A libertarian take on urban renewal. Filmmaker Jim Epstein read The Power Broker
From Planetizen:
Epstein found a number of folks who lived in a black community up on West 99th Street that was cleared by Moses’ Manhattantown project:
“In 2007, Epstein started digging through the archives and interviewing residents to learn more about the neighborhood that had vanished. From this work, he created a 7-minute documentary portrait of the old community…”
Cross-posted on Yurbanism.
Over the weekend, I came across an interesting article about a recent panel convened at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City to discuss a new book by Brown University professor Samuel (“Sandy”) Zipp entitled Manhattan Projects: the Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York. Among many other things, the panel engaged in an interesting discussion on the respective legacies of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs.
Here’s a passage from the article:
For the last few decades, it has been taken as a given by urban planners that “urban renewal,” the approach to planning in the 1950s and early 60s that resulted in bulldozed neighborhoods, modern public housing projects, and lots of urban highways, was a bad way to go about building a city. It’s axiomatic that a better way to go about it is to make the streets better for people and worse for cars, and encourage “mixed-use” development, among other things.
In New York specifically, Robert Moses, the post-war king of roads and “slum-clearance” made infamous by Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, has come to stand for urban renewal, and Jane Jacobs, who idealized and sought to preserve the West Village, and whose Death and Life of Great American Cities is still considered a prerequisite read for students in the field, represents the reaction.
That’s the history. But the cultural and intellectual legacy of urban renewal today is something a lot more complex.
The article ends with this quote:
“We used to say we plan at the scale of Robert Moses, but we judge ourselves by the standard of Jane Jacobs,” [New York City Planning Commissioner Amanda] Burden said in her introduction. “That’s not really true anymore. We judge ourselves now by Jan Gehl’s standard.”
A few days ago, I came across a cool site called Qu3stions. The site gives readers the opportunity to ‘listen in’ on short but illuminating conversations with interesting people.
While they normally ask questions of living people, they recently decided to take a different tack and profile Jane Jacobs. Instead of asking real-time questions, given that she passed away in 2006, they instead took three questions—and Jacobs’ answers—from some of her best interviews over the years. Over the next three days, I will be reposting, each question and response.
First up is a question from Bill Steigerwald (BS) in a June 2001 interview for Reason:
BS: What do you think you’ll be remembered for most? You were the one who stood up to the federal bulldozers and the urban renewal people and said they were destroying the lifeblood of these cities. Is that what it will be?
JJ: No. If I were to be remembered as a really important thinker of the century, the most important thing I’ve contributed is my discussion of what makes economic expansion happen. This is something that has puzzled people always. I think I’ve figured out what it is.
Expansion and development are two different things. Development is differentiation of what already existed. Practically every new thing that happens is a differentiation of a previous thing, from a new shoe sole to changes in legal codes.
Expansion is an actual growth in size or volume of activity. That is a different thing.
I’ve gone at it two different ways. Way back when I wrote The Economy of Cities, I wrote about import replacing and how that expands, not just the economy of the place where it occurs, but economic life altogether. As a city replaces imports, it shifts its imports. It doesn’t import less. And yet it has everything it had before.
The Villager, a well respected weekly newspaper serving downtown Manhattan, ran an obituary this week for Erik Wensberg. Mr. Wensberg was a friend and ally of Jane Jacobs during her battles against Robert Moses in the 1960s.
From the obiturary:
Erik Dana Wensberg, a writer, editor and longtime Village resident who worked with the late Jane Jacobs in the successful efforts to prevent the destruction of the neighborhood 40 years ago, died June 5 at age 79. He died of pneumonia, said his sister, Eleanor Pelcyger.
…
With Jacobs, he was a founding member of the West Village Committee and joined her in the successful effort to block the urban renewal project that would have destroyed 14 blocks of the Village. He also joined the fight to block Robert Moses’ 1963 plan for the Lower Manhattan Expressway from river to river on Broome St.
In an interview in April 2006, Wensberg told The Villager, “We didn’t win them all. We opposed the [N.Y.U.] Bobst Library, saying it was a waste of space and would cast a shadow on Washington Square Park. It does. And we opposed the World Trade Center.”
Jacobs enlisted Wensberg to read and edit the manuscript of her groundbreaking book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” before she submitted it to her editor at Random House, according to his sister.
“She was only one of many authors who sought his expert editorial advice,” Pelcyger said.
…
Read the whole article here.
As I have posted before, one of Jane Jacobs’ first forays into the public realm was in 1956, when Douglas Haskell, an editor at Architectural Forum magazine, became sick before a speech at the landmark Conference on Urban Design at Harvard University. In his place, he sent Jacobs, one of his associate editors. She had only spoken in public once before in her life and had great stage fright. As such, she decided to stick with what she was familiar with and simply shared her pointed observation on the mechanisms of city planning and urban renewal.
Given her inexperience in public speaking and her rather critical account of the current state of urban planning Jacobs expected a cold reaction from the crowd. To her surprise, the speech received rowdy applause. As a result, renowned urbanist William H. Whyte invited her to write a corresponding article in Fortune magazine, where he worked.
The essay, entitled Downtown is for People, put Jacobs on the radar of many urban theorists and developers. More importantly, it was her impetus to begin gathering her observations and her urban prescriptions. These were published in her seminal book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961.
While many observers of the urban condition are familiar withe the book, they are less familiar with the speech and article that started it all. The article concluded Fortune’s series on the ‘exploding metropolis.’ The series, which began with Whyte’s Are Cities Un-American? (September, 1957), included Francis Bello’s The City and the Car (October), Seymour Freedgood’s New Strength in City Hall (November), Daniel Seligman’s The Enduring Slums (December), and Whyte’s Urban Sprawl (January, 1958). Jacob’s Downtown is for People appeared in the April 1958 edition.
Together these essays address the problems of urban decline and suburban sprawl, transportation, city politics, open space, and the character and fabric of cities. The collected essays have since been published in book form, with the subtitle, “A study of the assault on urbanism and how our cities can resist.” Selection passages from the book are available on Google Reader.
I hope by posting this essay, you will gain a deeper appreciation of how Jane Jacobs saw the city, and a better understanding of what I am trying to do with this blog and through organizing the annual Jane’s Walk in Phoenix. Please feel free to share your own questions and observations in the comments section.
Given the length of the essay, I have decided to post it in sections. I will post part one tomorrow. If you can’t wait and want to read the entire essay on one siting, you can do so here.
Jane's Walk is a series of free neighborhood walking tours to get people in touch with their environments and each other. Jane's Walks help citizens celebrate their communities and to discover themselves... all over again. Jane's Walk Phoenix will return in May 2012. Stay tuned for details!
Jane's Walk Phoenix: No problem Taz. I'm glad I found a great new coor...
Blooming Rock: Thanks for reposting this Yuri! Can't wait to be i...
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