” at the MetroTech office plaza in downtown Brooklyn, said Mr. Stuckey, who in 2009 was appointed a dean of the Schack Institute of Real Estate at New York University. Soon after he assumed the position, he said, he started to think how he could teach students the lessons he learned after 9/11.
The result was a course on postcatastrophe reconstruction, now in its second semester, where students devise building plans, work on environmental and social issues, and create financing models for real-world projects.
...Postcatastrophe reconstruction — which Mr. Stuckey defines as the period following a disaster from Week 2 to Year 5 — is an emerging field in development circles, and it gained momentum after the tsunami that shook Indonesia in 2004. While many organizations focus on disaster preparedness and the emergency humanitarian efforts that crop up immediately after the event, “there is a void that occurs in the interim period,” Mr. Stuckey said. “After the humanitarian aid ends, how do you transition to the rebuilding stage?”
NoLandGrab: Suggestion for Mr. Stuckey's next project — helping to rebuild Prospect Heights, where his former boss, Bruce Ratner, has demolished numerous buildings, and has no plans (and no money) to reconstruct any of them anytime soon.
Posted by eric at March 2, 2011 11:32 AM