How Jane Jacobs Turned The Battle Of Urban Planning

A war broke out in the middle of the 20th century over what urban planning could and should accomplish, a struggle engagingly documented in Citizen Jane: [...] it is a kind of war movie, centering on the wildly differing visions of writer and activist Jane Jacobs and New York City planning czar Robert Moses. Jacobs, the film’s heroine and winner of the battle, wrote one of the seminal books about city planning, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” published in 1961 and still read and taught. Emblematic of then-modern city planning, Moses and his like had an austere vision based on ideas of Le Corbusier and others to replace aging and disorderly slums with high-rise projects grouped in bunches with few of the amenities of the old neighborhoods. Moses, who had the ear of politicians and developers, amassed a lot of power and openly sneered at the growing opposition — why, some of them were mere housewives and mothers! In any case, he wasn’t, and this first long section of the movie, focused on the high-rise aspect of urban renewal, end with a montage of projects — and not only in New York — being dynamited into dust, which puts a dramatic exclamation point to Jacobs’ victory. Perhaps too abruptly, the movie now switches gears to focus on planners’ efforts to accommodate the American love affair with cars, which eventually prompted one of Moses’ most ambitious (and bone-chilling) proposals — building a highway connecting the Williamsburg and Manhattan bridges to the Holland Tunnel, a road that would have been known as the Lower Manhattan Expressway. There are lots of archival photos and footage and talking heads, perhaps the most enjoyable of whom is the late Mayor Ed Koch, who recalls his days as an urban activist and discusses the hated plan to extend Fifth Avenue through Washington Square Park. [...] it’s a story that needs telling, as Tyrnauer proves with footage showing China’s massive program of erecting high-rise residences that bear more than a passing resemblance to the old American projects.