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Cities are, in many ways, the greatest invention

that human beings have brought to the world.

Cities have been expanding

and urbanization has been expanding on the globe

in an exponential fashion.

Most extraordinarily, we are urbanizing people

on the planet, at maybe

one and a half million people every week

In less than 2 months

there'll be the equivalent to another Los Angeles

metropolitan area on this planet.

This scale and speed of urbanization

has never, ever happened in human history.

This is the first time.

When you look at what is being built in cities

you have endless, endless

row after row of homogenizing towers.

And you see more and more highways.

At this moment, you're going to shape the cities

for generations to come.

People need to realize this is an opportunity

which will never come again.

There are a couple of ways of approaching

the design of cities.

The question is always who decides..

...what the physical form will be..

...how the city is going to function

and who is going to live in the city.

In order to understand what's happening today..

...we need to think about 2 great figures

in the middle of the 20th century

who embodied the struggle for the city.

The legendary power broker Robert Moses

represented the authority of the great man

who was gonna come into the city with his carving knife

and clear away the cancerous tissue..

[crash]

...and replace it with the shiny implements

of modernist planning.

Uh, you have to move a lot of people out of the way

of a big housing, uh, project

or, uh, slum clearance project.

A lot of 'em are not going to like it.

Many of them are misinformed.

In opposition to the homogenizing clarity

of Moses was Jane Jacobs.

I have very little faith, uh

i -- in, in even the kind of person

who, uh, prefers to take a large overall

uh, view of things.

Jacobs was an outsider.

She believed the city is not about buildings.

The city is about people.

It is about public spaces and the street

and she stood up for that.

She evolved both a theory

of what made a good and just city

and a theory of opposition

to the kind of planning practice that Moses represented.

There's a prudishness, a fear of life

a wish to direct things from some uncontaminated refuge

that is part and parcel of their bad plan.

They were famously at odds with each other.

It really did become a war between opposing forces.

Today we're still fighting these battles

across the world.

When we look across the spectrum of all the problems

generated by urbanization

there is the extraordinary realization that, my gosh

you know, these have been problems that have been around

for the last 100 years in cities.

New York, of course

is the greatest example of that.

In the 1930s

New York was the world's greatest city, you know?

A very special place.

Just the exuberance of metropolitan life

in the early 20th century.

That's, you know, the -- the great age

of the first real great skyscrapers.

You know, the Empire State Building

is the very climax of that.

But then, it all kind of crashes with The Depression.

Through the entire decade of the '30s

it's just one problem after another.

Down at street level

was this degraded environment.

Slums and dirt and, and pollution

that did not fit with the glorious spires

of the new skyscraper city.

The city was overcrowded

harsh, dirty, dangerous

and infested with disease.

Jacob Riis' famous book

"How The Other Half Live"

brought a lot of attention to this.

The idea was, we will solve the city's problem

by cleaning it up.

Now this is a unfortunate period for the city.

We've done an immense amount to cure these diseases

and we have much more to do.

Robert Moses started to work in an era

where we had a great many people

living in truly horrible conditions.

He began his professional life

in opposition to those conditions.

Moses emerged out of the Progressive Movement

early in the 20th century in New York.

The progressives were eager to improve the city.

His early work in developing public parks

and public beaches was about making life better

for people who were not rich.

Now if we don't clean out these slums

the central areas are going to rot.

And it's all nonsense to say that the problem can be solved

by rehabilitating and fixing up Old Law Tenements.

It can't be done.

That problem we've got to face.

Just about every progressive believed

that the way to solve the city's problems

was to wipe the slate clean, start all over again.

We didn't understand how high the price was

how we were giving up so many things

that were so very important until Jane Jacobs came along.

Jane always would see

in a city opportunities

that existed there.

She observed hints of regeneration

hints of creativity

hints of resourcefulness.

It was this life spring

of people coming to make their way.

I think that must have shaped her approach to the city.

I just loved coming to New York.

It was inexhaustible.

Just to walk around its streets and wonder at it.

So many streets different.

So many neighborhoods different.

Uh, so much going on.

She lived in Greenwich Village

and just viscerally felt

the pulse of the city

and was extraordinarily intuitive.

Was extremely observant.

New York was a place where you don't have to be

big and important and rich

or have a great plot of land

or a great development scheme

or something like that to do something.

And maybe even do something new

and do something interesting.

A place that has scope for all kinds of people.

What she saw was the soul of New York

and what it meant to be a city

and a city meaning a community of people.

After the war, the most sensational thing

that came was the full flowering of this vision

of the expressway tower city.

This generation of idealistic city planners comes along

and they're infected with the modernist purity idea.

And they certainly have the tools at their disposal

to sweep away large tracts of land.

We recognize the problems that your community faces

and we know that you share them

with hundreds of cities everywhere.

Now what's involved in making your city a better place?

Well, things like housing

industrial development

better streets and highways.

Improving all these things adds up to a better city.

I'm sure that you will see the exciting opportunity

that exists for your city to become better.

There was this emerging idea that crowded urban areas

where people were kind of hanging out on the street

on their stoops, uh, where there was a lot of poverty

that the way to deal with that problem

was to effectively get rid of the streets.

Was effectively to eliminate that sidewalk culture.

And build projects that would make it impossible really

for people to kind of cluster in public in that way.

The idea of urban renewal was that

places that were blighted

were a cancer on the city

and therefore, we're gonna cut out the cancer.

The planners conceiving these urban renewal projects

are doing this from that

God-like vantage point in the sky.

To be able to look down

and you're able to imagine massive transformations.

They thought that applying the logic

of The Machine Age was gonna do that.

The problem had to be solved by some supervisor

noticing where the slums were, noticing where the traffic was

and going in and bulldozing..

...and building grand projects.

Well, we got out a brochure just now

telling when everybody has to move.

Robert Moses was the great embodiment of this.

I don't honestly believe that

considering the large numbers of people we've had to move out

of the way of public housing and other public improvements

I don't believe that we've done

any very substantial amount of harm.

There must be people who are discommoded

inconvenienced or call it what you will

on the old theory, that you can't make an omelet

without breaking some eggs.

After the Second World War

Robert Moses began to amass power.

He was the august parks commissioner

in the city of New York.

And he got power to build parkways.

He was appointed the city's construction coordinator.

He built thousands of apartments.

He became urban renewal czar

the head of the mayor's committee on slum clearance.

By the time that Moses was running

the Urban Renewal Program

we had torn down

literally thousands of tenement buildings

in cities like New York and Chicago.

You know, there's the, the pre-war Moses

and the post-war Moses.

The pre-war Moses was mostly an angel.

Post-war Moses was increasingly problematic.

For nearly half a century

this man has pushed people around New York.

Almost anybody who is anybody has cursed him

fought him, knuckled under to him and admired him.

The list of his adversaries include Franklin Roosevelt

Fanny Hurst, Elmer Davis who once compared him

to Hitler, Walter O'Malley

and hundreds of thousands of landowners

who thought their property was sacred.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely

and Robert Moses was absolutely powerful.

So he had amassed, um, not simply

an incredible amount of power

but had insulated himself

from oversight by political authorities

and by the broader public.

Don't forget that it's one thing to buy a park

or a great big chunk of land from one owner.

It's quite another thing to get a right-of-way

where hundreds and even thousands of people own it.

You theoretically and, according to some of the, uh

goo-goos and uplift organizations

we ought to negotiate with every individual until he's happy.

Can you imagine when you'd build anything

under those conditions?

Moses along with all of the people

that were involved in the Urban Renewal Program

had an agreed-upon agenda.

People needed adequate housing

adequate recreation facilities

and the motorcar was coming to America

and it needed to be accommodated on a large scale.

That was the agenda.

Moses became one polar view of what you could do.

Until, all of a sudden, there was an alternative.

Jane Jacobs has in

"The Death and Life of Great American Cities"

written a book that advances with the controlled

and implacable power of a bulldozer

against modern orthodox city planning and rebuilding.

I first began to look into city planning

and, and housing

and it was unbelievably awful.

Uh, insane.

When "Death And Life" comes out in the '60s

it's a clarion call.

It's Martin Luther nailing those 95 theses

to the, to the cathedral door.

The book is really the first cogent

accessible articulation of a whole set of ideas

that questions the mainstream thinking about our cities.

She is constantly probing.

By that example, she's saying

"You, reader, you have the ability to question."

"Look what we have built.

"Low-income projects that become

"worse centers of delinquency

"vandalism and general social hopelessness

"than the slums they were supposed to replace.

"Middle-income housing projects

"which are truly marvels of dullness and regimentation..

"...sealed against any buoyancy or vitality of city life.

"Luxury housing projects that mitigate their inanity

"or try to with a vapid vulgarity.

"Cultural centers that are unable to support

"a good bookstore.

"Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums

"who have fewer choices of loitering place than others.

"Expressways that eviscerate great cities.

"This is not the rebuilding of cities.

This is the sacking of cities."

She was questioning orthodoxy

and in essence saying the emperor has no clothes..

...at a time when women were not welcomed

in those kinds of environments.

If you wanna see what kind of a city can flourish

you need to look at the cities where it's happening.

There must be a lot of diversity

continually building up, diversity of kinds of work..

...diversity of kinds of people.

She revealed the way to create better cities

is by working with the people who live there

and the fabric that existed.

The traditional fabric that people inhabited.

There have to be areas of the city

which people use a lot, walking on the streets

and use at all times of day.

Jane understood neighborhoods need lots of connections.

Short blocks, lots of turns

allowing different kinds of interaction.

Neighborhoods need a mix of buildings, old and new.

They need diverse uses, 24/7, so that they're safer.

Constant connection with, uh, neighborhoods around

so that you're not isolated.

You need public spaces that are accessible to people.

It's all a great network in the city.

It's all related.

She observed these early, early qualities at a time

when housing was being built

in completely opposite direction.

They were isolating communities.

They were creating dead-end streets.

They were separating work uses

and recreation and residential uses.

She was explaining how life worked.

Before "Death And Life," she was a journalist.

She was a very savvy observer of human behavior

of places, of cities.

Jacobs started writing about the city

when she was 18 years old.

She was a secretary for a candy company.

She was determined to write on the side.

She did what any good enterprising writer would do.

She got freelance jobs.

Her curiosity was so remarkable.

She writes about specific

economic districts in the city.

She does the Jewelry District

she does the Fur District, she does the Flower District

and she develops a voice.

And where does she sell them to?

"Vogue" magazine.

She was writing pieces

about what she was observing and seeing in the city.

"The best way to plan for Downtown

"is to see how people use it today.

"To look for its strengths

"and to exploit and reinforce them.

"There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city.

"People make it.

"And it is to them, not buildings

that we must fit our plans."

"Q Magazine" accepted one of her stories

about manhole covers.

She discovered that they had all kinds of interesting

uh, patterns on them, interesting lettering.

How many female journalists

were writing about manhole covers?

Nobody. But she was.

She wanted to figure out how the sewer system was working.

She's curious. She's got a really good craft.

She knows how to write.

And she finds herself in a staff job

with "Architectural Forum."

Mrs. Jacobs, an associate editor

of the magazine "Architectural Forum"

has been a New Yorker for 27 years

and loves it, Mrs. Jane Jacobs.

[applause]

Thank you very much, Mr. Dolbier.

One fine day, "Architectural Forum" put me on an assignment

about some urban renewal projects that were being done.

In Philadelphia, as a matter of fact.

We have found, in our work in rebuilding Philadelphia

that a central design idea, well-developed

and clearly-expressed, can of itself

become a major creative force

and can make more meaningful

the work of individual architects

in various parts of an area.

I found out what they had in mind

and what they were planning to do

and how it was going to look

according to the drawings

and what great things it was going to accomplish.

I came back and wrote

enthusiastic articles about this.

All was well, I was in very cozy

with the planners and the project builders.

Anyhow, time passed

and some of these things were actually built.

Society Hill is residential.

The oldest part of the city, it is the site

of an intensive restoration project.

Houses, many pre-dating the American Revolution

slowly had grown dilapidated

and had been converted to other uses.

In addition, there was room for new

dramatically contemporary apartment towers.

Society Hill emerges

as a combination of ancient and modern.

But they didn't work at all the way they should've worked.

The city around them didn't react the way

uh, theoretically the city around them

should have reacted.

She is the hyper-sensitive antennae

you know, that's picking up something here

that no one else is seeing.

Why did stores that looked very cheerful and posed

to, uh, be doing a great booming business in the plans

actually go empty or languish?

Well, I would bring these questions up

with the people who had been responsible

for the, uh, planning of these places.

And I got quite a lot of alibis

boiling down to, uh, "People are stupid.

They don't do what they're supposed to do."

And this was a great shock to me.

Never mind highfalutin theories and so forth.

What are we looking at? What are we seeing?

Do you wanna trust some theory

that somebody figured out sitting in an office somewhere?

Or do you wanna trust what you actually see

out there with your own eyes?

Maybe the experts didn't really know

as much as they pretended to know.

About this time, a gentleman came into the office

of the "Architectural Forum."

He was very much worried about East Harlem.

About 300 million dollars

uh, worth of city rebuilding money

had been put to work.

He could see that their problems

were growing greater than they had ever been in the past.

She goes up to Harlem and she was taken around

by William Kirk of the Union Settlement House.

And he's showing her all the things

that are being lost in this community

when it's being demolished.

He would walk me around East Harlem.

We would stop in at stores

stop in at housing projects.

I began to see the..

Just out of the accumulation of all of this

I was beginning to understand how things worked.

Many little details of cause and effect.

She describes it as the very beginning.

The sort of moment when the light bulb

kind of went off in her head.

What I was seeing, in fact, was, uh

what makes the very intricate order of the city.

This has to do with a quality

that's called rather vaguely urbanism.

Cities are extremely physical places.

It's not an inert mass.

It's enterprises and people

reacting in certain ways to each other

and mutually supporting each other.

And wherever it worked properly

there seemed to be an awful lot of diversity.

Many different kinds of enterprises

many different kinds of people

mutually supporting and supplementing each other.

Jane Jacobs is thinking about how does a neighborhood work?

How does a street work?

What function does a sidewalk play?

But what she's really after is a new theory

of how cities function.

"In Death And Life Of Great American Cities"

she's asking what is the problem of a city?

She argues, "A city is a problem

of organized complexity."

Looks on the surface

like it's complex and disorderly..

...but in fact, there's an underlying structure.

Looks like chaos, but in fact, there's a balance.

There's a productive mix

of different functions and organisms.

She draws on ecological metaphors

biological metaphors

to suggest how it's really an ecosystem.

She wrote..

"To see complex systems of functional order

"as order and not as chaos

takes understanding.

"The leaves dropping from the trees in the autumn

"the interior of an airplane engine..

"...the entrails of a dissected rabbit..

"...the city desk of a newspaper..

"all appear to be chaos

"if they are seen without comprehension.

"Once they are seen as systems of order

they actually look different."

Jacobs understood when cities really work

they're phenomena that come from the bottom up.

So a great neighborhood is what happens

when thousands of different actors..

...and that's the shopkeepers, the bar owners

the people walking the streets

they spontaneously come together

in, in an uncoordinated but meaningful way

to create the kind of flavor and personality

of a distinct neighborhood.

That's not planned.

That's much more a question of organized complexity.

Jane Jacobs understood that living cities are not pretty.

They're messy, uh, chaotic

dense with people interacting together.

Dead cities are beautiful in a certain sense

because they tend to look predictable.

There aren't very many people.

If you can understand a city, then that city is dead.

Living cities are congested.

They're frustrating.

And at the same time, that's where your dreams come true.

Planners, they don't see any of the wondrous human qualities

that Jacobs is seeing.

The very forms of urbanism that she wrote about

the urban renewalists sought to destroy.

What would you do for Harlem?

- The slum corner of Harlem. - Yes.

I'd take that and all the other similar slums.

I'd tear 'em all out, every bit of 'em.

It's a cancerous thing

and you've just got to wipe them out.

I say that you have a cancerous growth there

that has to be carved out.

Alright, you've carved it out

and now you've replaced it with something new.

Yes, that's right.

With something that's decent

something that involves light and air

and, uh, new schools and playgrounds and parks.

And I'd say that's a hell of a big contribution

and certainly all the contribution

that I would be able to make

with all the people I can persuade to make it.

Instead of following the natural way

that people use space

city planning in this post-war era

and modern architecture created

this abstract vision of what it should be.

Concentrated on the utopian and the ideal.

In the 1920s, you get the rise

of this curious, mystical figure

um, out of Switzerland

uh, who calls himself Le Corbusier.

He's done some architecture and he's bethinking himself

not only an architect, but a great urban visionary.

The real gestation of his ideas

about modernist urbanism

that came as a result of riding in an airplane over Paris.

Seeing the city from up in the air

looking down God-like on this diorama

versus considering and knowing the city from the streets.

Corb was enraptured by the airplane.

He writes that the airplane indicts the mess

we've made of our cities.

Before the wheels hit the tarmac

he's concluded that we need to sweep all this away

and rebuild our cities.

Le Corbusier envisioned tearing down

huge sections of Paris..

...and replacing it with slabs

modern slabs, cruciform buildings.

He proposed superhighways

that went through green open space.

And they were going to terminate in superblocks.

And the superblocks had high-rise buildings

and the high-rise buildings

were so that people could have light and air

and they could get out of the slums.

He was thoroughly of the opinion

that if you had, uh, good architecture

the lives of people would be improved

and that architecture would improve people

and people would improve architecture

until perfectibility would descend on us

like The Holy Ghost and we'd be happy forever after.

Corb did this plan and made his models

and, uh, it excited a lot of people.

But in France, they weren't so excited.

The idea of the Ville Radieuse and the tower in a park

ended up, uh, moving to America

just like the rest of modernism did.

To help us get a glimpse into the future

of this unfinished world of ours

there has been created for the New York World's Fair

a thought-provoking exhibit

of the developments ahead of us.

In 1939, General Motors had an exhibition.

The Futurama.

It showed superhighways.

And everybody in America wanted this.

Here is an American city replanned

around a highly-developed modern traffic system.

Rebuilt and replanned.

Residential, commercial and industrial areas

all have been separated

for greater efficiency and greater convenience.

The '39 World's Fair in New York

was a Corbusier event.

It celebrated that style.

And so we see some suggestion

of the things to come.

A world with a future

in which all of us are tremendously interested

because that is where we are going to spend

the rest of our lives.

In a future which can be whatever

we propose to make it.

Modernism moved into the mainstream

of both American commercial architecture

and urban renewal.

The public housing model that we picked in the United States

was a misinterpretation of Le Corbusier.

The towers in his 1923 plan

were for offices, and then around the towers

were low 7 story buildings with generous balconies.

He never called for people

living in high-rise towers.

It was one of those odd moments

where a set of intellectual ideas

could be corrupted very quickly and easily

into something cheap and commercial.

The simplest formula to make quick money is modernism.

And it was very cheap, very quick to produce

and could suddenly enable

huge amounts of building to happen very quickly.

And Robert Moses totally understood that.

The one thing missing completely

from that vision is streets.

And the idea that a street is something you actually walk on

and a street is a place where things happen.

Jane Jacobs saw that at a time

when everybody else was thinking the sidewalk

was a kind of foolish leftover of another age.

"This is something everyone already knows.

"A well-used city street is apt to be a safe street.

"A deserted city street is apt to be unsafe.

"But how does this work really?

"There must be eyes upon the street.

"Eyes belonging to those we may call

"the natural proprietors of the street.

"The buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers

"and to ensure the safety of both residents and strangers

"must be oriented to the street.

"They cannot turn their backs or blank sides on it

and leave it blind."

Philosophically, what she recognized was

safety doesn't come from armed security guards

or blocking the entrances.

What makes a neighborhood great is precisely the fact

that there are people on the street.

"The sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously

"both to add to the numbers of effective eyes on the street

"and to induce the people in the buildings along the street

"to watch the sidewalks in sufficient numbers.

"Nobody enjoys sitting on a stoop

"or looking out a window at an empty street.

"Almost nobody does such a thing.

"Large numbers of people entertain themselves off and on

by watching street activity."

She went out and looked at things.

When she said that the doormen were paid eyes on the street

and that the same thing could happen

from bars on the street in West Village

I understood what she was talking about.

Nobody has to worry about things

where there are a lot of people on the street.

Jane Jacobs reverses the vantage point.

What is it like actually to live in these places

from street level?

And it's that simple change of perspective

that lead her away from the orthodoxy of the time.

Robert Moses had no interest really in paying attention

to what was there in neighborhoods.

What was there, he viewed as simply an obstacle

to what he wanted to make happen.

People oppose Moses all the time.

Whether he wanted Lincoln Center for the performing arts

a bridge across the entrance to New York Harbor

a parking lot where mothers air their babies in Central Park

a highway down the spine of Fire Island

or one through the middle of Washington Square

vehement opposition was what he expected

and what he got.

Oh, there's opposition to everything

that's, uh, progressive, everything that's new.

The opinion of people who were activists

as we were in the village

were Robert Moses was terrible

and Robert Moses was destroying the city

and Robert Moses had to be stopped.

Jane had got involved in several efforts

to stop Robert Moses from ripping the city to pieces.

Starting with the, uh, his attempt

to run Fifth Avenue down through Washington Square.

The first time I became aware

of the threat of what the highways

were doing and could do to New York

was when along came the plan

to push Fifth Avenue through Washington Square Park

and down below it as a continuous street.

They, uh, wanted to have the Fifth Avenue buses

go through the park

down into West Broadway

and change the name of that

to Fifth Avenue South

so as to make it more valuable for rents.

And that was a Robert Moses project.

This wasn't in the abstract for Jane Jacobs.

This was happening close to home.

Right in her backyard.

This was where she brought her kids

in strollers to play in that park.

It was the campus for a university.

It was the front yard

for neighborhood kids growing up.

It was a true reflection of a diverse neighborhood.

This is The Circle.

On weekdays, it's a wading pool for village kids.

But on Sundays, the water is turned off

and the circle becomes a meeting place

for guitarists, bongo and banjo players

villagers on a stroll, folk singers and tourists.

To me and to many others, we were outraged

about a road going through Washington Square

and we were going to save Washington Square Park.

Washington Square was really Jane Jacobs'

beginning as a civic activist.

All of the activists, myself included

were involved in trying to stop that.

The leaders there

included, uh, Jane Jacobs

and Shirley Hayes.

Shirley Hayes and Edith Lyons

uh, were the 2 women

who started the, the fight against the roadway

in Washington Square Park.

Jane was not deferential to power.

So she ups the ante on that Washington Square fight

and says, "I'm gonna write the mayor."

"I have heard with alarm and almost with disbelief

"the plans to run a sunken highway through the center

"of Washington Square.

"My husband and I are amongst the citizens

"who truly believe in New York

"to the extent that we have bought a home

"in the heart of the city and remodeled it

"with a lot of hard work.

"It is very discouraging to do our best

"to make the city more habitable

"and then to learn that the city itself

is thinking up schemes to make it uninhabitable."

Jane's example that she set for herself

is an example for other people to follow.

If a highway is coming through

that's going to be very destructive

and you know it's an idiotic thing

you fight that highway.

Protest against stultification and the status quo

and things that touch you and your neighborhood directly.

I think she was effective

because of the force of her personality

and the fact that she was able to mobilize

a lot of people.

And Margaret Meade and Susan Sontag

and all the various folks that Jane was involved with

were drawn to the tangibility of this particular fight.

They get too many critics.

They get too many mud-throwers

too many people who foul their nest and there we are.

That's our trouble.

Too many people sitting around

calling names like Mumford.

People that, what do they contribute?

You have any problem to solve, any difficulty

you'd never call upon them.

Call upon them for four-letter words.

They don't even have very good vocabulary in my book.

Robert Moses wasn't used to anybody saying no to him.

He'd fire off these letters

to people of, uh, Greenwich Village.

"I realized that in the process of rebuilding

"south of Washington Square

"there would be cries of anguish

"from those who are honestly convinced

"the Sistine Madonna was painted in the basement

"of one of the old buildings there

"not presently occupied by a cabaret or speakeasy.

"That Michelangelo's David was fashioned

"in a garret in the same neighborhood.

"And that anyone who lays hands

"on these sacred landmarks will be executed

"if he has not already been struck down

by a bolt from heaven."

They managed to show Moses as this bully

and they, they got a lot of important people

on their side, including Eleanor Roosevelt.

I would feel very strongly

that destroying the Square

by putting a large artery

for traffic through the Square

would harm not only the Square itself

but the whole neighborhood

and really the city.

I'm not opposed to change.

In fact, I believe in change.

But I think that good tradition

has to be preserved.

Jacobs was a brilliant strategist

when it came to civil action.

She had a real sense for the photo op.

In Washington Square Park

she arranged for her daughter and another girl

to conduct a ribbon-tying ceremony.

This, of course, was the opposite of

the ribbon cutting ceremony

the politicians loved to, uh, celebrate

with public works.

It was at one of the hearings

where Moses was foolish enough to say that

nobody's against us except a bunch of mothers.

How could he be so tactless?

Only if you think that people don't matter at all

could you make a statement like that.

She was a housewife. That's how they treated her.

I mean, of course, she was a professional journalist.

That was not somehow..

When you want to dismiss her, you just say

there was this housewife from Hudson Street.

Try to mess with a bunch of mothers.

Uh, I think that

he underestimated what the, uh

effectiveness of these mothers might in fact be.

Literally thousands of people turned to

and it took quite a few years, but did save it.

It ended up being an extraordinarily

potent opposition, which he'd never met before.

Moses had never met this before.

He had his, he had it coming.

Washington Square Park was certainly

the first, uh, public defeat for Robert Moses

and it was a, uh, uh, a major chink in his armor.

The battle over Washington Square

is, is Jane's first taste of victory.

Not long after the Washington Square victory

"Death And Life" is published.

And Bennett Cerf, head of Random House

sends a copy to Robert Moses.

And Moses sends it back.

"I am returning the book you sent me.

"Aside from the fact that it is intemperate

"and inaccurate..

"...it is also libelous.

I call your attention, for example, to page 131."

"Robert Moses has made an art of using control

"of public money to get his way

"with those whom the voters elect and depend on

"to represent their frequently opposing interests.

"This is, of course, in other guises

an old, sad story of democratic government."

He didn't even wanna recognize

the existence of the book or of Jane.

Others, uh, were also, uh, not charitable

including Lewis Mumford.

Lewis Mumford, the great architectural critic

for "The New Yorker," his famous review of her book

had the title Mother Jacobs' Home Remedies.

He's immediately telling you

Jane Jacobs was just this sweet, old lady

trying to get some homeopathic medicine into the city

instead of doing the serious surgery

that a real doctor would do.

Right around the time

of "Death and Life of Great American Cities"

ironically, her own neighborhood

of the West Village, the very neighborhood

that she had, had proclaimed as a model

for what neighborhoods could be

was earmarked for urban renewal.

Moses was commissioner of, uh, housing

in the urban renewal effort to build more public housing

in New York City.

He actually stepped down from that position

but before he did

he designated the West Village

as eligible for slum designation.

I got the book finished finally

and thought, ah, now I can think about something else.

And for 3 weeks

I did think about other things.

Then I opened the "New York Times" one morning

and found that our own area of the West Village

was going to have an urban renewal project in it.

She really didn't think of herself as a community organizer

as a, a street fighter or that sort.

She was a writer.

She did not appreciate the distraction.

She really didn't, but she knew she had to do it.

She was sad. I mean, she would shrug her shoulders.

What can I, what can I do?

You know that thing about an inert object?

Well, there is nothing more inert

than a government bureau.

There's nothing more inert than a planning office.

It gets going in one direction

and it is never going to change of its own accord.

So I suddenly had to put into practice my own premises

that if anything was going to happen to reverse

the way things were being done

then the citizens had to take some initiative

and the citizens had to frustrate the planners.

I thereupon began to devote myself

to frustrating planners.

And so did the whole neighborhood.

Jane calls a meeting of local residents

at The Lion's Head

a favorite neighborhood hangout.

Organizes people to speak at public meetings

and gets everybody to wear sunglasses

with an X painted on them.

They were fairly sophisticated

I think, in the tactics that they would employ

and they're tackling somebody who's been writing

for a living for a couple of decades

and knows how to make an argument.

We all knew one another and were constantly planning

on how to, uh, get the mayor on our side

and how to threaten him. And we did.

We got him on our side.

She filed a lawsuit against the city of New York

to try to block the urban renewal plan.

"I think that the time has come

"to put the West Village

"urban renewal proposal to rest.

"Promptly remove the West Village designation.

Cordially, Robert F. Wagner."

They prevailed and, uh, at the end of the day

the slum designation never happened in the West Village.

She effectively showed the people of Greenwich Village

that they could fight city hall

that they did not have to accept

the plans of the planners at their drafting tables

and that they could reject those lines

being drawn around their homes.

We need to understand Greenwich Village

is a proxy here for a wave

that was starting to take hold in the United States

where there was increasing resistance

to centralized authority.

Her strategy was certainly informed

by other struggles that were going on at the time.

Within 3 years of each other

Jacobs published her book.

Uh, Betty Friedan published "The Feminine Mystique."

Rachel Carson published "Silent Spring."

The Environmental Movement.

Civil Rights.

The movement for decent cities

feminism, you know

all were being born at once

and all were sharing tools

of propaganda, of local organizing

of civil disobedience.

Jane Jacobs was perhaps the most articulate voice

of a movement that now seems

merely common sense.

Any city that's tearing down its buildings

just to make money for a development

or, uh, just to have novelty

is doing something criminal.

A fella who gets up in the upper stories

of a, of a public housing project

where he has a view, what's the matter with him?

He's got a nice place to live, hasn't he?

I think that the objection that some might have

was that the view is just of another housing development

and another highway.

No, I don't concede that.

It wasn't just that they wanted

new housing in place of the old.

They wanted an entirely different-looking city.

Robert Moses and his constituency

wanted it all to be very simplified

very sterilized.

It was the hubris of Moses and his ilk.

The idea that we're gonna rearrange the spaces

and therefore, we're gonna rearrange the social relations.

It had to do with this towers-in-the-park mentality.

It had to do with the creation

of a new form of ghetto.

Whole downtowns were being bulldozed

in the name of people, but not for the people.

They were destroying lives

and replacing them with these housing projects.

And why?

Because it was making a lot of people

a lot of money.

It was making developers a lot of money

politicians a lot of money

and it was fast money.

So they kept doing it over and over and over again

in cities all over the country.

It was several years

after Robert Moses had begun building these projects

that the other cities caught up.

What they were building was the Corbusier model.

You saw the kind of building of these

uh, these housing projects across the United States.

You know, 25 story block apartment buildings

with playgrounds and gardens around them

that looked great in all the drawings.

Here in bright, new buildings

with spacious grounds, they can live.

Live with indoor plumbing, electric lights

fresh plastered walls and the rest of the conveniences

that are expected in the 20th century.

In these projects, children can play in safety

on the wide lawns

not in the littered alleys and vacant lots.

We must make sure that every family in America

lives in a home of dignity

in a neighborhood of pride

and a community of opportunity

and a city of promise and hope.

But what ended up happening is nobody ever hung out

on, uh, in the kind of public space around these

uh, projects and so they became

these under-populated places.

And they actually very quickly became

some of the most dangerous places in the world.

Concentrated poverty.

This was a, you know, the really

the worst thing about, uh, the projects

and therefore, amplified all of the pathological

and antisocial elements of poverty.

These institutions became fortressed.

You become cornered. You feel cornered.

You feel trapped.

They left people more vulnerable.

Public housing became places of fear.

High-rise fortresses like these

were built this way to save money.

In the long run, they didn't even do that.

The problem was that they were all wrong

for the people who wound up living in them.

Rural blacks, broken families

allowed in and to stay in

only if their incomes were low enough.

Most cities now are engaged

in something called urban renewal

which means moving the Negroes out.

It means Negro removal. That is what it means.

And the federal government is an accomplice to this fact.

Now this, we are talking about human beings.

There's not such a thing as a monolithic wall

or, you know, some abstraction called Negro problem.

These Negro boys and girls

who at 16 and 17 don't believe

the country means anything that it says

and don't feel that they have any place here.

The phrase, Urban renewal is Negro removal

was an acknowledgement by African-Americans

that, that this was an assault.

Removal is in the sense of

out, over there, away, far away.

Some place inhospitable where you can just die.

And a huge part of what happened to people was

that they were put in inhospitable places.

And African-Americans were put in at the margins of the city

in places that were, could barely support

the vital kind of life that people need to prosper.

It's as though the builders have not realized

that children would be living there

nor did they foresee the crime

the vandalism, which is really the acting out of rage

and self-loathing that can make people want

to destroy their own property.

People had lived in communities

that were messy, but they worked.

People had social capitals, people watched

each other's child when somebody was not there.

All this was actually taken away.

People had no investment emotionally.

People resented these projects that had been built for them

because they were poor.

So you see a lot of windows broken out.

They all were broken out by children throwing rocks.

And, uh, what's more natural than children throwing rocks?

They don't have nothing else to do.

There's absolutely no recreation facilities here.

And, uh, the playground like this

is a mockery for thousands of children.

Tenants had no input as to what they wanted.

Uh, it was built because somebody said

this would be good for children to play on.

There were graffiti everywhere

and there were drug problems and all the problems

that you can imagine come from

when you uproot people without their will.

And what do you expect, that they will love these projects?

No, that wasn't gonna happen.

Pruitt-Igoe, if you really see

an, uh, an aerial view of it

those buildings were spaced quite a distance apart.

If you took them and threw them on their faces

which is where they should've fallen

you will get lovely housing 20 feet high.

You can take a look at a little exercise here

that if these towers, these slabs

are removed from the towers

you begin to see a different attitude

of what is visible.

You begin to see through the site

as opposed to looking at a slab of buildings running.

One thing, the tenants are really stressing

is for a low-rise building

closer to a home.

Something that they can relate to.

What we are trying to do here

is to take a given situation

and try to bring it back

to a community where people would want to live.

After thinking about the problem

of the Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project

the city planners blew it up.

[explosion]

Just dynamited it away.

The projects end up being tremendous failures.

You know, we know all about that failure now.

And everywhere they existed

30, 40 years later

they're all being torn down.

You can't put streets back where you took them out.

You can't put stores back.

You can't put the daily life and all the institutions.

It takes generations to build up those institutions.

That's what was eliminated by these projects.

[explosion]

The superblock urbanism of the modernist ilk

that Jane Jacobs, uh, writes about

is, is destroying cities.

You also have, at the very same time

the automobile being rammed through.

This causes as many problems

as the urban renewal projects.

The most profound influence

on the city in the last hundred years

has been the automobile.

The decision made almost inevitable

was to drive the freeways, the interstates in some

right through the cities and through neighborhoods

whose value city elites and developers

wanted to ultimately reclaim.

We wouldn't have any American economy

without the automobile business.

That's literally true.

I believe that that this is a great industry

that has to go on and has to keep on turning out

cars and trucks and buses

and there have to be places for them to run.

There have to be modern roads.

The first of Moses' commandments for progress

is thou shalt drive.

Jane Jacobs was one of the very first people

to say the car is not supreme.

The people who walk on the sidewalk

are what makes the city.

It isn't hard to understand

that producing and consuming automobiles

might seem all-important to the management of Ford

and Chrysler and General Motors.

But it's harder to understand why the production

and consumption of automobiles should be the purpose of life

for all the rest of us.

Moses was about realizing

a very particular vision of the American dream.

That was, you know, what's good for General Motors

is good for the United States of America.

I'm privileged to present

the winner of the Grand National Award.

Robert Moses of New York.

Robert Moses, New York City Construction Coordinator

is a world-famous highway planner.

A man who knows his business.

What he was really doing was tearing up vital neighborhoods.

For example, in the South Bronx

where he built the Cross Bronx Expressway.

This was the single most destructive decision

ever made about US cities.

The Cross Bronx Expressway

an artery whose history was marked by

such gigantic problems of construction, financing

relocation and organized obstruction

that it took 17 years to complete.

The Cross Bronx Expressway ripped through the heart

and the middle of the Bronx

creating what was a wall between

what eventually was known as

the northern and the southern part of the Bronx.

Robert Moses thought he'd get away with anything.

Who's gonna stop him?

He's got all the city politicians on his side

because he's bringing a lot of federal money

from the federal highway program.

And that gets passed around.

Today our greatest

single problem is tenant removal.

The, uh, tendency on the part

of people in politics

as well as those who are living on these

rights-of-way who are immediately affected

is to assume that the people who are doing this job

are unsympathetic.

They're even sadistic.

Well, of course, that isn't the truth at all.

When Moses would ram the Cross Bronx Expressway through

it was not just breaking down the physical structure

of that borough literally

so south and north become different

but the community.

When you remove the daily life

when you remove the stores, you remove the places

that constitute where they spend time

what we would call the public realm

the sidewalks, the bars, the grocery stores

you remove the city.

And that's what Jane Jacobs says.

You draw away the people with a prescription

that is guaranteed to hurt cities.

Well, you have to bull it through. You've gotta do it.

It's like all these, these things that have opposition.

The fact that 2000 people come and agitate

against the extension of an expressway

doesn't prove that you're not gonna build the expressway.

So many of the problems of the South Bronx grew directly

out of the devastation caused by building that expressway.

Which, of course, became totally gridlocked

15 minutes after it was open.

I mean, Moses thought he was improving the city

by bringing it up-to-date

by making it work for the automobile.

And as it became clear

that urban highways were, in fact

uh, profoundly destructive

it really became a battle between opposing forces.

Of course, in Lower Manhattan

uh, Moses, uh, wanted to build a road

right across, um, uh, the city there.

The Whole Cast Iron District

would've been basically obliterated.

The Lower Manhattan Expressway

was to have connected the Holland Tunnel

with the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges.

It would've destroyed most of SoHo.

We would've lost one of the greatest inventories

of 19th century buildings, not just in New York

but in the world.

The highways, of course

destroyed the neighborhoods

that they went through.

Where was this going to end?

The whole place was going to be laced with highways.

What would we have left of Manhattan?

On any day of the week, if you walk along Canal Street

and it's often faster than riding

this is what you'll see.

The crush of endless waiting traffic.

Now look at the solution.

A Lower Manhattan Expressway

only practical highway crossing

serving the Lower Manhattan

commercial and business districts.

Can we afford to let one section of our city

slowly strangle in hopeless traffic congestion?

There was an awful campaign against that neighborhood.

It was called Hell's Hundred Acres.

A bottled-up, stagnating section of the city.

No new private buildings erected in 30 years.

A valley of economic depression.

The need is urgent.

We must have a Lower Manhattan Expressway now.

The local priest in a church on Broom Street

had heard about Jane's

successful defenses fighting Moses

and asked if she could help.

Father, what effect do you feel

that the expressway will have on the neighborhood?

Well, the expressway will, will destroy the neighborhood.

This is the worst thing about these monumental plans.

There is no way there

that old buildings can easily be torn down

and new ones put up.

Old things adapted to different use.

It's settled.

Well, that's not planning for the future.

Reminded of some of the opposition

to his longtime dream for an expressway

across Lower Manhattan

Moses was specific about what it takes

to override the inevitable roadblocks.

You gotta move people.

And that, the political leaders

naturally, if they have people ticketed

and they know where they are and they vote right

they don't wanna move 'em and have 'em go somewhere else.

What I try to do, uh, in New York

what we've done successfully in other places

which is to pay more money to people in cash.

Come take the money and go away.

You got people who rent. They don't own anything.

So what different does it make

when you're talking about a, uh, an expressway

that costs 84 million dollars?

Stop being victims.

I think it's wicked

in a way, to be a victim.

It's even wickeder to be a predator

but it's wicked to be a victim and allow it.

You can't, as an individual, you can't do anything

but you can organize.

If you're being victimized by an expressway

that a bureaucracy is putting through

for the benefit of the automobile people

then you fight that you refuse to be a victim of that.

What effect do you think this will have

on the neighborhood itself?

It will destroy the neighborhood.

It's one of the few neighborhoods that you can..

A woman can go down the streets at night and be safe.

And the women know it and I know it.

2 or 3 o'clock in the morning

the men are sitting in the cafes

and they're watching you, taking care of you.

You wanna build up neighborhoods like this.

They say let's get back to the old, safe neighborhoods.

This is it!

Memorandum to Arthur Hodgkiss from Robert Moses.

"The Lower Manhattan will move very soon.

Please keep an eye on it."

Mr. Simon, are you saying that

they're trying to sneak it through?

I would say it's a sleeper.

If this thing is passed, uh

these are how these things happen.

If they're not watched, uh, it's a sleeper.

Who do you think is pushing this?

Well, uh, there's only one man

that I can think of that can be pushing.

They seem to think that they have a choice.

That they'd rather stay in the houses

that they've lived in all this time.

The whole federal arterial aid program

running into billions of dollars

depend upon the votes of a few

a very few people in one section.

We wouldn't build anything. Nothing would be built.

There'd be no highways, there'd be no -- no housing.

There, there'd be no public improvements.

Please do not build this express highway.

Most of these people consider automobiles

more than the human being.

It is not right!

I think it's awful.

I don't think it's fair.

I don't think it's very good

'cause I live there, I look out my window.

The truck, the car and everything.

They don't need expressway.

What they gonna do, throw me in the street?

After 51 years, I'm citizen and everything?

There's something awful to think every day

they gonna throw you out.

I think it's awful thing. They make me sick.

I hope God they have to be damn sick.

That's what I hope. Goodbye.

Thank you.

It was gonna be a defining hearing

in which they would approve the expressway.

And Jane said, when they discuss this issue

I'm gonna get up and I'm gonna speak against it.

I went up, uh, to the microphone.

I was very angry. They weren't listening to us.

They had made their decision. That was clear.

They were really only errand boys

who had no power to make decisions.

So we had better let them take back a message.

We would never stand for this expressway.

I intended just to climb up to their level

and walk across the stage.

There was a stenotypist

who had a new machine.

She was frightened

and she picked up her stenotype machine

and clasped it to her bosom.

The tapes fell out of the machine

and ran across the floor like confetti.

People began tossing it in the air.

I knew it had to be brought to an end

so an inspiration struck me.

I said, "There is no hearing

"because the record is gone.

And without a record, there can't be a hearing."

The chief state person was saying

"Arrest that woman. Arrest that woman."

As I went out, police captain told me that

uh, I was arrested.

The police were very apologetic.

They knew who she was and what was going on.

She was charged with 3 felonies

which is pretty rotten for what she did.

What did she do? She didn't hurt anybody.

She became the hero.

And the politics did shift at that point.

The Board of Estimate in an executive session today

voted unanimously to turn down the proposal

for a Lower Manhattan Expressway.

The board -- Please.

[applause]

That was the decisive moment.

And Moses couldn't do anything.

He was just a pure villain.

The politicians were villains.

At that point, it was clear that no politicians

were gonna get away with this.

The Lower Manhattan Expressway

was really the beginning of the end for Robert Moses.

Robert Moses was finally squeezed out

by Nelson Rockefeller, who as Governor of New York

might have been the first public official

powerful enough to call his bluff.

Moses was famous for threatening to resign

when he was unhappy with something.

Rockefeller said at one point okay

and Moses had no choice.

He couldn't back down and he was gone.

After the Moses' expressway situation was finally settled

Jane felt she could go to Canada with her typewriter

and become a writer again.

Her husband, who was an architect

was building hospitals up there.

And their sons were there be, to keep out of the

that awful Vietnam War.

Of course, as soon as she got to Toronto

she, she saw there was another expressway

heading right for her house

the Spadina Expressway.

She stopped that too.

And then got to work.

The Lower Manhattan Expressway

was officially dead in the year 1970.

Meanwhile, across the country

these kinds of freeway revolts were taking place

and similar roadways were being defeated.

But the Lower Manhattan Expressway

was really the leading example.

If that had happened, there would be no SoHo.

The entire history of development

and redevelopment and adaptive reuse in the city

would've played out in a different way.

It would've been the single most

damaging intervention in the urban fabric

in Manhattan in the 20th century, period.

A city is not just a physical object.

The city is a living thing.

It will always morph and change.

Our goal has to be to manage change well

not to freeze it in time.

As cities around the world are obliged to house

this dramatically increasing population

we still have the conversation in terms of

top down versus bottom up

formality versus informality.

These are the eternal polarities

of thinking about the city.

If you go to China, you see huge swathes

of farmland that are now being urbanized

in exactly the model that America used in 1950s

and we know that it failed.

China today is Moses on steroids, you know.

And the notion that Moses could not have conceived

of this extraordinary scaling up

of what it means to build.

In that sense, history has outdone him.

These isolated developments

with hundreds of similar-looking blocks

with no urbanism, no street

who can live in them and how would you live in them?

What they are building today, I think..

...is the slums of the future.

And they're made in concrete.

They're gonna last at least 60 years.

We are condemning future generations

to an absolute world without hope.

Given the scale of the problem we have

that makes a completely different context..

...in which Jane Jacobs' ideas again now

have a new incarnation.

"It is so easy to blame the decay of cities

"on traffic or immigrants..

"...or the whimsies of the middle class.

"The decay of cities goes deeper and is more complicated.

"It goes right down to what we think we want

and to our ignorance about how cities work."

With the amount of people who now need to live in cities

you have to accept that you're going to need more density.

But a lot of densely built up terrain..

...is not a city.

If, when we're to build a city

no matter how fast it is

without building a great public realm

you don't have a city.

That's what Jane Jacobs talks about.

Historically, solutions to city problems

have very seldom come from the top.

They come from people

who understand the problems firsthand

'cause they're living with them

and who have new and ingenious

and often very offbeat ideas of how to solve them.

The creativity and the concern

and the ideas down there in city neighborhoods

and city communities has to be given a chance

has to be released.

People have to insist on government

trying things their way.

If you gave people an environment

that they could shape themselves

they would not only be happier..

...but you would have a completely

different kind of city.

The problem for people who are planning

and designing and thinking about all this new urban tissue

that's being created is how to take some of these

incredibly valuable lessons that Jane Jacobs teaches

um, and apply them to the project of creating

the places where, uh, all of these

billions of people are going to live.

The key thing about Jane Jacobs

much more important than loving stoops and streets and stuff

was a willingness to be skeptical

a willingness to doubt the received wisdom..

...and to trust our eyes instead.

"Under the seeming disorder of the old city

"wherever the old city is working successfully..

"...is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety

"of the street

"and the freedom of the city.

"It is a complex order.

"This order is all composed of movement and change.

"And although it is life, not art..

"...we may fancifully call it the art form of the city..

"...and liken it to the dance.

"Not to a simpleminded precision dance

"with everyone kicking up at the same time

"twirling in unison and bowing off en masse..

"...but to an intricate ballet

"in which the individual dancers and ensembles

"all have distinctive parts..

"...which miraculously reinforce each other..

...and compose an orderly whole."

[instrumental music]