Citizen Jane: Battle for the City—Documentary on the life
and times of urban activist Jane Jacobs
By Clare Hurley
27 July 2017
27 July 2017
Matt Tyrnauer’s Citizen
Jane: Battle for the City is a documentary film about journalist and
activist Jane Jacobs (1916-2006). Author of The Death and Life of Great
American Cities (1960), Jacobs is also known for her crusades against
several large-scale infrastructure projects in New York City in the 1960s.
Not an urban planner by
training, Jacobs enjoyed her role as an iconoclastic journalist writing on
urban affairs for Architectural Forum and then Fortune
Magazinebeginning in the 1950s. Basing herself on direct observation,
particularly of her beloved Greenwich Village, in her Death and Life of
Great American Cities, she drew far-ranging conclusions about what made for
successful neighborhoods. Contrary to the conceptions advanced by urban
planners and architects, she believed these were characterized above all by
what she called a lively “sidewalk culture,” in which neighbors watch each
other’s children as they play in the spray of fire-hydrants and otherwise live
in an urban environment as they would in a close-knit village.
Still influential among urban planners, the book
is most important for its emphasis on the human element of cities. Citing the
example of grandly conceived civic centers that become wastelands, Jacobs
argues that the best-laid plans of architects and planners come to naught if
people are unable to satisfy the requirements of daily life within a given
built environment, and that sometimes less well-“planned” environments prove
better able to offer a diversity of housing, shopping, employment and
recreation.
Citizen Jane mainly focuses on
Jacobs’s role in the late 1950s and 1960s as an opponent of a proposal to build
a four-lane highway through historic Washington Square Park in downtown
Manhattan to connect traffic flow north and south of the park. The plan, first
proposed in the 1940s by then-Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, had gone through
several iterations but was still fiercely opposed by local Greenwich Village
residents.
Jacobs, the prototype middle class grassroots
activist with a flair for publicity, mobilized housewives and neighborhood
kids, elicited support from former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and eminent
city planner Lewis Mumford, and bombarded city officials with petitions until
the plan was finally scrapped.
The victory of Jacobs and her supporters in the
campaign against the Washington Square highway proposal came at the tail end of
a series of large-scale public works projects in New York, many of them under
Moses’s direction. Serving first as parks commissioner in the 1930s and then as
head of municipal authorities under Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, Moses organized
projects that included the construction of numerous major bridges together with
the city’s network of expressways, highways and parkways.
Moses’s earlier focus on public works that
benefited broad layers of the population in their neighborhoods gave way, in
the post-World War II period, to “slum clearance,” with often devastating
consequences for many communities. The construction of the Cross-Bronx
Expressway, finally completed in 1972 after 25 years, involved the razing of
entire working class neighborhoods. This was the type of project that Jacobs
opposed most vehemently.
The central conceit
of Citizen Jane (and much of the media coverage of Jacobs’s
life and work) is that its heroine and Moses were locked in a titanic struggle
for the “soul” of the city, a conflict pitting the populist Jacobs, with her
vision of “cozy, scrambled” urban areas, against a grandiose, utilitarian and
sterile bureaucracy. This vast over-simplification ignores the historical and class
questions involved in the transformation of New York over the course of half a
century from a patchwork of self-contained neighborhoods into a modern,
integrated metropolitan area.
That Moses’s infrastructure projects connected
the city by a network of highways—not surprisingly much of it federally
funded—and gave pride of place to the automobile instead of public
transportation was bound up with the exigencies and peculiarities of American
capitalism in the post-World War II period. Moses’s ego and overbearing
personality had little to do with it.
Jacobs took for granted, every bit as much as
Moses did, the existing social order. Her criticisms, in the end, reflected the
concerns of petty bourgeois layers who desired to make life as comfortable for
themselves, and for as many others as possible, while accepting the overall
domination of big business over American (and Canadian) life. Frankly, as long
as neighborhoods like Greenwich Village and the Annex in Toronto (where Jacobs
lived from 1971 until her death) could be preserved, neighborhoods that became
more and more expensive to live in as time passed, a good many of her political
and urban planning goals were met.
The fate of the urban
working class population was not a central issue for Jacobs, nor is it for
Tyrnauer in Citizen Jane.
The film does admit,
however, that overcrowding and the generally miserable conditions in stifling
tenements, famously documented by photographer/reformer Jacob Riis (1849-1914)
in his How the Other Half Lives (1890), might have been a
reason people hung out communally on their stoops.
The interviews conducted
with contemporary city planners and urbanists make up the weakest portion of
Tyrnauer’s film. Prominent among those interviewed is architecture critic Paul
Goldberger, who has written on the rebuilding of the World Trade Center
in Up From Zero: Politics, Architecture, and the Rebuilding of New York(2004).
The overarching thrust of the various comments
is that “livable” cities develop “organically” and that attempts at overall
planning are well-intentioned and utopian at best, but authoritarian at heart.
Moreover, such attempts, according to the commentators, are often
misinterpretations of the principles elaborated by pioneers of modernism, such
as Swiss-French architect, designer and urban planner Le Corbusier (1887-1965).
The latter designed projects like the Radiant
City in Marseilles, first elaborated in 1930 in connection with the French
syndicalist movement, which was as much a plan for social reform as urban
design. The planned city, integrating housing, industry, civic and municipal
buildings in networks of tall towers, connected by paths and multi-tiered
walkways instead of streets with major traffic routed underground, was never
built. It did, however, become the general model for innumerable public housing
projects in Europe and the United States, as well as being the basis for the
layout of newly developed megacities such as Brasilia in Brazil and Chandigarh,
India.
The film recycles the notion that housing
projects for the working class were doomed to become blighted areas of
concentrated poverty, leaving out one small fact—that modernist architects like
Le Corbusier (who visited and worked in the Soviet Union between 1928 and 1934)
envisaged their projects as part of the overall transformation of society and
the elimination of poverty and social inequality. There are examples of
successful high-rise building projects that are home to thousands of working
class families, indicating that the urban blight that is often associated with
modernism is rather a consequence of poverty.
Ultimately, with its unqualified admiration for
“Citizen Jane’s” outlook, Tyrnauer’s film fails to draw out the implications of
“organic” development under capitalism, which in effect means that corporate
interests have free rein to develop real estate—be it high-rise towers or
brownstones—for the wealthy, while anything rationally “planned,” i.e.,
designed for the working class, is unprofitable and, especially in recent
decades, deemed a waste of resources.
There is obviously a crying need for vast,
complex, publicly organized projects to provide the high-quality housing,
transportation, employment and public space, along with the power and
technology grids, required by populations living in urban areas, including
mega-cities such as Tokyo, Shanghai, Jakarta, Delhi, New York and Mexico City.
This will not arise spontaneously out of the
existing conditions of the profit system, but will require the planned,
rational mobilization of society’s resources by the working class under
socialism to meet the needs of globalized mass society in the twenty-first
century.
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