Street fighter: how Jane Jacobs saved New York from Bulldozer Bob

‘She picked up things no one else could see’ … Jane Jacobs holding a petition.
Photograph: Phil Stanziola/World Telegram & Sun/Library of Congress

"Robert Moses was the despotic planner hellbent on building four-lane highways through neighbourhoods. She was the cyclist who stopped him. A new film, Citizen Jane, revisits their David and Goliath struggle for the soul of New York

“There is nobody against this,” insisted a flustered Robert Moses at the hearing for his plan to drive a four-lane highway through New York’s Washington Square Park in 1958. “Nobody, nobody, nobody but a bunch of ... a bunch of mothers.”

The despotic city planner hadn’t counted on the determination of the mothers in question, or the ferocity of their leader – an owlish stenographer and freelance journalist by the name of Jane Jacobs. As part of his insatiable hunger for grand public works, Moses wanted to extend Fifth Avenue through the square, ostensibly to ease congestion, but with the real motive of rewarding developers and raising property values south of the park, where he had already razed a swath of Greenwich Village for redevelopment.

Jacobs, who lived in the West Village and knew how much her neighbourhood valued the park, mobilised a vocal coalition of campaigners, residents and politicians, who eventually halted the project. “It is very discouraging to do our best to make the city more habitable,” Jacobs wrote to the mayor, “and then to learn that the city is thinking up schemes to make it uninhabitable.”

That hearing was the only time Jacobs and Moses ever crossed paths, the single meeting in an oft-recounted, years-long David and Goliath saga of the saintly protector of the streets fighting the villainous master builder. Their duel, which came to symbolise the struggle of “bottom-up” versus “top-down”, is the focus of a new documentary, Citizen Jane: Battle for the City, made to commemorate her centenary last year.

Now arriving in the UK, the film brings home the enduring relevance of her ideas. Three years after her Washington Square victory, the inquisitive self-taught journalist published a book that would change urban planning for ever. 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.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. 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. 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.”

To her, the success of a vibrant city came from the “intricacy of pavement use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes”. 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. “There must be eyes upon the street,” she wrote, “eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street. 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. They cannot turn their backs or blank sides on it and leave it blind.

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. 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. 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.

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. 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 Lower Manhattan Expressway, which Jacobs and her allies halted, would have inflicted a similar fate on Soho and Little Italy – conveniently framed by Moses as a crime-ridden “hell’s hundred acres”, to be swept clean by gleaming new arteries topped with futuristic mega-structures. Old TV clips show “Big Bob the Builder” oozing arrogance and reptilian cunning, as he condemns whole areas, describing a low-income part of Harlem as “a cancerous growth that has to be carved out” and scoffing at the idea of compensating landowners who stand in his way: “Do you think anything would ever be built if we did that?” All that’s missing is footage of him being chauffeur-driven around the city in his stretch limo with pigskin seats.

By contrast, Jacobs is the indomitable champion of the people, gliding around town on her bicycle, corralling campaigns into action. She was a master of popular media, choreographing stunts like mock funerals for neighbourhoods and staging colourful protests with snappy badges and banners. Proclaimed Queen Jane by Vogue and photographed by Diane Arbus for Esquire, she counted Eleanor Roosevelt and Susan Sontag among her supporters.

If it all sounds a little black and white, that’s because it is. Told, retold and even produced as a children’s story, the pantomime goody-baddy narrative has become drastically oversimplified, a problem that this film does little to address. Yes, Moses was a bullying megalomaniac, but he also built 13 bridges, two tunnels, 637 miles of highways, 658 playgrounds, 10 giant public swimming pools, 17 state parks, not to mention dozens of housing projects and city parks.

Neither should Jacobs’ theories and her influence on contemporary “good practice” go totally unquestioned. “Jacobs romanticised social conditions that were already becoming obsolete,” says urban sociologist Sharon Zukin, while Deyan Sudjic, director of the Design Museum in London, believes her “underlying message is of unblinking paranoia”.

Jacobs’ writings have led to a collective received wisdom – driven by the spurious discipline of “placemaking” – that decrees every street frontage should be “active”, every public space should bustle with civic life, every bit of the city should be configured around clear “desire lines” from A to B, with citizens’ movement intricately choreographed. It is a world in which narrow alleyways and quiet corners are banished in favour of 24-hour curated vibrancy.

Ironically, in an echo of Big Bob’s hunger for demolition, Jacobs’ arguments are now being deployed to raze postwar council estates across the world, her principles mobilised to lambast “sink estates”, conflating social problems and lack of maintenance with a particular style of architecture. They are the new cancer to be carved out. At the same time, the kinds of historic districts Jacobs helped to save now often feel like open-air museums, places as soulless and devoid of real life as the high-rises she so despised.

A hint of this would have added a welcome cautionary tone to the film. Instead it ends with Saskia Sassen, the Dutch sociologist, railing against China’s new megacities as “Moses on steroids”, over footage shot from a speeding car. If urbanists got out and looked more closely, as Jacobs herself did, they’d find that urban life continues to flourish in unexpected places. As critic Paul Goldberger concludes, Jacobs’ finest quality was “a willingness to doubt the received wisdom and trust our eyes instead”.”

"Fonte e imagens: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/apr/30/citizen-jane-jacobs-the-woman-who-saved-manhattan-from-the-bulldozer-documentary?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=facebook

Goodbye-ways: The downfall of urban freeways

The golden days -- when the traffic hadn't caught up with the lanes. (Photo by coltera.)

By Greg Hanscom

13 Mar 2012

 

"We can say this for our Great Urban Freeway Experiment: It seemed like a good idea at the time.

The time was the 1950s and ’60s, specifically, and U.S. cities were watching their residents flee to the suburbs in alarming numbers. Their solution: Build giant freeways connecting city centers to the ’burbs, thereby allowing citizens to live the good life on the outskirts and commute to work in the urban core. It was an attempt to hang on to urban industrial might even as the city’s population bled (or drove) out.

When all was said and done, these freeways did salvage some downtown commerce, but they only accelerated the flight from the inner city. At the same time, they carved up historic urban neighborhoods, turned whole sections of cities into slums, and cut off many downtowns from their waterfronts. Legendary urban activist Jane Jacobs was among the first to fight the scourge of the urban highway, and by the late 1970s and early 1980s, it had become all but impossible to gain approval for new highways through urban areas.

It’s one thing to stop building urban freeways, however, and another thing entirely to tear down existing ones. For many city centers, those highways still look a lot like lifelines.

But over the past few decades, urban freeways have begun to come down — from the West Side Highway in New York to the Embarcadero in San Francisco — and if a growing urban transportation reform movement has its way, many more will fall in the coming years.

This is the thrust of a report just released by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy and EMBARQ, two organizations that promote equitable and sustainable transportation projects around the world. The report, called “The Death and Life of Urban Highways” — a tribute to Jacobs’ groundbreaking 1961 urbanist manifesto, The Death and Life of Great American Cities — declares that “the urban highway is a failed experiment,” and describes cities that have traded in highways for parks, mixed-use developments, and all manner of urbanist bliss.

At last! City leaders have seen the light! Power to the people! Critical mass!

Well, not really.

“Cities are not removing all highways because of a sudden awakening of environmental consciousness or realization that car culture is bad,” the report says. Instead, they’re doing it because they can’t afford to keep aging freeways from crumbling, and they’re realizing that the space these roads take up is a hell of a lot more valuable, both socially and economically, when it’s used for houses, businesses, and parks. And then there’s the raft of studies showing that freeways don’t relieve traffic congestion — they actually make it worse.

Death and Life documents all this, and then provides five case studies of cities that have removed freeways, starting with Portland, Ore., which in the 1970s tore out Harbor Drive, a freeway that walled off the downtown area from the Willamette River, and replaced it with a waterfront park that to this day is a central attraction in Stump Town. San Francisco tore out a raised freeway that was critically damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, replacing it with Embarcadero Boulevard, replete with palm-tree-lined pedestrian promenade. Most recently, in the early 2000s, under longtime Mayor John Norquist, Milwaukee dynamited the unfinished Park East Freeway, making room for three new neighborhoods, a boulevard, and a street grid that reconnects the city to its downtown.

In all three cases, land values around the demolished highways have skyrocketed, the areas have served as hubs for economic redevelopment, and, according to the report, the impacts on traffic congestion have been minimal — thanks in some places (Portland) to the construction of parallel roads, and others (San Francisco) to an increase in mass transit ridership. And just as remarkably, all three cities saved money over what they would have spent widening, rebuilding, or completing their existing freeways.

The report finishes out with a look at Seoul, South Korea, which in 2003 demolished the Cheonggyecheon freeway, “daylighting” the river buried beneath and turning the whole thing into a miles-long urban park; and Bogotá, Colombia, which chose not to build a planned Inner Ring Expressway, opting instead to invest its money in mass transit, bicycle paths, pedestrian walkways, and promenades. Too cool.

It’s pretty inspiring, especially when you compare it to what we would have been left with if the highway engineers had their way. In a recent interview with Next American City, John Norquist, the former Milwaukee mayor who is now CEO of the Congress for the New Urbanism, described where that dream would have taken us:

The Detroit metropolitan area is covered with freeways … More than any other place in the country, the Michigan DOT pretty much got its way. And they have solved the problem that they identified, which was congestion … So by creating a transportation system that encouraged people to leave town — the population of the city is about a third of what it was since 1950.
[Detroit] had 300 miles of streetcars at the end of the war. That’s all gone … The street grid has been cut up, so it’s hard to move around on the surface streets. [But] the stated goal was to battle congestion, and in Detroit, they did it. And there are side effects.

Side effects. Sure — if you consider your city turning into a wasteland a “side effect.” (Sounds like a potentially terminal illness to us.) But if there’s a silver lining here, it is this: Highway construction ground to a halt much earlier in most burgs than it did in the Motor City, and now those freeways that were built are coming of age. It’s a perfect time to reconsider our approach to urban transportation.

In fact, we really have no choice. Being broke has a way of narrowing your options. Besides, with huge latent interest in urban living, it’s time to get serious about making cities work for city residents again, not just the folks who drive in from the ‘burbs.

Grist special projects editor Greg Hanscom has been editor of the award-winning environmental magazine High Country News and the Baltimore-based city mag, Urbanite. He tweets about cities and the environment at @ghanscom."

Fonte e imagem:

http://grist.org/cities/goodbye-ways-the-downfall-of-urban-freeways/