Matt Tyrnauer’s engaging, chirpily scored documentary centres on New Yorker Jane Jacobs. A journalist who began her career writing about city life in Vogue, she rallied against the architectural modernism that formed the backbone of urban planner Robert Moses’s quick-fix clean-up programme. Jacobs insisted that with skyscrapers come slums, emphasising the city as a community of people rather than a collection of buildings. The film spends a little too long on Jacobs’s involvement in killing Moses’s proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway, but it’s energising to see civil disobedience linked with feminist, environmental and anti-war movements that played out contemporaneously. A celebration of grassroots activism and a cry for community, this should appeal to those interested in the history and politics of urbanisation as well as architecture nerds.
