Most good documentaries are powered by conflict, and you couldn’t ask for a struggle more elemental or relevant to our time than the one chronicled in Citizen Jane: Battle for the City. Director Matt Tyrnauer revisits the ongoing contest in the 1950s and ’60s between Jane Jacobs, the populist author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and Robert Moses, the imperious master builder of New York City, who championed massive tower blocks and expressways in his plans to modernize Manhattan. For ten years Jacobs was a thorn in Moses’s side, helping lead the charge against him when he wanted to demolish Washington Square Park for a highway extension, or raze parts of the West Village as part of an urban renewal project, or destroy much of historic SoHo to construct a lower Manhattan expressway. The last of these battles, in 1964, was so fiery it helped drive Jacobs out of New York and Moses out of public life.
Arrogant and paternalistic, Moses embraced the Corbusier model as a futuristic solution to the squalor of slum life, but Jacobs rejected this mind-set, seeing the city not as a collection of buildings but as a collection of people, a social ecosystem with an innate genius for correcting its own problems. With Cities she popularized the idea of “eyes on the street,” arguing that public safety comes less from the police than from neighbors who keep an eye on each other and incoming strangers; these eyes create a “public realm” where civic virtue is enforced by common consent. Moses and Le Corbusier preached a gospel of uniformity, but Jacobs argued that diversity was the key to a healthy city district: the area must have multiple primary uses and a variety of businesses that keep the streets busy past nightfall. Moses was disgusted by the “stoop culture” of the slums, but for Jacobs this was the social fabric that kept the community alive.
Directed by Matt Tyrnauer
