From Red Hook to the South Bronx, from SoHo to Harlem, all over the city, efforts initiated in recent decades by community-based groups are succeeding in regenerating their neighborhoods. Many of these groups are descended from those that fought against the massive clearance projects that dramatically undermined their neighborhoods in the era of Robert Moses – the "power broker" who once held a dozen different city and state government positions at once and reshaped the New York metropolitan area in the mid-20th century.
Yet, a major revisionist effort to rehabilitate Robert Moses continues. Casting a more positive light on Moses-era projects requires turning a blind eye to the broad disruption, destabilization and displacement those projects caused. It is from that era that the city has been repairing itself since the 1970s.
Jane Jacobs, on the other hand, needs no rehabilitation. As relevant as ever, her vision for comprehending the city and understanding change is now being given equal time with a major exhibit opening this week at the Municipal Art Society, “Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York.”
Jacobs is famously known for successfully battling Moses over the West Village Urban Renewal proposal, a road through Washington Square and the Lower Manhattan Expressway. Even more significant is her lasting vision for urban change, which offered – and still offers – an alternative to Moses’ take-no-prisoners approach. When Moses was in power, his stranglehold on planning decisions meant those who shared that alternative vision hardly had a chance, whether helpless citizens or equally helpless public officials. Jacobs’ leadership mobilized those who knew a better, more humane and less destructive strategy was possible.
Her pioneering books – starting with "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" in 1961 – were always cutting-edge, but 46 years later are as fresh and relevant as ever. The public, whose vision and values she celebrated, has never stopped extolling the virtues of her precepts. Many public officials, designers, planners and developers claim to follow them, but do so in name more than in substance.
After Jacobs' death in May 2006, and during the public discussions and commentary accompanying the Moses exhibits this winter (the centerpiece of which was on display at the Museum of the City of New York), the erroneous view was expressed that Jacobs’ "small is meaningful" philosophy is inappropriate to today. This view totally misconstrues Jacobs.
Jacobs believed in big projects: mass transit, and the boulevards and greenways that strengthen a city, not massive highways through neighborhoods that weaken it; transit-accessible big parks and neighborhood-based little parks that are gathering places, not acres of fenced-in green space with towers in the middle and signs admonishing “Keep Off the Grass”; vast school and health care systems; singular cultural venues, not clustered in centers, that spread regenerative potential around the city and help anchor neighborhoods; and economic development that works expansively by encouraging innovation and new local business formations, rather than depending on large construction projects.
