the death and the life of great american cities

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.

The death and the life of great american cities