New York’s dissident urban theorist Jane Jacobs is the subject of this bracing, invigorating documentary. Yet it has no very reassuring message for the future, or for what can be done to keep her message alive. After the war, New York City’s urban planning became the province of just one man, Robert Moses, a conceited wheeler-dealer who secured federal funds for his grand designs and became more important than any elected official. He was what this film calls a “super block modernist”, dropping his great rectilinear urban-renewal designs from above like some fusion of Le Corbusier and Bomber Harris. Moses wiped away slum tenements wholesale and replaced them with grim, soulless and cheaply made projects which became the nurseries of crime. He was also an enthusiast for vast motorways – “parkways” – which would service the all-important automobile industry at the cost of displacing communities and knocking down important buildings.
Against him was journalist and activist Jacobs, who believed that cities had to evolve from the bottom up, their forms being the organic result of hive-mind cooperation. With her intensely intelligent birdlike face, she reminded me a little of Pauline Kael. Director Matt Tyrnauer compares her to Betty Friedan and Rachel Carson: one shot shows her wearing a “Mailer for Mayor” badge: I’d have liked to hear more about that. Nowadays, China is building horrendous megacities, described here as “Moses on steroids”. Where is the Chinese Jane Jacobs to take them on?
