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Wrestling With Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York's Master Builder And Transformed The American City (2009)

by Anthony Flint(Favorite Author)

3.75 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1400066743 (ISBN13: 9781400066742)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Random House

review 1: It is amazing how much I can continue to learn about America and about New York 7-8 years after having left the city. I knew people there who were intensely activist, and increasingly I begin to fathom this spirit of political and social activism that at first seemed so simultaneously admirable and alien. 'Wrestling with Moses' is about one of NY's most well-known (well, in the 1950-60s) urban activists, Jane Jacobs, and her work to prevent the demolition and reconstruction of parts of lower Manhattan, as pushed by powerful bureacrat and builder Robert Moses. There are five chapters here: The first two provide a short background to first Jacobs and then Moses; the third narrates their first big battle over the extension of Fifth Avenue into Washington Square Park (where Ja... morene lived); the fourth describes how, after Moses' defeat, his method lived on in the hands of his successor bureacrats and Jacobs had to rally the community yet again; the fifth then turns to her leadership of the SoHo community in opposition to another Moses proposal, the Lower Manhattan Expressway. While written as a journalistic account of the immense odds the fragmented local families faced in protecting the organic nature of their communal neighbourhood, the book is obviously ideologically tilted to the side of Jacobs and the community. Not that this is a unattractive stance -- Jane Jacobs and her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities stand for the ground-up approach to urban planning, respect for the human scale in architecture, respect for what the people who live there really want and think, for diversity, for the organic blooming of city life. Moses, on the other hand, stood for the modern approach, grand plans, glass and steel superstructures and soaring expressways, and effectively bulldozing over friendly if somewhat scruffy neighbourhoods in the name of cleaning up slums. This is fascinating on two levels: First is the implicit description of the political process in New York. I can't imagine it taking place in Asia (oddly, the only place I can imagine this is in China, for certain reasons; but surely not in Singapore or other Southeast Asian capitals): there are too many requisite elements that are simply not present here. You need an active and committed citizenry, you need a local press that is willing and able to opine on public policy, you need a localised political process with politicians willing and able to take sides (interestingly and ironically, Jacobs was welcomed more by the Republicans, who felt she stood for smaller government). The citizenry question is difficult, and I come back to demographics: too much population pressure in Asia, people don't earn enough to have time for activism, people who are wealthy enough are more interested in consumption or have entered the status quo elite and don't have the incentive for activism. And the very idea of public hearings, of raising communal opposition to public works projects already announced in the newspapers -- the whole feeling of it is so uniquely and admirably American.The second is this clash of ideas between large-scale top down government planning vs bottom up organic hustle and bustle. The question is raised in the book of how a city government can provide for the needs of low income households if it cannot seize and redevelop land for public projects -- this is certainly a valid question and not one, imo, that the Jacobs school adequately answered. And it is surely more pressing (and no better addressed) in Asia. Yet if it is not possible to dream of Asian capitals built entirely in European scale, I'd argue the top down approach to infrastructure building has also worked very imperfectly -- although possibly due to institutional issues (corruption, pork barrel projects) rather than because large scale infrastructure is bad. There is, indeed, an ambivalence in the book regarding Moses and the top-down approach -- it acknowledges his valuable contributions to, for example, the interstate highway network, the triboro bridge, as well as vastly increasing the amount of park space in NYC. The failure at heart seems less the man himself than the hubris and insensitivity that set in during his later years, after two decades of succcess, when at the height of his powers he forget to listen to the people who would live in the cities he wanted to build.
review 2: This is a good fast read and is a great follow up to Robert Caro's tome "The Power Broker" The subject matter is a must for anyone who cares for cities. It made me want to read Jane Jacobs actually books. One picky comment is that the author sometimes doesn't get his neighborhoods and directions correct, he places Sty Town in the Lower East Side, when it is above 14th Street well out of the bounds the neighborhood, and says that Gramercy Park is a few blocks east of Washington Square when it's about a mile north. less

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