CityReads | David and Goliath in urban history: Jacobs vs. Moses

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David and Goliath in urban history: Jacobs vs. Moses

Jacobs was the David to Moses’ Goliath.

Citizen Jane: Battle for the City, directed by Matt Tyrnauer

Source: 

https://www.npr.org/2017/04/21/525046934/city-planning-as-a-contact-sport-in-citizen-jane-battle-for-the-city

Three thousand years ago in the valley of Elah, David, a shepherd boy, with a stick in his hand and five stones on his back, confronted Goliath, a giant covered in armor and wearing three sharp weapons, and the outcome of their fight seemed self-evident. However, to everyone's surprise, David took out a stone and put it in the leather pouch of the stone thrower and fired it at Goliath's uncovered forehead, and Goliath fainted and fell to the ground. David ran over to Goliath and cut off his head with Goliath's sword. A young boy who seemed to have no chance of winning miraculously won the battle.

Documentary Citizen Jane: Battle for the City, directed by Matt Tyrnauer, chronicles the struggle between two mid-20th century worldviews: that of Robert Moses, who preached a cure for what ailed American cities that amounted to "bulldoze and replace," and the less destructive prescriptions of writer/activist Jane Jacobs, who challenged the whole notion of urban renewal in her game-changing book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Jacobs was the David to Moses’ Goliath. As New York's unelected but powerful parks commissioner, transit czar and head of public works, Moses was intent on creating the city of tomorrow — a place of glistening, angular high-rises, soaring bridges, and superhighways. And in the 1950s and '60s, he had the muscle to make them happen. As he talks of cutting out the "cancer" of slums, the images on-screen are of whole blocks being demolished by wrecking ball and explosives. Jacobs, on the other hand, is an outsider, a journalist, writer and mother, without even a college degree. Jacobs had organized and participated in numerous nonviolent actions to stop Moses' destructive transformation of New York. As an outsider, Jacobs unexpectedly defeated the powerful master builder on the question of what the city should be built for and by whom, writing a turning point in the history of urban thought.

Moses took a top-down approach to city planning that when you take a view from the clouds, the city's inhabitants become mere specks on your architectural models. "Today our greatest single problem is tenant removal," Moses intones matter-of-factly. "You have to move people out of the way of a slum clearance project, and a lot of them are not gonna like it." Grant the man a gift for understatement.

While Moses designed crisp city blocks from on high, Jane Jacobs was looking at New York from street level. To her a city wasn't about buildings — it was about people. Planners like Moses may have seen newsstands and folks sitting on front stoops as clutter, but Jacobs saw a vibrant streetscape.

They were natural antagonists, these two. And with archival footage and talking heads, the filmmakers lay out the differences in their outlooks, and then revisit their biggest battles. Jane had got involved in several efforts to stop Robert Moses from ripping the city of the pieces, starting with his attempt to run Fifth Avenue down through Washington Square. It was a place where many mothers brought their kids to play in the park, the front yard for neighborhood kids growing up, and it was a true reflection of a diverse neighborhood. It was also a paradise for children on weekdays, as well as a gathering place for residents, guitarists, villagers, singers and tourists on weekends. To Jane and many others, they were outraged about a road going through Washington Square, and they were going to save it. Washington Square was really Jane Jacobs’ beginning as a civic activist. She wrote to the mayor. Jane’s example that she set for herself is an example for other people to follow. All of the activists were involved in trying to stop that. Literally thousands of people turned to and it took quite a few years, but did save it. It was certainly the first public defeat for Robert Moses.

Right around the time of publishing The Death and Life of Great American Cities, ironically, her own neighborhood of the West Village, the neighborhood that she had proclaimed as a model for what neighborhoods could be was earmarked for urban renewal. Jacobs lashed out at the government bureau after hearing the news. She decided to show up to urge the frustrated planners, She thereupon began to devote herself to frustrating planners, and so did the whole neighborhood. Jane called the meeting of local residents, organized people to speak at public meetings and got everybody to wear sunglasses with an X painted on them. She filed a lawsuit against the city of New York to try to block the urban renewal plan. They prevailed and at the end of the day the slum designation never happened in the West Village. She effectively showed the people of Greenwich Village that they could fight city hall that they did not have to accept the plans of the planners at their drafting tables. Greenwich Village is a proxy for a wave that was starting to take hold in United States where there was increasing resistance to centralized authority.

Robert Moses and his constituency wanted it all to be very simplified and sterilized. whole downtowns were being bulldozed. They were destroying lives and replacing them with these housing projects and kept doing it over and over and over again in cities all over the country. The ideal in Le Corbusier’s model didn’t happen. But what ended up happening is nobody ever hung out in the public space around these projects, so they became underpopulated places. And they actually very quickly became some of the most dangerous places in the world. The programs amplified all of the pathological and antisocial elements of power and public housing became places of fear. Most importantly, urban renewal projects were disguised as tools to segregate Negroes. It's as though the builders haven't realized that children would be living there nor did they foresee the crime and vandalism, which is really acting out of rage and self-loathing that can make people want to destroy their own property. That's what happens when people lose their homes against their will. After thinking about problems, the city planners blew it up. Everything was eliminated by these projects. "This is not the re-building of cities,"  Jacobs wrote. "This is the sacking of cities."

The most profound influence on the city in the last 100 years has been the automobile. The first of Moses' commandments for progress is thou shalt drive. What he was really doing was tearing up vital neighborhoods. Jane Jacobs was one of the first people to say the car is not supreme. The people who walk on the sidewalk are what makes the city. For example, The cross Bronx expressway ripped through the heart and the middle of the Bronx, creating what was a wall between the northern and the southern part of the Bronx. It was breaking down the physical structure. The urban highways were profoundly destructive and it really became a battle between opposing forces. So did the construction of the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which was to have connected the Holland Tunnel with the Williamsburg and Manhattan bridges. It would've destroyed most of SoHo, one of the greatest inventories of 19th century buildings in the world. At the defining hearing in 1968, Jane was arrested and charged with three felonies. After the trial, she was acquitted on these counts. She became the hero. And the politics did shift at that point. The lower Manhattan expressway was officially dead in the year 1970. Meanwhile, across the country these kinds of freeway revolts were taking place. The battle for the city was on.

A city is not just a physical object and it is a living thing. As cities around the world are obliged to house this dramatically increasing population, we still have the conversation in terms of top down versus bottom up, formality versus informality. These are the eternal polarities of thinking about the city. At the end of the film, Saskia Sassen said, "China Today is Moses on steroid and the notion that Moses could not have conceived." No one knows what this extraordinary expansion means. Large tracts of urbanized farmland, isolated buildings. But we know that Jane Jacobs's views are still useful. As urbanization turns into a global issue, we can still find clues to solve the current urban problems in Jane's words and opinions.

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