A housing hero gets her due

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This article was published 24/06/2017 (3404 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Documentaries always benefit from human drama, and this new look at influential urban thinker Jane Jacobs has a clear conflict and crackerjack characters.

On one side, we have Jacobs, scrappy grassroots activist. On the other, Robert Moses, power broker, money man and master builder. In this cogent, urgent, zippy doc, director Matt Tyrnauer (Valentino: The Last Emperor) has them duking it out for the soul of New York City in the 1950s and ’60s.

Jacobs, who started as a journalist, believed that urban development had to begin with people and how they really lived, not with overarching theories. Her landmark 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, advocated for vital urban neighbourhoods with a messy mix of old and new buildings and diverse uses. For her, everything started at the street level.

Moses, an unelected official who amassed an enormous amount of bureaucratic clout, took a God’s-eye view of the city. With a hardline modernist vision that favoured tower blocks and expressways, he tore down low-income neighbourhoods to make way for massive planned building programs.

Jacobs’ and Moses’s conflict over urban issues is bound up with gender and race.

At a time when most professional city planners were men, Jacobs was often treated with condescension and dismissed as a meddling housewife. Social critic Lewis Mumford referred to her book as “Mother Jacobs’ Home Remedies” in the New Yorker.

The neighbourhoods that Moses tore down were often predominantly African-American and Hispanic, with vast numbers of people displaced into isolated and dysfunctional high-rise social housing.

Citizen Jane concentrates on key Jacobs-Moses showdowns in New York City, including one that would have levelled SoHo to make way for a freeway. There is little about Jacobs’ later life in Toronto, where she moved in 1968. The film focuses on her beliefs, not her biography.

And while this is essentially a documentary of ideas, Tyrnauer keeps things lively and fast-moving with a deft mix of archival footage and opinionated talking-head interviews.

Citizen Jane is not meant to be an even-handed argument — the title makes that clear. There is no mention of recent revisionist takes on Moses’s legacy. There is no acknowledgement that the dense urban neighbourhoods Jacobs championed as havens of social and economic diversity have become, in many North American cities, enclaves of white affluence.

Tyrnauer makes his own activist argument in calls to action that bookend the film. The particular New York battles between Jacobs and Moses may be in the past, he suggests, but the war goes on, with the super-accelerated rate of global urbanization making it even more crucial. With footage that looks like something out of a dystopian sci-fi movie, one interview subject describes current city development in China as “Robert Moses on steroids.”

We are making decisions right now, Citizen Jane makes clear, that will affect our world for generations.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca