美国国家公共电台 NPR City Planning As A Contact Sport In 'Citizen Jane: Battle For The City'

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KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:

City planning is portrayed¹ as a contact sport in the new documentary "Citizen Jane: Battle For The City." The film is about activist² Jane Jacobs, who fought New York's master builder, Robert Moses, when he was at the height of his power. Critic Bob Mondello says it was never a fair fight but that didn't slow her down.

BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE³: She was the David to his Goliath. Designing the city of tomorrow, he saw high-rises, bridges, superhighways. And in the 1950s and '60s, he had the muscle to make them happen.

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UNIDENTIFIED MAN: The legendary⁴ power broker⁵ Robert Moses represented the authority of the great man who was going to come into the city with his carving⁶ knife and clear away the cancerous tissue...

MONDELLO: The images on screen are of whole blocks being demolished⁷ by wrecking⁸ ball and explosives.

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UNIDENTIFIED MAN: ...And replace it with the shiny implements⁹ of modernist planning.

MONDELLO: Robert Moses with models and sketches¹⁰.

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ROBERT MOSES: You have to move a lot of people out of the way - a big housing project or some clearance¹¹ project. A lot of them aren't going to like it.

MONDELLO: Grant the man a gift for understatement. While he designed crisp city blocks from on-high, Jane Jacobs was looking at New York from street level. To her, a city wasn't about buildings, it was about people. Planners like Moses may have seen newsstands and folks sitting on front stoops as clutter¹².

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MOSES: Today, our greatest single problem is tenant¹³ removal.

MONDELLO: Jacobs saw a vibrant¹⁴ streetscape.

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JANE JACOBS: I have very little faith in even the kind of person who prefers to take a large overall view of things.

MONDELLO: They were natural antagonists¹⁵, these two. And with archival footage, director Matt Tyrnauer our revisits their biggest battles - over, say, the Moses plan to declare much of Greenwich Village a slum so he could run traffic, think his neighborhood-killing Cross Bronx Expressway through the center of Washington Square.

Jacobs had just published her book, "The Death And Life Of Great American Cities," and she lived in Greenwich Village. Moses foolishly termed her just a mother with a baby carriage. He would soon learn not to underestimate mothers.

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JACOBS: You know that thing about an inert¹⁶ object? Well, there's nothing more inert in a planning office. It gets going in one direction and it is never going to change of its own accord. If anything was going to happen to reverse the way things were being done, the citizens had to frustrate¹⁷ the planners. I thereupon began to devote myself to frustrating¹⁸ planners.

MONDELLO: Oh, did she. She proved that the people of Greenwich Village could fight City Hall. But the Moses doctrine¹⁹ of bulldoze and replace was making a lot of money for developers and it was spreading.

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MOSES: Well, you have to bull it through. You've got to do it. It's like all these things of having opposition²⁰.

MONDELLO: The cities everywhere followed his lead, bulldozing run-down neighborhoods to construct soulless, low-income high-rises that no one wanted. The film shows the result - Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, Cabrini-Green in Chicago - huge sterile²¹ towers surrounded by ribbons of concrete and what sketches depicted²² as parklands but what were in reality the equivalent of empty lots.

Jacobs predicted correctly that these walled-in green spaces would prove more dangerous than the busy streets they replaced because no one would ever be in them. This is not the rebuilding of cities, she wrote, this is the sacking of cities.

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JACOBS: Any city that's tearing down its buildings just to make money for a development or just to have novelty is doing something criminal.

MONDELLO: It would be hard to watch "Citizen Jane: Battle For The City" without making connections to battles raging today, politicians who want to build things - walls, infrastructure²³ - to clean up clutter and make people conform.

Jacobs argued that what looks to them like disorder²⁴ is actually what makes a crowded human landscape function. It's just a more complex order. And in this fascinating documentary, you can see the beauty she found in that complexity²⁵. I'm Bob Mondello.

(SOUNDBITE OF DUKE JORDAN TRIO'S "TWO LOVES")