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Citizen Jane: Battle for the City (2016)
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[indistinct chatter] [typewriter clacking] [instrumental music] Cities are, in many ways, the greatest invention that human beings have brought to the world. Cities have been expanding and urbanization has been expanding on the globe in an exponential fashion. Most extraordinarily, we are urbanizing people on the planet, at maybe one and a half million people every week In less than 2 months there'll be the equivalent to another Los Angeles metropolitan area on this planet. This scale and speed of urbanization has never, ever happened in human history. This is the first time. When you look at what is being built in cities you have endless, endless row after row of homogenizing towers. And you see more and more highways. At this moment, you're going to shape the cities for generations to come. People need to realize this is an opportunity which will never come again. There are a couple of ways of approaching the design of cities. The question is always who decides.. ...what the physical form will be.. ...how the city is going to function and who is going to live in the city. In order to understand what's happening today.. ...we need to think about 2 great figures in the middle of the 20th century who embodied the struggle for the city. The legendary power broker Robert Moses represented the authority of the great man who was gonna come into the city with his carving knife and clear away the cancerous tissue.. [crash] ...and replace it with the shiny implements of modernist planning. Uh, you have to move a lot of people out of the way of a big housing, uh, project or, uh, slum clearance project. A lot of 'em are not going to like it. Many of them are misinformed. In opposition to the homogenizing clarity of Moses was Jane Jacobs. I have very little faith, uh i -- in, in even the kind of person who, uh, prefers to take a large overall uh, view of things. Jacobs was an outsider. She believed the city is not about buildings. The city is about people. It is about public spaces and the street and she stood up for that. She evolved both a theory of what made a good and just city and a theory of opposition to the kind of planning practice that Moses represented. There's a prudishness, a fear of life a wish to direct things from some uncontaminated refuge that is part and parcel of their bad plan. They were famously at odds with each other. It really did become a war between opposing forces. Today we're still fighting these battles across the world. When we look across the spectrum of all the problems generated by urbanization there is the extraordinary realization that, my gosh you know, these have been problems that have been around for the last 100 years in cities. New York, of course is the greatest example of that. In the 1930s New York was the world's greatest city, you know? A very special place. Just the exuberance of metropolitan life in the early 20th century. That's, you know, the -- the great age of the first real great skyscrapers. You know, the Empire State Building is the very climax of that. But then, it all kind of crashes with The Depression. Through the entire decade of the '30s it's just one problem after another. Down at street level was this degraded environment. Slums and dirt and, and pollution that did not fit with the glorious spires of the new skyscraper city. The city was overcrowded harsh, dirty, dangerous and infested with disease. Jacob Riis' famous book "How The Other Half Live" brought a lot of attention to this. The idea was, we will solve the city's problem by cleaning it up. Now this is a unfortunate period for the city. We've done an immense amount to cure these diseases and we have much more to do. Robert Moses started to work in an era where we had a great many people living in truly horrible conditions. He began his professional life in opposition to those conditions. Moses emerged out of the Progressive Movement early in the 20th century in New York. The progressives were eager to improve the city. His early work in developing public parks and public beaches was about making life better for people who were not rich. Now if we don't clean out these slums the central areas are going to rot. And it's all nonsense to say that the problem can be solved by rehabilitating and fixing up Old Law Tenements. It can't be done. That problem we've got to face. Just about every progressive believed that the way to solve the city's problems was to wipe the slate clean, start all over again. We didn't understand how high the price was how we were giving up so many things that were so very important until Jane Jacobs came along. Jane always would see in a city opportunities that existed there. She observed hints of regeneration hints of creativity hints of resourcefulness. It was this life spring of people coming to make their way. I think that must have shaped her approach to the city. I just loved coming to New York. It was inexhaustible. Just to walk around its streets and wonder at it. So many streets different. So many neighborhoods different. Uh, so much going on. She lived in Greenwich Village and just viscerally felt the pulse of the city and was extraordinarily intuitive. Was extremely observant. New York was a place where you don't have to be big and important and rich or have a great plot of land or a great development scheme or something like that to do something. And maybe even do something new and do something interesting. A place that has scope for all kinds of people. What she saw was the soul of New York and what it meant to be a city and a city meaning a community of people. After the war, the most sensational thing that came was the full flowering of this vision of the expressway tower city. This generation of idealistic city planners comes along and they're infected with the modernist purity idea. And they certainly have the tools at their disposal to sweep away large tracts of land. We recognize the problems that your community faces and we know that you share them with hundreds of cities everywhere. Now what's involved in making your city a better place? Well, things like housing industrial development better streets and highways. Improving all these things adds up to a better city. I'm sure that you will see the exciting opportunity that exists for your city to become better. There was this emerging idea that crowded urban areas where people were kind of hanging out on the street on their stoops, uh, where there was a lot of poverty that the way to deal with that problem was to effectively get rid of the streets. Was effectively to eliminate that sidewalk culture. And build projects that would make it impossible really for people to kind of cluster in public in that way. The idea of urban renewal was that places that were blighted were a cancer on the city and therefore, we're gonna cut out the cancer. The planners conceiving these urban renewal projects are doing this from that God-like vantage point in the sky. To be able to look down and you're able to imagine massive transformations. They thought that applying the logic of The Machine Age was gonna do that. The problem had to be solved by some supervisor noticing where the slums were, noticing where the traffic was and going in and bulldozing.. ...and building grand projects. Well, we got out a brochure just now telling when everybody has to move. Robert Moses was the great embodiment of this. I don't honestly believe that considering the large numbers of people we've had to move out of the way of public housing and other public improvements I don't believe that we've done any very substantial amount of harm. There must be people who are discommoded inconvenienced or call it what you will on the old theory, that you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs. After the Second World War Robert Moses began to amass power. He was the august parks commissioner in the city of New York. And he got power to build parkways. He was appointed the city's construction coordinator. He built thousands of apartments. He became urban renewal czar the head of the mayor's committee on slum clearance. By the time that Moses was running the Urban Renewal Program we had torn down literally thousands of tenement buildings in cities like New York and Chicago. You know, there's the, the pre-war Moses and the post-war Moses. The pre-war Moses was mostly an angel. Post-war Moses was increasingly problematic. For nearly half a century this man has pushed people around New York. Almost anybody who is anybody has cursed him fought him, knuckled under to him and admired him. The list of his adversaries include Franklin Roosevelt Fanny Hurst, Elmer Davis who once compared him to Hitler, Walter O'Malley and hundreds of thousands of landowners who thought their property was sacred. Absolute power corrupts absolutely and Robert Moses was absolutely powerful. So he had amassed, um, not simply an incredible amount of power but had insulated himself from oversight by political authorities and by the broader public. Don't forget that it's one thing to buy a park or a great big chunk of land from one owner. It's quite another thing to get a right-of-way where hundreds and even thousands of people own it. You theoretically and, according to some of the, uh goo-goos and uplift organizations we ought to negotiate with every individual until he's happy. Can you imagine when you'd build anything under those conditions? Moses along with all of the people that were involved in the Urban Renewal Program had an agreed-upon agenda. People needed adequate housing adequate recreation facilities and the motorcar was coming to America and it needed to be accommodated on a large scale. That was the agenda. Moses became one polar view of what you could do. Until, all of a sudden, there was an alternative. Jane Jacobs has in "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" written a book that advances with the controlled and implacable power of a bulldozer against modern orthodox city planning and rebuilding. I first began to look into city planning and, and housing and it was unbelievably awful. Uh, insane. When "Death And Life" comes out in the '60s it's a clarion call. It's Martin Luther nailing those 95 theses to the, to the cathedral door. The book is really the first cogent accessible articulation of a whole set of ideas that questions the mainstream thinking about our cities. She is constantly probing. By that example, she's saying "You, reader, you have the ability to question." "Look what we have built. "Low-income projects that become "worse centers of delinquency "vandalism and general social hopelessness "than the slums they were supposed to replace. "Middle-income housing projects "which are truly marvels of dullness and regimentation.. "...sealed against any buoyancy or vitality of city life. "Luxury housing projects that mitigate their inanity "or try to with a vapid vulgarity. "Cultural centers that are unable to support "a good bookstore. "Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums "who have fewer choices of loitering place than others. "Expressways that eviscerate great cities. "This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities." She was questioning orthodoxy and in essence saying the emperor has no clothes.. ...at a time when women were not welcomed in those kinds of environments. If you wanna see what kind of a city can flourish you need to look at the cities where it's happening. There must be a lot of diversity continually building up, diversity of kinds of work.. ...diversity of kinds of people. She revealed the way to create better cities is by working with the people who live there and the fabric that existed. The traditional fabric that people inhabited. There have to be areas of the city which people use a lot, walking on the streets and use at all times of day. Jane understood neighborhoods need lots of connections. Short blocks, lots of turns allowing different kinds of interaction. Neighborhoods need a mix of buildings, old and new. They need diverse uses, 24/7, so that they're safer. Constant connection with, uh, neighborhoods around so that you're not isolated. You need public spaces that are accessible to people. It's all a great network in the city. It's all related. She observed these early, early qualities at a time when housing was being built in completely opposite direction. They were isolating communities. They were creating dead-end streets. They were separating work uses and recreation and residential uses. She was explaining how life worked. Before "Death And Life," she was a journalist. She was a very savvy observer of human behavior of places, of cities. Jacobs started writing about the city when she was 18 years old. She was a secretary for a candy company. She was determined to write on the side. She did what any good enterprising writer would do. She got freelance jobs. Her curiosity was so remarkable. She writes about specific economic districts in the city. She does the Jewelry District she does the Fur District, she does the Flower District and she develops a voice. And where does she sell them to? "Vogue" magazine. She was writing pieces about what she was observing and seeing in the city. "The best way to plan for Downtown "is to see how people use it today. "To look for its strengths "and to exploit and reinforce them. "There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city. "People make it. "And it is to them, not buildings that we must fit our plans." "Q Magazine" accepted one of her stories about manhole covers. She discovered that they had all kinds of interesting uh, patterns on them, interesting lettering. How many female journalists were writing about manhole covers? Nobody. But she was. She wanted to figure out how the sewer system was working. She's curious. She's got a really good craft. She knows how to write. And she finds herself in a staff job with "Architectural Forum." Mrs. Jacobs, an associate editor of the magazine "Architectural Forum" has been a New Yorker for 27 years and loves it, Mrs. Jane Jacobs. [applause] Thank you very much, Mr. Dolbier. One fine day, "Architectural Forum" put me on an assignment about some urban renewal projects that were being done. In Philadelphia, as a matter of fact. We have found, in our work in rebuilding Philadelphia that a central design idea, well-developed and clearly-expressed, can of itself become a major creative force and can make more meaningful the work of individual architects in various parts of an area. I found out what they had in mind and what they were planning to do and how it was going to look according to the drawings and what great things it was going to accomplish. I came back and wrote enthusiastic articles about this. All was well, I was in very cozy with the planners and the project builders. Anyhow, time passed and some of these things were actually built. Society Hill is residential. The oldest part of the city, it is the site of an intensive restoration project. Houses, many pre-dating the American Revolution slowly had grown dilapidated and had been converted to other uses. In addition, there was room for new dramatically contemporary apartment towers. Society Hill emerges as a combination of ancient and modern. But they didn't work at all the way they should've worked. The city around them didn't react the way uh, theoretically the city around them should have reacted. She is the hyper-sensitive antennae you know, that's picking up something here that no one else is seeing. Why did stores that looked very cheerful and posed to, uh, be doing a great booming business in the plans actually go empty or languish? Well, I would bring these questions up with the people who had been responsible for the, uh, planning of these places. And I got quite a lot of alibis boiling down to, uh, "People are stupid. They don't do what they're supposed to do." And this was a great shock to me. Never mind highfalutin theories and so forth. What are we looking at? What are we seeing? Do you wanna trust some theory that somebody figured out sitting in an office somewhere? Or do you wanna trust what you actually see out there with your own eyes? Maybe the experts didn't really know as much as they pretended to know. About this time, a gentleman came into the office of the "Architectural Forum." He was very much worried about East Harlem. About 300 million dollars uh, worth of city rebuilding money had been put to work. He could see that their problems were growing greater than they had ever been in the past. She goes up to Harlem and she was taken around by William Kirk of the Union Settlement House. And he's showing her all the things that are being lost in this community when it's being demolished. He would walk me around East Harlem. We would stop in at stores stop in at housing projects. I began to see the.. Just out of the accumulation of all of this I was beginning to understand how things worked. Many little details of cause and effect. She describes it as the very beginning. The sort of moment when the light bulb kind of went off in her head. What I was seeing, in fact, was, uh what makes the very intricate order of the city. This has to do with a quality that's called rather vaguely urbanism. Cities are extremely physical places. It's not an inert mass. It's enterprises and people reacting in certain ways to each other and mutually supporting each other. And wherever it worked properly there seemed to be an awful lot of diversity. Many different kinds of enterprises many different kinds of people mutually supporting and supplementing each other. Jane Jacobs is thinking about how does a neighborhood work? How does a street work? What function does a sidewalk play? But what she's really after is a new theory of how cities function. "In Death And Life Of Great American Cities" she's asking what is the problem of a city? She argues, "A city is a problem of organized complexity." Looks on the surface like it's complex and disorderly.. ...but in fact, there's an underlying structure. Looks like chaos, but in fact, there's a balance. There's a productive mix of different functions and organisms. She draws on ecological metaphors biological metaphors to suggest how it's really an ecosystem. She wrote.. "To see complex systems of functional order "as order and not as chaos takes understanding. "The leaves dropping from the trees in the autumn "the interior of an airplane engine.. "...the entrails of a dissected rabbit.. "...the city desk of a newspaper.. "all appear to be chaos "if they are seen without comprehension. "Once they are seen as systems of order they actually look different." Jacobs understood when cities really work they're phenomena that come from the bottom up. So a great neighborhood is what happens when thousands of different actors.. ...and that's the shopkeepers, the bar owners the people walking the streets they spontaneously come together in, in an uncoordinated but meaningful way to create the kind of flavor and personality of a distinct neighborhood. That's not planned. That's much more a question of organized complexity. Jane Jacobs understood that living cities are not pretty. They're messy, uh, chaotic dense with people interacting together. Dead cities are beautiful in a certain sense because they tend to look predictable. There aren't very many people. If you can understand a city, then that city is dead. Living cities are congested. They're frustrating. And at the same time, that's where your dreams come true. Planners, they don't see any of the wondrous human qualities that Jacobs is seeing. The very forms of urbanism that she wrote about the urban renewalists sought to destroy. What would you do for Harlem? - The slum corner of Harlem. - Yes. I'd take that and all the other similar slums. I'd tear 'em all out, every bit of 'em. It's a cancerous thing and you've just got to wipe them out. I say that you have a cancerous growth there that has to be carved out. Alright, you've carved it out and now you've replaced it with something new. Yes, that's right. With something that's decent something that involves light and air and, uh, new schools and playgrounds and parks. And I'd say that's a hell of a big contribution and certainly all the contribution that I would be able to make with all the people I can persuade to make it. Instead of following the natural way that people use space city planning in this post-war era and modern architecture created this abstract vision of what it should be. Concentrated on the utopian and the ideal. In the 1920s, you get the rise of this curious, mystical figure um, out of Switzerland uh, who calls himself Le Corbusier. He's done some architecture and he's bethinking himself not only an architect, but a great urban visionary. The real gestation of his ideas about modernist urbanism that came as a result of riding in an airplane over Paris. Seeing the city from up in the air looking down God-like on this diorama versus considering and knowing the city from the streets. Corb was enraptured by the airplane. He writes that the airplane indicts the mess we've made of our cities. Before the wheels hit the tarmac he's concluded that we need to sweep all this away and rebuild our cities. Le Corbusier envisioned tearing down huge sections of Paris.. ...and replacing it with slabs modern slabs, cruciform buildings. He proposed superhighways that went through green open space. And they were going to terminate in superblocks. And the superblocks had high-rise buildings and the high-rise buildings were so that people could have light and air and they could get out of the slums. He was thoroughly of the opinion that if you had, uh, good architecture the lives of people would be improved and that architecture would improve people and people would improve architecture until perfectibility would descend on us like The Holy Ghost and we'd be happy forever after. Corb did this plan and made his models and, uh, it excited a lot of people. But in France, they weren't so excited. The idea of the Ville Radieuse and the tower in a park ended up, uh, moving to America just like the rest of modernism did. To help us get a glimpse into the future of this unfinished world of ours there has been created for the New York World's Fair a thought-provoking exhibit of the developments ahead of us. In 1939, General Motors had an exhibition. The Futurama. It showed superhighways. And everybody in America wanted this. Here is an American city replanned around a highly-developed modern traffic system. Rebuilt and replanned. Residential, commercial and industrial areas all have been separated for greater efficiency and greater convenience. The '39 World's Fair in New York was a Corbusier event. It celebrated that style. And so we see some suggestion of the things to come. A world with a future in which all of us are tremendously interested because that is where we are going to spend the rest of our lives. In a future which can be whatever we propose to make it. Modernism moved into the mainstream of both American commercial architecture and urban renewal. The public housing model that we picked in the United States was a misinterpretation of Le Corbusier. The towers in his 1923 plan were for offices, and then around the towers were low 7 story buildings with generous balconies. He never called for people living in high-rise towers. It was one of those odd moments where a set of intellectual ideas could be corrupted very quickly and easily into something cheap and commercial. The simplest formula to make quick money is modernism. And it was very cheap, very quick to produce and could suddenly enable huge amounts of building to happen very quickly. And Robert Moses totally understood that. The one thing missing completely from that vision is streets. And the idea that a street is something you actually walk on and a street is a place where things happen. Jane Jacobs saw that at a time when everybody else was thinking the sidewalk was a kind of foolish leftover of another age. "This is something everyone already knows. "A well-used city street is apt to be a safe street. "A deserted city street is apt to be unsafe. "But how does this work really? "There must be eyes upon the street. "Eyes belonging to those we may call "the natural proprietors of the street. "The buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers "and to ensure the safety of both residents and strangers "must be oriented to the street. "They cannot turn their backs or blank sides on it and leave it blind." Philosophically, what she recognized was safety doesn't come from armed security guards or blocking the entrances. What makes a neighborhood great is precisely the fact that there are people on the street. "The sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously "both to add to the numbers of effective eyes on the street "and to induce the people in the buildings along the street "to watch the sidewalks in sufficient numbers. "Nobody enjoys sitting on a stoop "or looking out a window at an empty street. "Almost nobody does such a thing. "Large numbers of people entertain themselves off and on by watching street activity." She went out and looked at things. When she said that the doormen were paid eyes on the street and that the same thing could happen from bars on the street in West Village I understood what she was talking about. Nobody has to worry about things where there are a lot of people on the street. Jane Jacobs reverses the vantage point. What is it like actually to live in these places from street level? And it's that simple change of perspective that lead her away from the orthodoxy of the time. Robert Moses had no interest really in paying attention to what was there in neighborhoods. What was there, he viewed as simply an obstacle to what he wanted to make happen. People oppose Moses all the time. Whether he wanted Lincoln Center for the performing arts a bridge across the entrance to New York Harbor a parking lot where mothers air their babies in Central Park a highway down the spine of Fire Island or one through the middle of Washington Square vehement opposition was what he expected and what he got. Oh, there's opposition to everything that's, uh, progressive, everything that's new. The opinion of people who were activists as we were in the village were Robert Moses was terrible and Robert Moses was destroying the city and Robert Moses had to be stopped. Jane had got involved in several efforts to stop Robert Moses from ripping the city to pieces. Starting with the, uh, his attempt to run Fifth Avenue down through Washington Square. The first time I became aware of the threat of what the highways were doing and could do to New York was when along came the plan to push Fifth Avenue through Washington Square Park and down below it as a continuous street. They, uh, wanted to have the Fifth Avenue buses go through the park down into West Broadway and change the name of that to Fifth Avenue South so as to make it more valuable for rents. And that was a Robert Moses project. This wasn't in the abstract for Jane Jacobs. This was happening close to home. Right in her backyard. This was where she brought her kids in strollers to play in that park. It was the campus for a university. It was the front yard for neighborhood kids growing up. It was a true reflection of a diverse neighborhood. This is The Circle. On weekdays, it's a wading pool for village kids. But on Sundays, the water is turned off and the circle becomes a meeting place for guitarists, bongo and banjo players villagers on a stroll, folk singers and tourists. To me and to many others, we were outraged about a road going through Washington Square and we were going to save Washington Square Park. Washington Square was really Jane Jacobs' beginning as a civic activist. All of the activists, myself included were involved in trying to stop that. The leaders there included, uh, Jane Jacobs and Shirley Hayes. Shirley Hayes and Edith Lyons uh, were the 2 women who started the, the fight against the roadway in Washington Square Park. Jane was not deferential to power. So she ups the ante on that Washington Square fight and says, "I'm gonna write the mayor." "I have heard with alarm and almost with disbelief "the plans to run a sunken highway through the center "of Washington Square. "My husband and I are amongst the citizens "who truly believe in New York "to the extent that we have bought a home "in the heart of the city and remodeled it "with a lot of hard work. "It is very discouraging to do our best "to make the city more habitable "and then to learn that the city itself is thinking up schemes to make it uninhabitable." Jane's example that she set for herself is an example for other people to follow. If a highway is coming through that's going to be very destructive and you know it's an idiotic thing you fight that highway. Protest against stultification and the status quo and things that touch you and your neighborhood directly. I think she was effective because of the force of her personality and the fact that she was able to mobilize a lot of people. And Margaret Meade and Susan Sontag and all the various folks that Jane was involved with were drawn to the tangibility of this particular fight. They get too many critics. They get too many mud-throwers too many people who foul their nest and there we are. That's our trouble. Too many people sitting around calling names like Mumford. People that, what do they contribute? You have any problem to solve, any difficulty you'd never call upon them. Call upon them for four-letter words. They don't even have very good vocabulary in my book. Robert Moses wasn't used to anybody saying no to him. He'd fire off these letters to people of, uh, Greenwich Village. "I realized that in the process of rebuilding "south of Washington Square "there would be cries of anguish "from those who are honestly convinced "the Sistine Madonna was painted in the basement "of one of the old buildings there "not presently occupied by a cabaret or speakeasy. "That Michelangelo's David was fashioned "in a garret in the same neighborhood. "And that anyone who lays hands "on these sacred landmarks will be executed "if he has not already been struck down by a bolt from heaven." They managed to show Moses as this bully and they, they got a lot of important people on their side, including Eleanor Roosevelt. I would feel very strongly that destroying the Square by putting a large artery for traffic through the Square would harm not only the Square itself but the whole neighborhood and really the city. I'm not opposed to change. In fact, I believe in change. But I think that good tradition has to be preserved. Jacobs was a brilliant strategist when it came to civil action. She had a real sense for the photo op. In Washington Square Park she arranged for her daughter and another girl to conduct a ribbon-tying ceremony. This, of course, was the opposite of the ribbon cutting ceremony the politicians loved to, uh, celebrate with public works. It was at one of the hearings where Moses was foolish enough to say that nobody's against us except a bunch of mothers. How could he be so tactless? Only if you think that people don't matter at all could you make a statement like that. She was a housewife. That's how they treated her. I mean, of course, she was a professional journalist. That was not somehow.. When you want to dismiss her, you just say there was this housewife from Hudson Street. Try to mess with a bunch of mothers. Uh, I think that he underestimated what the, uh effectiveness of these mothers might in fact be. Literally thousands of people turned to and it took quite a few years, but did save it. It ended up being an extraordinarily potent opposition, which he'd never met before. Moses had never met this before. He had his, he had it coming. Washington Square Park was certainly the first, uh, public defeat for Robert Moses and it was a, uh, uh, a major chink in his armor. The battle over Washington Square is, is Jane's first taste of victory. Not long after the Washington Square victory "Death And Life" is published. And Bennett Cerf, head of Random House sends a copy to Robert Moses. And Moses sends it back. "I am returning the book you sent me. "Aside from the fact that it is intemperate "and inaccurate.. "...it is also libelous. I call your attention, for example, to page 131." "Robert Moses has made an art of using control "of public money to get his way "with those whom the voters elect and depend on "to represent their frequently opposing interests. "This is, of course, in other guises an old, sad story of democratic government." He didn't even wanna recognize the existence of the book or of Jane. Others, uh, were also, uh, not charitable including Lewis Mumford. Lewis Mumford, the great architectural critic for "The New Yorker," his famous review of her book had the title Mother Jacobs' Home Remedies. He's immediately telling you Jane Jacobs was just this sweet, old lady trying to get some homeopathic medicine into the city instead of doing the serious surgery that a real doctor would do. Right around the time of "Death and Life of Great American Cities" ironically, her own neighborhood of the West Village, the very neighborhood that she had, had proclaimed as a model for what neighborhoods could be was earmarked for urban renewal. Moses was commissioner of, uh, housing in the urban renewal effort to build more public housing in New York City. He actually stepped down from that position but before he did he designated the West Village as eligible for slum designation. I got the book finished finally and thought, ah, now I can think about something else. And for 3 weeks I did think about other things. Then I opened the "New York Times" one morning and found that our own area of the West Village was going to have an urban renewal project in it. She really didn't think of herself as a community organizer as a, a street fighter or that sort. She was a writer. She did not appreciate the distraction. She really didn't, but she knew she had to do it. She was sad. I mean, she would shrug her shoulders. What can I, what can I do? You know that thing about an inert object? Well, there is nothing more inert than a government bureau. There's nothing more inert than a planning office. It gets going in one direction and it is never going to change of its own accord. So I suddenly had to put into practice my own premises that if anything was going to happen to reverse the way things were being done then the citizens had to take some initiative and the citizens had to frustrate the planners. I thereupon began to devote myself to frustrating planners. And so did the whole neighborhood. Jane calls a meeting of local residents at The Lion's Head a favorite neighborhood hangout. Organizes people to speak at public meetings and gets everybody to wear sunglasses with an X painted on them. They were fairly sophisticated I think, in the tactics that they would employ and they're tackling somebody who's been writing for a living for a couple of decades and knows how to make an argument. We all knew one another and were constantly planning on how to, uh, get the mayor on our side and how to threaten him. And we did. We got him on our side. She filed a lawsuit against the city of New York to try to block the urban renewal plan. "I think that the time has come "to put the West Village "urban renewal proposal to rest. "Promptly remove the West Village designation. Cordially, Robert F. Wagner." They prevailed and, uh, at the end of the day the slum designation never happened in the West Village. She effectively showed the people of Greenwich Village that they could fight city hall that they did not have to accept the plans of the planners at their drafting tables and that they could reject those lines being drawn around their homes. We need to understand Greenwich Village is a proxy here for a wave that was starting to take hold in the United States where there was increasing resistance to centralized authority. Her strategy was certainly informed by other struggles that were going on at the time. Within 3 years of each other Jacobs published her book. Uh, Betty Friedan published "The Feminine Mystique." Rachel Carson published "Silent Spring." The Environmental Movement. Civil Rights. The movement for decent cities feminism, you know all were being born at once and all were sharing tools of propaganda, of local organizing of civil disobedience. Jane Jacobs was perhaps the most articulate voice of a movement that now seems merely common sense. Any city that's tearing down its buildings just to make money for a development or, uh, just to have novelty is doing something criminal. A fella who gets up in the upper stories of a, of a public housing project where he has a view, what's the matter with him? He's got a nice place to live, hasn't he? I think that the objection that some might have was that the view is just of another housing development and another highway. No, I don't concede that. It wasn't just that they wanted new housing in place of the old. They wanted an entirely different-looking city. Robert Moses and his constituency wanted it all to be very simplified very sterilized. It was the hubris of Moses and his ilk. The idea that we're gonna rearrange the spaces and therefore, we're gonna rearrange the social relations. It had to do with this towers-in-the-park mentality. It had to do with the creation of a new form of ghetto. Whole downtowns were being bulldozed in the name of people, but not for the people. They were destroying lives and replacing them with these housing projects. And why? Because it was making a lot of people a lot of money. It was making developers a lot of money politicians a lot of money and it was fast money. So they kept doing it over and over and over again in cities all over the country. It was several years after Robert Moses had begun building these projects that the other cities caught up. What they were building was the Corbusier model. You saw the kind of building of these uh, these housing projects across the United States. You know, 25 story block apartment buildings with playgrounds and gardens around them that looked great in all the drawings. Here in bright, new buildings with spacious grounds, they can live. Live with indoor plumbing, electric lights fresh plastered walls and the rest of the conveniences that are expected in the 20th century. In these projects, children can play in safety on the wide lawns not in the littered alleys and vacant lots. We must make sure that every family in America lives in a home of dignity in a neighborhood of pride and a community of opportunity and a city of promise and hope. But what ended up happening is nobody ever hung out on, uh, in the kind of public space around these uh, projects and so they became these under-populated places. And they actually very quickly became some of the most dangerous places in the world. Concentrated poverty. This was a, you know, the really the worst thing about, uh, the projects and therefore, amplified all of the pathological and antisocial elements of poverty. These institutions became fortressed. You become cornered. You feel cornered. You feel trapped. They left people more vulnerable. Public housing became places of fear. High-rise fortresses like these were built this way to save money. In the long run, they didn't even do that. The problem was that they were all wrong for the people who wound up living in them. Rural blacks, broken families allowed in and to stay in only if their incomes were low enough. Most cities now are engaged in something called urban renewal which means moving the Negroes out. It means Negro removal. That is what it means. And the federal government is an accomplice to this fact. Now this, we are talking about human beings. There's not such a thing as a monolithic wall or, you know, some abstraction called Negro problem. These Negro boys and girls who at 16 and 17 don't believe the country means anything that it says and don't feel that they have any place here. The phrase, Urban renewal is Negro removal was an acknowledgement by African-Americans that, that this was an assault. Removal is in the sense of out, over there, away, far away. Some place inhospitable where you can just die. And a huge part of what happened to people was that they were put in inhospitable places. And African-Americans were put in at the margins of the city in places that were, could barely support the vital kind of life that people need to prosper. It's as though the builders have not realized that children would be living there nor did they foresee the crime the vandalism, which is really the acting out of rage and self-loathing that can make people want to destroy their own property. People had lived in communities that were messy, but they worked. People had social capitals, people watched each other's child when somebody was not there. All this was actually taken away. People had no investment emotionally. People resented these projects that had been built for them because they were poor. So you see a lot of windows broken out. They all were broken out by children throwing rocks. And, uh, what's more natural than children throwing rocks? They don't have nothing else to do. There's absolutely no recreation facilities here. And, uh, the playground like this is a mockery for thousands of children. Tenants had no input as to what they wanted. Uh, it was built because somebody said this would be good for children to play on. There were graffiti everywhere and there were drug problems and all the problems that you can imagine come from when you uproot people without their will. And what do you expect, that they will love these projects? No, that wasn't gonna happen. Pruitt-Igoe, if you really see an, uh, an aerial view of it those buildings were spaced quite a distance apart. If you took them and threw them on their faces which is where they should've fallen you will get lovely housing 20 feet high. You can take a look at a little exercise here that if these towers, these slabs are removed from the towers you begin to see a different attitude of what is visible. You begin to see through the site as opposed to looking at a slab of buildings running. One thing, the tenants are really stressing is for a low-rise building closer to a home. Something that they can relate to. What we are trying to do here is to take a given situation and try to bring it back to a community where people would want to live. After thinking about the problem of the Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project the city planners blew it up. [explosion] Just dynamited it away. The projects end up being tremendous failures. You know, we know all about that failure now. And everywhere they existed 30, 40 years later they're all being torn down. You can't put streets back where you took them out. You can't put stores back. You can't put the daily life and all the institutions. It takes generations to build up those institutions. That's what was eliminated by these projects. [explosion] The superblock urbanism of the modernist ilk that Jane Jacobs, uh, writes about is, is destroying cities. You also have, at the very same time the automobile being rammed through. This causes as many problems as the urban renewal projects. The most profound influence on the city in the last hundred years has been the automobile. The decision made almost inevitable was to drive the freeways, the interstates in some right through the cities and through neighborhoods whose value city elites and developers wanted to ultimately reclaim. We wouldn't have any American economy without the automobile business. That's literally true. I believe that that this is a great industry that has to go on and has to keep on turning out cars and trucks and buses and there have to be places for them to run. There have to be modern roads. The first of Moses' commandments for progress is thou shalt drive. Jane Jacobs was one of the very first people to say the car is not supreme. The people who walk on the sidewalk are what makes the city. It isn't hard to understand that producing and consuming automobiles might seem all-important to the management of Ford and Chrysler and General Motors. But it's harder to understand why the production and consumption of automobiles should be the purpose of life for all the rest of us. Moses was about realizing a very particular vision of the American dream. That was, you know, what's good for General Motors is good for the United States of America. I'm privileged to present the winner of the Grand National Award. Robert Moses of New York. Robert Moses, New York City Construction Coordinator is a world-famous highway planner. A man who knows his business. What he was really doing was tearing up vital neighborhoods. For example, in the South Bronx where he built the Cross Bronx Expressway. This was the single most destructive decision ever made about US cities. The Cross Bronx Expressway an artery whose history was marked by such gigantic problems of construction, financing relocation and organized obstruction that it took 17 years to complete. The Cross Bronx Expressway ripped through the heart and the middle of the Bronx creating what was a wall between what eventually was known as the northern and the southern part of the Bronx. Robert Moses thought he'd get away with anything. Who's gonna stop him? He's got all the city politicians on his side because he's bringing a lot of federal money from the federal highway program. And that gets passed around. Today our greatest single problem is tenant removal. The, uh, tendency on the part of people in politics as well as those who are living on these rights-of-way who are immediately affected is to assume that the people who are doing this job are unsympathetic. They're even sadistic. Well, of course, that isn't the truth at all. When Moses would ram the Cross Bronx Expressway through it was not just breaking down the physical structure of that borough literally so south and north become different but the community. When you remove the daily life when you remove the stores, you remove the places that constitute where they spend time what we would call the public realm the sidewalks, the bars, the grocery stores you remove the city. And that's what Jane Jacobs says. You draw away the people with a prescription that is guaranteed to hurt cities. Well, you have to bull it through. You've gotta do it. It's like all these, these things that have opposition. The fact that 2000 people come and agitate against the extension of an expressway doesn't prove that you're not gonna build the expressway. So many of the problems of the South Bronx grew directly out of the devastation caused by building that expressway. Which, of course, became totally gridlocked 15 minutes after it was open. I mean, Moses thought he was improving the city by bringing it up-to-date by making it work for the automobile. And as it became clear that urban highways were, in fact uh, profoundly destructive it really became a battle between opposing forces. Of course, in Lower Manhattan uh, Moses, uh, wanted to build a road right across, um, uh, the city there. The Whole Cast Iron District would've been basically obliterated. The Lower Manhattan Expressway was to have connected the Holland Tunnel with the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges. It would've destroyed most of SoHo. We would've lost one of the greatest inventories of 19th century buildings, not just in New York but in the world. The highways, of course destroyed the neighborhoods that they went through. Where was this going to end? The whole place was going to be laced with highways. What would we have left of Manhattan? On any day of the week, if you walk along Canal Street and it's often faster than riding this is what you'll see. The crush of endless waiting traffic. Now look at the solution. A Lower Manhattan Expressway only practical highway crossing serving the Lower Manhattan commercial and business districts. Can we afford to let one section of our city slowly strangle in hopeless traffic congestion? There was an awful campaign against that neighborhood. It was called Hell's Hundred Acres. A bottled-up, stagnating section of the city. No new private buildings erected in 30 years. A valley of economic depression. The need is urgent. We must have a Lower Manhattan Expressway now. The local priest in a church on Broom Street had heard about Jane's successful defenses fighting Moses and asked if she could help. Father, what effect do you feel that the expressway will have on the neighborhood? Well, the expressway will, will destroy the neighborhood. This is the worst thing about these monumental plans. There is no way there that old buildings can easily be torn down and new ones put up. Old things adapted to different use. It's settled. Well, that's not planning for the future. Reminded of some of the opposition to his longtime dream for an expressway across Lower Manhattan Moses was specific about what it takes to override the inevitable roadblocks. You gotta move people. And that, the political leaders naturally, if they have people ticketed and they know where they are and they vote right they don't wanna move 'em and have 'em go somewhere else. What I try to do, uh, in New York what we've done successfully in other places which is to pay more money to people in cash. Come take the money and go away. You got people who rent. They don't own anything. So what different does it make when you're talking about a, uh, an expressway that costs 84 million dollars? Stop being victims. I think it's wicked in a way, to be a victim. It's even wickeder to be a predator but it's wicked to be a victim and allow it. You can't, as an individual, you can't do anything but you can organize. If you're being victimized by an expressway that a bureaucracy is putting through for the benefit of the automobile people then you fight that you refuse to be a victim of that. What effect do you think this will have on the neighborhood itself? It will destroy the neighborhood. It's one of the few neighborhoods that you can.. A woman can go down the streets at night and be safe. And the women know it and I know it. 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning the men are sitting in the cafes and they're watching you, taking care of you. You wanna build up neighborhoods like this. They say let's get back to the old, safe neighborhoods. This is it! Memorandum to Arthur Hodgkiss from Robert Moses. "The Lower Manhattan will move very soon. Please keep an eye on it." Mr. Simon, are you saying that they're trying to sneak it through? I would say it's a sleeper. If this thing is passed, uh these are how these things happen. If they're not watched, uh, it's a sleeper. Who do you think is pushing this? Well, uh, there's only one man that I can think of that can be pushing. They seem to think that they have a choice. That they'd rather stay in the houses that they've lived in all this time. The whole federal arterial aid program running into billions of dollars depend upon the votes of a few a very few people in one section. We wouldn't build anything. Nothing would be built. There'd be no highways, there'd be no -- no housing. There, there'd be no public improvements. Please do not build this express highway. Most of these people consider automobiles more than the human being. It is not right! I think it's awful. I don't think it's fair. I don't think it's very good 'cause I live there, I look out my window. The truck, the car and everything. They don't need expressway. What they gonna do, throw me in the street? After 51 years, I'm citizen and everything? There's something awful to think every day they gonna throw you out. I think it's awful thing. They make me sick. I hope God they have to be damn sick. That's what I hope. Goodbye. Thank you. It was gonna be a defining hearing in which they would approve the expressway. And Jane said, when they discuss this issue I'm gonna get up and I'm gonna speak against it. I went up, uh, to the microphone. I was very angry. They weren't listening to us. They had made their decision. That was clear. They were really only errand boys who had no power to make decisions. So we had better let them take back a message. We would never stand for this expressway. I intended just to climb up to their level and walk across the stage. There was a stenotypist who had a new machine. She was frightened and she picked up her stenotype machine and clasped it to her bosom. The tapes fell out of the machine and ran across the floor like confetti. People began tossing it in the air. I knew it had to be brought to an end so an inspiration struck me. I said, "There is no hearing "because the record is gone. And without a record, there can't be a hearing." The chief state person was saying "Arrest that woman. Arrest that woman." As I went out, police captain told me that uh, I was arrested. The police were very apologetic. They knew who she was and what was going on. She was charged with 3 felonies which is pretty rotten for what she did. What did she do? She didn't hurt anybody. She became the hero. And the politics did shift at that point. The Board of Estimate in an executive session today voted unanimously to turn down the proposal for a Lower Manhattan Expressway. The board -- Please. [applause] That was the decisive moment. And Moses couldn't do anything. He was just a pure villain. The politicians were villains. At that point, it was clear that no politicians were gonna get away with this. The Lower Manhattan Expressway was really the beginning of the end for Robert Moses. Robert Moses was finally squeezed out by Nelson Rockefeller, who as Governor of New York might have been the first public official powerful enough to call his bluff. Moses was famous for threatening to resign when he was unhappy with something. Rockefeller said at one point okay and Moses had no choice. He couldn't back down and he was gone. After the Moses' expressway situation was finally settled Jane felt she could go to Canada with her typewriter and become a writer again. Her husband, who was an architect was building hospitals up there. And their sons were there be, to keep out of the that awful Vietnam War. Of course, as soon as she got to Toronto she, she saw there was another expressway heading right for her house the Spadina Expressway. She stopped that too. And then got to work. The Lower Manhattan Expressway was officially dead in the year 1970. Meanwhile, across the country these kinds of freeway revolts were taking place and similar roadways were being defeated. But the Lower Manhattan Expressway was really the leading example. If that had happened, there would be no SoHo. The entire history of development and redevelopment and adaptive reuse in the city would've played out in a different way. It would've been the single most damaging intervention in the urban fabric in Manhattan in the 20th century, period. A city is not just a physical object. The city is a living thing. It will always morph and change. Our goal has to be to manage change well not to freeze it in time. As cities around the world are obliged to house this dramatically increasing population we still have the conversation in terms of top down versus bottom up formality versus informality. These are the eternal polarities of thinking about the city. If you go to China, you see huge swathes of farmland that are now being urbanized in exactly the model that America used in 1950s and we know that it failed. China today is Moses on steroids, you know. And the notion that Moses could not have conceived of this extraordinary scaling up of what it means to build. In that sense, history has outdone him. These isolated developments with hundreds of similar-looking blocks with no urbanism, no street who can live in them and how would you live in them? What they are building today, I think.. ...is the slums of the future. And they're made in concrete. They're gonna last at least 60 years. We are condemning future generations to an absolute world without hope. Given the scale of the problem we have that makes a completely different context.. ...in which Jane Jacobs' ideas again now have a new incarnation. "It is so easy to blame the decay of cities "on traffic or immigrants.. "...or the whimsies of the middle class. "The decay of cities goes deeper and is more complicated. "It goes right down to what we think we want and to our ignorance about how cities work." With the amount of people who now need to live in cities you have to accept that you're going to need more density. But a lot of densely built up terrain.. ...is not a city. If, when we're to build a city no matter how fast it is without building a great public realm you don't have a city. That's what Jane Jacobs talks about. Historically, solutions to city problems have very seldom come from the top. They come from people who understand the problems firsthand 'cause they're living with them and who have new and ingenious and often very offbeat ideas of how to solve them. The creativity and the concern and the ideas down there in city neighborhoods and city communities has to be given a chance has to be released. People have to insist on government trying things their way. If you gave people an environment that they could shape themselves they would not only be happier.. ...but you would have a completely different kind of city. The problem for people who are planning and designing and thinking about all this new urban tissue that's being created is how to take some of these incredibly valuable lessons that Jane Jacobs teaches um, and apply them to the project of creating the places where, uh, all of these billions of people are going to live. The key thing about Jane Jacobs much more important than loving stoops and streets and stuff was a willingness to be skeptical a willingness to doubt the received wisdom.. ...and to trust our eyes instead. "Under the seeming disorder of the old city "wherever the old city is working successfully.. "...is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety "of the street "and the freedom of the city. "It is a complex order. "This order is all composed of movement and change. "And although it is life, not art.. "...we may fancifully call it the art form of the city.. "...and liken it to the dance. "Not to a simpleminded precision dance "with everyone kicking up at the same time "twirling in unison and bowing off en masse.. "...but to an intricate ballet "in which the individual dancers and ensembles "all have distinctive parts.. "...which miraculously reinforce each other.. ...and compose an orderly whole." [instrumental music] |
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