New Yorkers split over Ground Zero

More than 5,000 people, including many relatives of victims of the 11 September attacks, will gather today at a "town hall" meeting in New York to discuss the increasingly vexed question of how to rebuild the site of the World Trade Center.

Last week city authorities released six initial proposals, none of them containing buildings as tall or imposing as the twin towers.

All, however, have drawn strong objections – either because they were too large, or because they were not ambitious and swaggering enough.

Today's meeting, attended by fire-fighters, rescue workers, downtown business executives and residents, as well as family members of victims from New York, Connecticut and New Jersey, will not settle the arguments. But it will provide a snapshot of the views of the parties most directly affected by the events of 11 September.

Participants will meet in the main hall of the gleaming steel and glass Jacob Javits Convention Center in lower Manhattan, looking out over the Hudson River. They will vote on electronic keypads on the main points raised. But they are unlikely to resolve disagreements so deeply and passionately felt.

The debate reaches far beyond the practical merits of a variety of architectural projects. It is about commemorating the dead of the world's greatest terrorist outrage, about the character of New York city – and for many, by extension, about the very nature of America itself.

There is one school which wants the site to be turned into a memorial for the 3,000 people who died, as happened to the site of the federal building in Oklahoma City, blown up in April 1995 by Timothy McVeigh, America's deadliest home-grown terrorist.

But Team Twin Towers, a group pressing for a statement of US resolve, argues that anything smaller than what was lost on 11 September would be "tantamount to kneeling to terrorism". The best solution, it says, is to rebuild the towers either the same height or as the tallest buildings in the world.

The six projects will be whittled down to three by September. But it already looks as if the process will divide people from New York and far beyond.