![]() ‘Do you think anything would ever be built if we compensated people?’ … Robert Moses on what is now the site of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. We see the carnage inflicted by the Cross Bronx Expressway, the country’s first major urban highway, which carved a ravine through the borough, fatally separating north and south Bronx in a piece of vandalism described by writer Mike Davis as “the single most destructive act in the history of US cities”. The documentary forcefully charts Jacobs’ battles and the level of destruction power-hungry Moses inflicted on existing communities in the name of improving New York for the greater public good. People weren’t behaving as they should, the planners said, refusing to accept that their brave new concrete vision wasn’t tuned to how citizens actually behave. Jacobs had witnessed at first hand the failures of urban renewal in Philadelphia, where a zoning masterplan siloed different functions – housing, industry, offices, shops –into towers, separated by yawning public spaces lined with retail units that were soon lying empty. It all sounds like common sense now, but to the postwar planners – infected with the modernist dogma of sweeping the slate clean to make way for tower blocks in wide open spaces – this was an affront to everything they had been taught. Photograph: Paul Rudolph/Library of Congress Paul Rudolph’s plan for the Lower Manhattan Expressway, with accompanying monorail, from the documentary Citizen Jane. They cannot turn their backs or blank sides on it and leave it blind.” The buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers, and to insure the safety of both residents and strangers, must be oriented to the street. “There must be eyes upon the street,” she wrote, “eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street. This daily “street ballet” of public interaction that unfolded outside her house is depicted with archive footage of bustling Manhattan dating from the early to mid 20th century. To her, the success of a vibrant city came from the “intricacy of pavement use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes”. As one of the talking heads in the documentary puts it: “She was the hypersensitive antennae, picking up on things no one else could see.” Jacobs deployed her training in zoology, geology and political science to look at the city through an anthropologist’s eye, using ecological metaphors to describe urban life as a complex and fragile ecosystem. With startling precision and sensitivity, Jacobs detailed how streets and spaces are actually used by people, as opposed to how they are perceived from above on the politician’s grand plan. The Death and Life of Great American Cities was a rallying cry against the destruction the broad brush of postwar urban renewal was wreaking on the fine grain of the city. Three years after her Washington Square victory, the inquisitive self-taught journalist published a book that would change urban planning for ever. Now arriving in the UK, the film brings home the enduring relevance of her ideas. Watch the trailer for Citizen Jane: Battle for the City
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