| “Cities have the
capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when,
they are created by everybody.” – Jane
Jacobs
The film
highlights Jane Jacobs’ magisterial 1961 treatise The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in which she
single-handedly undercuts her era’s orthodox model of city planning, exemplified
by the massive Urban Renewal projects of New York’s “Master Builder,” Robert
Moses. Jacobs and Moses figure centrally in our story as archetypes of the
“bottom up” and the “top down,” respectively. They also figure as two
larger-than-life personalities: Jacobs, a journalist with provincial origins,
no formal training in city planning, and scarce institutional authority seems
at first glance to share little in common with Robert Moses, a high prince of
government and urban theory fully ensconced in New York’s halls of power and
privilege. Yet both reveal themselves to be master tacticians who, in the
middle of the 20th century, became locked in an epic struggle over the fate of
the city. In three suspenseful acts, Citizen
Jane: Battle for the City gives audiences a front row seat to this battle,
and shows how two opposing visions of urban greatness continue to ripple across
the world stage, with unexpectedly high stakes. |
