Healthy cities are not made by planners but by ordinary people. It is more like a biological organism, shaped by natural selection into a well-functioning, complex, interrelated, constantly-changing whole. A healthy city is not, for her, a work of art, consciously designed. And so her idea of urban planning is not to pack everyone into high-rise buildings to get them off the street, but the reverse: to get as many people on the street as possible. She loved walking around cities, chatting with neighbors, gazing at street-life, making small-talk at local shops, sitting on stoops and leaning out windows. There are innumerable theoretical differences between Jacobs and Moses, but I think the most essential difference is this: Jacobs loved cities. Jacobs was absolutely opposed to this model. But in Moses’s hands this philosophy became deeply reactionary: isolate the poor people of color in projects and build highways for the car-owning middle class. The impulse was, I believe, originally progressive: to erase differences in class by creating uniform conditions for everyone. In a way, it is a conception of the city that is anti-city: there would be no streets, no corner shops, no neighborhoods. These buildings would be connected, not by ordinary roads, but by giant superhighways. The idea was to create a city with all the different functions in separate zones-sections for retail, business, manufacturing, residence-and to create as much green space as possible by putting everything in high-rise buildings, freeing up land for parks. Moses was, at bottom, a follower of Le Corbusier, a modernist who put forward the idea of the Radiant City. More diametrically opposed conceptions of the city could hardly be imagined. The two did not only clash in life-with Jacobs leading protests to stop Moses’s highways-but, more importantly, in thought. Jacobs, the underdog autodidact, community organizer, defender of Greenwich Village and Washington Square Park.
Moses, the autocratic, power-hungry city-planner who eviscerates neighborhoods and bulldozes homes. The two make an excellent hero and villain. There is a book about it, Wrestling with Moses, a well-made documentary, Citizen Jane, and an opera, A Marvelous Order, with a libretto written by a Pulitzer Prize winner (I haven’t seen it). The conflict between Robert Moses, czar-like planner of New York City for almost half a century, and Jane Jacobs, ordinary citizen and activist, has become the source of legend. I picked up this book immediately after finishing The Power Broker, and I highly recommend this sequence to anyone who has the time. This is a common assumption: that human beings are charming in small numbers and noxious in large numbers.
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