Las Urbanistas

Correction Appended

THE developer Bruce Ratner broke ground this week on his Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, despite an eminent domain suit over property he must raze to build a basketball arena for the Nets. This “preparatory work” is Mr. Ratner’s latest maneuver in a maddeningly effective campaign to make his instant city — a 22-acre swarm of 16 residential skyscrapers (and a 20,500-seat arena) that would create the densest population swath in the United States — look and feel like a foregone conclusion.

Josh Cochran

To supporters, anyone who opposes Atlantic Yards must be doing so for selfish reasons. The project, these proponents claim, is a boon for Brooklyn: it will connect neighborhoods long cleaved by the Long Island Rail Road yards; provide jobs, tax revenue and urgently needed affordable housing; supply acres of public green space; and showcase bold designs by Frank Gehry.

Moreover, it will do all this without seriously straining the area’s infrastructure, according to an environmental impact statement commissioned by Mr. Ratner: police, fire, bus and subway services and schools will absorb the new population mostly without “adverse impact,” and tweaking the timing of stoplights will largely prevent traffic snarls.

Reading these assertions, I’m half-convinced myself — until I look around me.

I live three blocks north of the project, in sunny, friendly Fort Greene, a neighborhood diverse by race, age and family configuration. Many families on our block have been here for 20 years (we’ve been here six), but there are also plenty of newcomers — homeowners and renters both.

Even without Atlantic Yards, our neighborhood and others nearby are feeling the strain of poor planning for a rising population. Traffic and parking are problems already; Flatbush Avenue is a seething mass of vehicles that I dread crossing with my children. Morning subway trains are crammed, and the buses on DeKalb Avenue are often too crowded to pick up new passengers.

At my son’s public school — a lottery school serving the Atlantic Yards area — 620 children vied last year for 100 slots, and the number of applicants rises by a hundred each year. The claim that these neighborhoods can absorb at least 15,000 new residents, not to mention 20,000 arena-goers, defies common sense.

Nearly everyone I’ve spoken to about the Atlantic Yards project, whether they favored or opposed it, assumed that it would be scaled back. In fact, the plan approved by the Public Authorities Control Board in December was more than 600,000 square feet larger than the one first unveiled.

That approval came despite sobering revisions by the city and the developer of his initial heady claims about the project’s benefits to Brooklyn: the proportion of affordable housing has slipped, and much of it won’t be completed until 2016; the public park on the arena’s rooftop is now only for residents; the number of promised jobs has shrunk; the projected tax revenue has fallen; and the taxpayers’ bill is colossal and apparently open-ended.

Even as the Atlantic Yards project sailed forward with hardly a concession from Mr. Ratner (whose company is also building this newspaper’s new headquarters), two other high-profile projects were voted down: the Norman Foster tower on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and the Jets stadium on the Far West Side. Why have things played out so differently for Brooklyn than for Manhattan?

There are many possible answers. The most critical fact is that, because part of the property on the Atlantic Yards footprint belongs to the Metropolitan Transit Authority, a state organization, Mr. Ratner was allowed to bypass local checks and balances and work directly with Albany.

There was also the absence in Brooklyn of a wealthy corporate adversary like Cablevision, which owns Madison Square Garden and, fearing competition, helped to fight off the Jets stadium. And because Atlantic Yards doesn’t involve protected buildings, the Landmarks Preservation Commission — which killed the Foster building after adamant, well-organized lobbying from deep-pocketed locals — was never invoked.

But as someone who has long opposed the development in its proposed form, I’ve been frustrated that many Brooklynites who agreed with me weren’t moved to do much about it. Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, a local organization (on whose advisory board I serve), has vehemently opposed the project. But resignation and bitter apathy afflicted many residents, who disliked the project but felt that it was unstoppable.

What chance do we have, I was asked, when our mayor, governor and borough president are in lockstep with a private developer? News coverage has often left unscrutinized Mr. Ratner’s claims about the development’s financial benefits or the implications of its density and scale. This tacit approval has only added to the perception that the project is a done deal.

It has also allowed Mr. Ratner to operate his formidable spin machine in a relative vacuum. Perhaps his greatest public relations ploy was to form partnerships, early on, with eight community organizations, some of which appear to have been created expressly to support him (his company has acknowledged giving at least one of them $100,000).

The commitments Mr. Ratner made to these groups — should he honor them — are good ones: construction job training, small-business development and 2,250 units of subsidized housing.

But the biggest gain was Mr. Ratner’s. By allying himself with groups run largely by African-Americans, he was able to cast himself — a wealthy man who stands to make $1 billion on the Atlantic Yards development — as the champion of working-class Brooklynites who favor jobs and housing in a battle against affluent, spoil-sport newcomers who have the luxury of fretting over their quality of life. This was a powerful strategy: the question of whether the Atlantic Yards project was good for Brooklyn dissolved into the uneasy question of whose Brooklyn you were talking about.

What was mostly lost in this caustic debate was the biggest question of all: what do we Brooklynites — a diverse and even divided collective — want our borough to be? Do we want it transformed from a sunny, low-lying place into knots of vertical superblocks? Are we content to let our borough’s future be imposed on us by developers and politicians?

Brooklyn’s population is expected to rise 10 percent by 2030 — that’s more than 250,000 people, and we can be certain that Mr. Ratner is not the last developer to have a grand vision of how to profit from their arrival. It is our responsibility to work together — actively and inclusively — if we hope to exert any control over the future of our borough.

There’s a lesson in Mr. Ratner’s grassroots tactics: if we are united in advance on questions of jobs, housing and scale, it will be much harder for a developer to use these issues to divide us. Progress is already being made. Since 2004, City Councilwoman Letitia James, whose district includes the Atlantic Yards footprint, and who opposed the project from the start, has worked with Brooklynites to create a community development plan for any future building on the rail yards, should Mr. Ratner yet fail. Known as the Unity plan, it emphasizes appropriate scale and affordable housing, and has been endorsed by 23 local groups, and city and state politicians.

This is a model of what should be happening throughout Brooklyn. A strong girding of power and ideas is our best defense against developers who might wish to control the process. And an active and vocal public will send a healthy warning to elected officials who might consider placing these developers’ interests above our own.

Jennifer Egan is the author, most recently, of “The Keep,” a novel.

Correction: February 28, 2007

An Op-Ed article on Saturday, about the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, incorrectly rendered the given name of a city councilwoman opposed to the project in some copies. It is Letitia James, not Leticia.

LONDON, Feb. 23 — Ever since the London authorities imposed a charge to drive into the city center in 2003, the United States Embassy has stood as a beacon of automotive defiance, refusing to pay what its diplomats call a tax from which they should be exempt.

Matt Dunham/Associated Press
London officials imposed a charge to drive into the city center in 2003, and almost doubled the area this week, to roughly 15 square miles.

But when city leaders almost doubled the size of the charging zone this week, casting their net over an area housing many more embassies, the Americans suddenly acquired new allies in their resistance, including from unusual quarters like France, which has not always been quite so supportive of American diplomacy.

“The situation has changed,” said a diplomat from the French Embassy, which used to sit outside the zone and willingly paid for diplomats to enter it. “Now the embassy is within the charging zone, we have no choice: We have to use vehicles for our work.”

Like the Americans, the French and some others — including Russia and Belgium, according to the British press — maintain that international protocols, known as the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, forbid the imposition of taxes on diplomats. “This is not a question of rich countries being unwilling to pay,” said a senior European diplomat, who, like his French colleague, spoke in return for anonymity in order to be, well, diplomatic. “It is a question of principle — legal principle and diplomatic principle.”

The charge for entering the zone is roughly $15 a day during working hours Monday through Friday, and the London model, presented by officials as a way to relieve congestion, has inspired some other European capitals, notably Stockholm, to follow suit. While European officials say diplomatic representatives from roughly half of the European Union ’s 27 members will not pay the charge, Sweden is not among the rebels.

These have been challenging days for British authorities seeking to exert some kind of dominion over the nation’s ever-more-choked streets and highways. After the congestion charge zone was extended Monday, Prime Minister Tony Blair’s office found itself sending e-mail replies on Wednesday to a staggering 1.8 million people who had registered protests in an electronic petition against a separate plan to impose nationwide road charging.

On Tuesday, the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, announced an arrangement to cut fares in half on buses and trams for around 250,000 people living on welfare under a deal struck with Venezuela: Essentially, Venezuela will pay for one-fifth of the diesel used by London’s 8,000 buses in return for London’s technical advice on how to run a transit system — even though London’s buses and subways are frequently criticized by passengers.

“Both London and Venezuela will be exchanging those things in which they are rich to the mutual benefit of both,” Mr. Livingstone said. Not everyone agreed, as Richard Barnes, a leader of the opposition Conservatives in the London Assembly, made clear. London, he said, “should not be doing business with a third-rate South American dictator with an appalling human rights and democratic record,” referring to the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez.

The $32 million deal achieved a lower profile than the expansion of the congestion charging zone, to roughly 15 square miles from eight square miles, drawing in upmarket neighborhoods like Kensington and Chelsea, home to bankers, rock stars and the rich of other stripes.

One quirk about the extension of the charging zone is that roughly 60,000 residents of the extended zone received a 90 percent residents’ discount, meaning that people living, for instance, in Chelsea — whose legions of S.U.V. drivers inspired the generic term “Chelsea Tractor” for their Range Rovers and BMW X5s — may now cruise the entire zone for a mere $1.50 a day.

That could well offset Mayor Livingstone’s promise to reduce congestion in central London by 10 to 15 percent. As the conservative Daily Telegraph observed in an editorial, drivers “who are among the wealthiest householders in the country will now be able to drive into central London at a fraction of the usual cost of this punitive, regressive tax.”

The embassies that have entered this fray seem anxious to keep their dispute with the mayor less strident than it was a couple of years back, when the mayor railed at the American ambassador, Robert H. Tuttle, accusing him of behaving “like some chiseling little crook” by withholding the congestion charge.

In the past, Mr. Tuttle and his aides have gone public to reject the mayor’s argument that the congestion fee is a charge for a service and not, therefore, a tax and should, therefore, be paid. But the American Embassy, which has been within the charging zone from the start, seemed reluctant to be drawn into a new slinging match. “We are actively discussing the issue with British authorities but don’t have anything to add to what we have said before,” said an embassy spokeswoman, insisting on anonymity.

According to Transport for London, the official body running the city’s transit system, the American Embassy owes over $1.95 million in unpaid congestion charges and fines. “Those embassies that flout the law of this country and misuse diplomatic immunity to avoid the charge are enjoying the benefits of reduced congestion but contributing nothing,” Transport for London said in a statement on Friday. Western diplomatic missions aside, African embassies have said from the start that they will not pay because it is too much of a financial burden for some of them.

The congestion issue touches deep chords among Britons who, like Americans, cherish the freedom to use their cars as little short of — or perhaps somewhere beyond — a human, if not divine, right.

One source of concern is that road charging is just a way to raise revenue. Another is that the authorities will try to use satellite navigation aids in cars to track motorists and assess their road-use charges.

In his e-mail reply to his 1.8 million petitioners, Mr. Blair said “no firm decision” had been made about whether to introduce a national road pricing scheme. “This is not about imposing ’stealth taxes’ or introducing ‘Big Brother’ surveillance, he said in a three-page message. “Our aim is to relieve traffic jams, not create a Big Brother society.”