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A plucky intellectual takes on New York's most powerful builder in "Citizen Jane: Battle for the City," an engrossing documentary that details a historical conflict that is being repeated around the world today.
Director Matt Tyrnauer (who explored the fashion word in the 2008 documentary "Valentino: The Last Emperor") profiles Jane Jacobs, a journalist and urban thinker best known for her 1961 book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities." In this landmark book, Jacobs argued that cities are complicated organisms and that the best ones aren't designed from the top down, but incorporate the culture of the sidewalk to reflect how real people live.
"Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody only because, and only when, they are created by everybody," she wrote.
Jacobs' ideas were a direct response to the "urban renewal" movement of the 1950s and '60s, when ambitious city planners tore up slum neighborhoods to build massive high-rise residential projects and highways to accommodate more car traffic. The best-known of these planners was Robert Moses, the imperious "master builder" who oversaw New York City's building boom after World War II.
Tyrnauer depicts Moses as an arrogant bully, displacing thousands of New Yorkers and making developers rich with his grand schemes to build housing projects and freeways. Critics in the film cite Moses' work in pushing housing projects that almost immediately became crime-ridden hellholes and in championing the Cross-Bronx Expressway, a freeway that many believe ripped the soul out of that borough and turned the South Bronx into one of the nation's most blighted urban areas. (Tyrnauer doesn't even mention how Moses' intransigence prompted two of the city's revered baseball teams, the Dodgers and the Giants, to move to California.)
Tyrnauer details instances where Jacobs helped organize protests against Moses' massive plans and won. Jacobs, dismissed by Moses' supporters as a mere housewife, helped lead the fight to keep a highway from bisecting Washington Square Park and to push back on plans to designate Greenwich Village (where she lived) as a slum. The biggest fight was over the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway, another freeway, which would have decimated SoHo and the Village.
Jacobs' voice is heard through interviews, and her writings read by Marisa Tomei, to channel her theories about the vibrancy of city life. (For example, she argued that a busy sidewalk full of neighbors is safer than Moses' so-called "clean" streets, because more people are watching out for each other.) Tyrnauer interviews a bevy of urban experts who point out that Jacobs was proven right by history, as evidenced by the many cities that demolished their Moses-influenced housing projects.
"Citizen Jane: Battle for the City" isn't merely a dusty history lesson about things that happened 50 years ago. "China is Robert Moses on steroids," one expert opines, and that's just one instance where the battles Jacobs waged in New York are still happening all over the world. —
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'Citizen Jane: Battle for the City'
A thoughtful documentary profiles the writer and urban theorist Jane Jacobs, who fought the top-down "urban renewal" push of the 1950s and '60s.
Where • Broadway Centre Cinemas.
When • Opens Friday, June 23.
Rating • Not rated, but probably PG for language and mentions of drug use and violence.
Running time • 92 minutes.