In 1960 Jane Jacobs’s book The Death and Life of Great American Cities sent shockwaves through the architecture and planning worlds, with its exploration of the consequences of modern planners’ and architects’ reconfiguration of cities. Jacobs was also an activist, who was involved in many fights in mid-century New York, to stop “master builder” Robert Moses from running roughshod over the city. This film retraces the battles for the city as personified by Jacobs and Moses, as urbanization moves to the very front of the global agenda. Many of the clues for formulating solutions to the dizzying array of urban issues can be found in Jacobs’s prescient text, and a close second look at her thinking and writing about cities is very much in order. This film sets out to examine the city of today though the lens of one of its greatest champions.
How one woman harnessed people power to ‘save’ old New York
New
film tells story of Jane Jacobs’s battles against the wealthiest
developers in the city
Jane
Jacobs ‘wrote the manual on social activism’.
Edward Helmore
Sunday 23 April 2017
00.05 BST
She was a beaky,
bespectacled architecture writer, hardly a figure likely to ignite
protests that changed the shape of one of the world’s great cities.
Yet such is the legend of Jane Jacobs and her bitter struggles to
preserve the heart of New York from modernisation that a film
charting her astonishing victories over some of the most powerful
developers in the US is set to inspire a new generation of urban
activists around the world.
Citizen Jane: Battle
for the City tells the story of Jacobs, author of The Death and Life
of Great American Cities, who made herself the bane of New York’s
powerful city planners from the 1950s to 1970s. Her nemesis was
Robert Moses, the city’s powerful master builder and advocate of
urban renewal, or wholesale neighbourhood clearance – what author
James Baldwin termed “negro removal”.
Moses dismissed the
protesters as “a bunch of mothers”, and attempted to ignore their
efforts to attract wider attention, which included taping white
crosses across their glasses in the style of Jacobs.
But through a
combination of grassroots activism, fundraising and persistence,
Jacobs blocked Moses and successive city overlords from running Fifth
Avenue through the historic Washington Square, tearing down much of
SoHo and Little Italy to make way for a billion-dollar expressway,
and building a six-lane highway up Manhattan’s west side.
“Some issues you
fight with lawsuits and buy time that way,” she later wrote. “With
others, you buy time by throwing other kinds of monkey wrenches in.
You have to buy time in all these fights. The lawsuit is the more
expensive way.”
Jacobs warned of the
dangers of mixing big business and government, and called them
“monstrous hybrids”. She warned, too, that huge housing projects
favoured by developers from the school of Le Corbusier would only
bring social dislocation to the poor while making developers wealthy.
Jacobs’s method of
prevarication, says Citizen Jane director Matt Tyrnauer, wrote the
manual for activism. “Speaking truth to power was her great
strength, and she was fearless, but she was also a great strategist
and analysed how to get to politicians and threaten them in ways that
were going to be effective.”
Robert Hammond, who
produced Citizen Jane and co-founded the High Line, a significant
renewal project along Manhattan’s west side that turned an elevated
rail track into a garden and walkway, says key to her protest was
targeting lower-tier elected officials “because they depend on you
for their jobs and they know it. She understood that fighting
government is a slog, and no matter how powerful you think people
are, things can be changed … the value of individuals coming
together and working as an organism, which today we call
crowdsourcing.”
Those lessons, in
particular Jacobs’s later studies of economics, helped shape The
Indivisible Project, an umbrella organisation for thousands of
protest groups that have sprung up in the US in the aftermath of the
presidential election.
Tyrnauer, who
previously directed Valentino: The Last Emperor, considers that
Indivisible’s activism, which includes berating local officials and
challenging congressional leaders at town hall meetings, “is cut
from the Jacobs playbook”. Late last year the group’s founders,
four congressional aides moved to act by the election of Donald
Trump, published suggestions that have become central to democratic
resistance. Six thousand groups have registered so far, seeking to
follow Indivisible’s basic, Jacobs-esque credo: localised defensive
advocacy; recognition that elected representatives think primarily
about re-election and how to use that; efforts to build constituent
power through organically formed, locally led groups; and a focus on
congressional representatives via town hall meetings, district office
visits and mass phone calls.
Jane Jacobs won
many victories over her nemesis Robert Moses, the powerful master
builder.
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Jane Jacobs won
many victories over her nemesis Robert Moses, the powerful master
builder. Photograph: Library of Congress/Sundance Selects
“In her academic
and personal life, Jacobs looked at the power individuals have in
their own communities,” says co-founder and executive director Ezra
Levin. “Indivisible is fundamentally about constituent power, and
we recommend that people assert that power on their own turf, in
their own communities.” But the connection runs deeper. Jacobs
maintained cities are best left to be self-organising. Too much
control and they become lifeless. She believed they should be messy –
something old, something new – and warned of the concentration of
money and too little diversity. Crucial to Indivisible’s success is
an individual group’s basic autonomy. “It’s crucial that this
is not a franchise operation. We’ve created a platform but the
decisions these groups are taking, or their exact form is
fundamentally driven at a local level.”
Jacobs, who died in
2006 and whose centennial falls this year, used to tell an
anti-authoritarian story about a preacher who warns children: “In
hell, there will be wailing and weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
“What if you don’t
have teeth?” one of the children asks.
“Then teeth will
be provided.”
“That’s it –
the spirit of the designed city: teeth will be provided for you,”
she told the New Yorker in 2004.
In Citizen Jane, the
documentarians seek to apply the lessons of Manhattan in the 50s to
the urbanisation of China and India. The results are inconclusive.
Many of the
challenges cities now face, at least in the west, are reversals of
the clearances that affected cities in the last century. “The
suburbs are where the poor people are moved to, and they’re
becoming more impractical than cities to live in,” says Hammond.
Film
Review: ‘Citizen Jane: Battle for the City’
Owen Gleiberman
Chief Film Critic
A fascinating
documentary captures the showdown, half a century ago, between the
activist Jane Jacobs and the Trumpian urban planner Robert Moses: a
fight for the future of New York.
“Citizen Jane:
Battle for the City,” directed by the gifted journalist and
documentarian Matt Tyrnauer (“Valentino: The Last Emperor”),
tells the story of a David-and-Goliath fight over urban planning that
took place more than 50 years ago. Yet the movie just about pulses
with contemporary resonance. It has moments of uncanny overlap with
this week’s election, and it explores the scope and meaning of that
overly familiar thing — the city — in ways that will box open
your thinking. It’s a finely woven tapestry that feels as relevant
and alive as the place you live.
It’s also got
great sparks of conflict. The movie, which kicked off the seventh DOC
NYC film festival last night, features two nearly mythological
antagonists. In one corner is Robert Moses, the scabrous New York
power broker and construction czar who, in the years after World War
II, transformed the city by gutting its poorer sections and erecting
miles of concrete-slab housing projects and snaking superhighways. In
the other corner is Jane Jacobs, activist and author of “The Death
and Life of Great American Cities” (1961), who led an uprising
against Moses’ dehumanized dream of a paved-over utopia. She fought
his plans to destroy Washington Square Park, to bulldoze the
beautiful historic buildings of Greenwich Village, and to bisect
lower Manhattan with an expressway that would likely have been the
most ruinous — and influential — disaster of urban “renewal”
in the history of the United States.
It’s no trick
figuring out who to root for, but the fascination of “Citizen Jane”
isn’t just in seeing how Jacobs took on the system and won. The
movie invites you to sink into her challengingly supple and vibrant
analysis of why cities, which we mostly take for granted, are in fact
rather magical places. Even if you live in one and think you know it
inside out, you come away from “Citizen Jane” understanding, more
than you did going in, the special chemistry of what makes a city
tick.
It comes from the
ground up — and that’s the tricky thing to see, since urban
planning generally occurs from the top down. Moses started out in the
’30s as a progressive thinker, but his idea of what it would take
to make cities better evolved into a Teutonic, machine-age vision of
monolithic apartment buildings in massively organized rows and
“clean” streetscapes erected in place of all the neighborhood
hurly-burly. We see Moses in clips from the ’40s and ’50s, a
blustery, dour-looking man whose eyes gleam with reptilian cunning,
and each time he talks about making things better, he expresses such
high-handed contempt for those who’ll be displaced that he sounds
like he’s talking about roaches. His “philosophy” walks a thin
line between improvement and incineration.
Jane Jacobs rejects
all of this, but not just on basic common moral human grounds. At
heart, she’s an anthropologist, and her subject is the mysterious
spirituality of neighborhoods: the way they evolve, over generations,
into thriving organic places that are nurturing and protective and
are embedded with stories that rise out of the streets. Jacobs makes
the point that true neighborhoods, with clusters of small businesses
and people sitting on stoops, are far safer than the stark moonscapes
proposed by Moses — there are more people around, so the streets
are more naturally patrolled. (Sure enough, once housing projects
started to get built, they turned out to be far more dangerous
places.) More than just “blocks,” they’re human networks,
enveloping hives.
This is only
Tyrnauer’s second feature, but he has taken a subject that might
have been dryly academic and turned it into a visual hymn to the
streets of New York — to how their development, over the 20th
century, influenced everything around them. Tyrnauer interpolates
clips from the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, to the
point that the past starts to feel like a living thing. New York was
built, but more than that it metastasized, so when Moses treated
low-income sections of it as a “cancer” that had to be cut out
(he would happily have razed Harlem), he was violating the city’s
essence.
Jacobs’ first
fight with him is over his attempt to extend Fifth Avenue through the
center of Washington Square Park. Sure, it’s just one park, but ask
anyone in London or Paris — or the stroller-wheeling mothers of
Greenwich Village — how serenely uplifting a park can be. What
Moses really wanted to do was take a gathering place and put a spike
through it. Jacobs, who at this point was an unknown journalist
thought of by her foes as a “housewife,” wrote letters, went to
meetings, formed and led a coalition, and in the end shot the plan
down.
With her long thin
nose, graying hair, and elfin grin, Jacobs bears a striking
resemblance to the film critic Pauline Kael (with a hint of a female
Poindexter), and she’s got some of Kael’s playful imperiousness.
Born in 1916, she’s a bohemian scamp who starts off writing about
the city for places like Vogue. By the time she reaches her forties,
she has evolved into an activist, but in the least self-righteous way
possible; she wants to preserve her home. In the duel between herself
and Moses, gender is far from incidental, and not just because Jacobs
emerged out of the same second-wave-feminist era defined by writers
like Betty Friedan (“The Feminine Mystique”) and Rachel Carson
(“Silent Spring”). Jacobs’ vision of the city was bravely and
spectacularly feminine: She viewed it as a teeming enigmatic
cooperative, a garden of earthly delights, whereas Moses, offering a
degraded version of the ideas of the Swiss-French architect and urban
planner Le Courboisier (who’d created the template of the future
presented at the 1939 World’s Fair), was all about abstract
masculine dominion: tall hard buildings, no hint of mess, a city that
was nothing but sharp edges.
Since we’re
talking about buildings, it’s no stretch to say that there’s
something more than a little Trumpian about Robert Moses. His drive
to erect looming, impersonal housing was a form of control; his
desire to sweep everything else away was even worse — a fascism of
the spirit. “Citizen Jane” provides stunning evidence that as the
population explodes, more and more cities around the world are being
built in the spirit of Robert Moses: acres of skyscraper cages for
the anonymous horde. Yet the spirit of Jane Jacobs is heard each time
a neighborhood is allowed to evolve. What she fought and defeated,
most dramatically by keeping a highway out of lower Manhattan, was
the prototype for urban planning that would steamroll everyone it was
supposed to be planning for. Jacobs insisted that the city is a place
for the people. That’s why it can’t just “serve” them; it has
to express who they are.
Film Review:
'Citizen Jane: Battle for the City'
Reviewed at SVA
Theatre (DOC NYC), New York, November 10, 2016. MPAA Rating: Not
rated. Running time: 92 MIN.
Production
An Altimeter Films
production. Producers: Matt Tyrnauer, Robert Hammond, Corey Reeser,
Jessica Van Garsse.
Crew
Director: Matt
Tyrnauer. Camera (color, widescreen): Chris Dapkins. Editors: Daniel
Morfesis, Andrea Lewis.
With
Jane Jacobs, Robert
Moses.
FILED UNDER: Citizen
Jane: Battle for the City
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