Courageous Jane, taking on the influential
leaders of New York City in the l950’s, made landmark strides in challenging
them to take a different perspective on city planning. The importance of the topic is noted by
the observation that the scale and speed of urbanization from the 1950’s to now
is the greatest in the history of cities.
Moreover, what we’re doing now will shape cities for years to come. This documentary addresses the question
of what constitutes a successful city and who it is who makes decisions about
its size, form, and function, as well as who will live there.
In the mid-20th Century, two figures
stand out as embodying the issue of city planning. One is Robert Moses, a modernist New York City planner with
grandiose ideas about what was possible, as well as strong beliefs about public
housing and transportation. His
opposition included a cheeky journalist named Jane Jacobs, who contended that
cities should be about people, public places, and neighborhoods that are
inter-connected and accessible.
Moses championed the automobile and the need for throughways that
necessarily had to cut through green space and neighborhoods. And although he started out as a
progressive wanting to address city blight and areas of poverty, he was looking
at it from a distance—an aerial view, so to speak. Whereas Jane walked the streets and made astute observations
from which she formed her ideas about what makes a city vibrant and successful.
To address the city’s poverty, Moses favored
tearing down tenements (which he did by the thousands), “wiping the slate
clean”, and starting all over again, eliminating the sidewalk culture and
people clustering together. He was
late in realizing that this vision resulted in isolated communities, dead-end
streets, and separation of work, residential, and recreational areas, along
with residential sectioning based on social class. Three of his most outrageous ideas were to 1) build the Cross
Bronx Expressway, tearing up vital neighborhoods and essentially creating a
wall between north and south Bronx; 2) build the Lower Manhattan Expressway,
dividing it up like he did the Bronx; and 3) run Fifth Avenue through
Washington Square Park. Fortunately,
because of the activists’ efforts, he was denied the last two ideas.
Jane Jacobs expressed her opinions on city
planning in one of eight books she wrote.
In The Death and Life of Great
American Cities, she questioned city planners (Moses’ brand was repeated in
cities across the country) and countered them with her own vision of what
constitutes successful cities:
Diversity in people, jobs, uses of streets, types of buildings, and the
accessibility of all these to all people.
“Fit your plans to people; not buildings”, she would say. One of Jacobs’ most fundamental beliefs
about cities is that the city is a living, ever-changing organism, and we need
to manage the change organically and on the basis of our observations, getting
input from the people who reside in it, rather than taking a top-down approach
to planning.
The comprehensive, engaging documentary traces
the early lives of Moses and Jacobs and the evolvement of their ideas and
actions across the many years of their careers. The cinematography by Chris Dapkins is extraordinarily good
in lustrous black and white, eye-catching colors, and original footage from the
time.
A cautionary note at the end of the film is
that what happened in the U.S. in the fifties, is now going on in China, where
they are creating isolated developments without streets that are likely to
become the slums of the future.
Citizen Jane Jacobs challenges the
concepts of noted New York City planner Robert Moses.
Grade: A By
Donna R. Copeland
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