Moses fell from grace and power, while Jacobs moved to Toronto with her family where she was soon fighting against bludgeoning overdevelopment there. In any case, Moses’s greatest excesses, like the Cross Bronx freeway – 17 years in the making, displacing families and creating new slums in its almost instantly gridlocked wake – were proving to be failures.
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In fact, by the time she fought Moses over the Lower Manhattan Expressway through to 1968, and won, she was pretty expert on the subject of urban planning, and this at a time when women were finding their professional and critical voices. Jacobs was clearly more than a “housewife”. These patronising put-downs proved to be ill-timed and inaccurate. And when Jacobs gathered women to protest actively against Moses’s plans to drive an expressway through Washington Square Park and out to new suburbs, the grand planner dismissed the opposition as interfering “housewives”. Mumford’s alternative title was 'Mother Jacobs’ Home Remedies'. It was not altogether surprising when Lewis Mumford, the grand American panjandrum of the discipline, chose to belittle her in his New Yorker review of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Choosing not to commute to a squeaky clean new suburb, they settled in Greenwich Village.Īs she found her voice through Architectural Forum, and Fortune, Jacobs disturbed established authorities on urban planning. She was feature writer for the Office of War Information during WW2, where she met her architect husband, Robert Hyde Jacobs Jr. She worked as a secretary at a trade magazine, and freelanced for the Sunday Herald Tribune and Vogue, writing about local neighbourhoods. This sentiment, though, struck a chord in the 1950s when top-down planners, and notably Robert Moses, had achieved almost god-like powers over the future development of major American cities.īorn in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Jacobs left high school to work as an unpaid women’s page editor at the Scranton Tribune before moving to New York City in 1935. Of course, cities never are “created by everybody”, as Jacobs, a former associate editor of Architectural Forum magazine, knew quite well. Far from perfect, they can feel larger than life. For Jacobs, a great city was a messy city, a kind of giant circus, theatre or bazaar, as New York had been before WWII and as some renowned cities – Kolkata, Palermo, Medellín, Naples – are even today. Or at least those who appeared to believe more in ideas and concepts than people and the lives they lived in streets that seemed little more than an unholy and unhygienic mess to tidy minded bureaucrats and their ambitious architects. This was the core message of Jane Jacobs’ fight against city powers and planners. Citizen Jane opens with a line from The Death and Life of Great American Cities typewritten across the screen: “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”
She celebrated the messy vitality of life on the street, of lively neighbourhoods where small businesses thrived, children played on sidewalks and people of different backgrounds rubbed shoulders.
For Jacobs, cities were more about people than buildings and grand designs.