Alexander Garvin, Chief Planner for Rebuilding Lower Manhattan, Will Speak at Yale

Alexander D. Garvin, vice president of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. and a longtime Yale faculty member, will speak at Yale on the future of the World Trade Center site on November 15 at 5 p.m.

Garvin’s lecture, titled “Ground Zero: The Rebuilding of an American City,” will address the complex issues that have emerged from early and controversial attempts to produce a design for the World Trade Center site.

In his current job as vice president for planning, design and development of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., Garvin is one of the key actors in a drama that has attracted an unprecedented audience of interested citizens for a city planning decision. In his lecture, Garvin will argue that the procedures he helped create for picking a new design for Ground Zero are a radical departure from traditional urban planning in America, and a reinvigoration of American democracy. Garvin will propose that these procedures become a model for citizen involvement in city building.

Garvin is an architect and planner who has combined a career in city planning and real estate with teaching, design and public service. He is currently a commissioner on the New York City Planning Commission and managing director for planning of NYC2012, the committee trying to bring the Summer Olympics to New York City in 2012. In choosing New York as the U.S. bid city for the 2012 Olympic games, the U.S. Olympic Committee cited the originality of the plan Garvin and his colleagues devised.

Garvin is adjunct professor of urban planning and management at Yale. He has taught in New Haven for 35 years. His course, “Introduction to the Study of the City,” has been one of Yale’s most popular undergraduate offerings. Garvin is the author of “The American City: What Works, What Doesn’t,” now in its second edition. The book won the American Institute of Architects award as the best book on urbanism in 1996.

Garvin is a 1962 graduate of Yale College and received masters degrees in both architecture and urban studies from Yale in 1967. He is a native of New York City and has lived there all his life.

Garvin is delivering the first Elihu Yale Lecture, sponsored by the Elihu Club, a Yale senior society celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2003. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will take place in McNeil Lecture Hall, 1111 Chapel Street.