After the 9/11 attacks, after the smoke was gone, after the rubble cleared away, New Yorkers had a city to rebuild.

After the towers fell, no one could agree on what should be done with Ground Zero. In response to fast tracked redevelopment plans, New York decided to do one of the bravest – or maybe one of the most unconventional – things in the history of city planning: they gathered 5,000 representative New Yorkers for the largest town hall in American history and asked them to decide. They came to vote on the city’s six proposals for rebuilding Ground Zero. But instead, the people rejected the top down approach and successfully charted a new path forward. Their work determined what is at Ground Zero today. People expected chaos, yelling, maybe even a fistfight. But what happened was democracy.

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