Citizen Jane: Battle for the City covers a lot of ground. It’s a study of how cities grow and develop, of how architecture affects people’s lives and of political power. The movie gets into questions of race – cities didn’t mind jamming poor African-American’s into segregated housing projects. And if you like, the movie is also a lesson in how to stop a bully.
World War II changed the country dramatically. Population grew; things like eating, traveling and shopping were all hit by the idea of large scale operations – McDonald’s hamburgers, Holiday Inns and chain discount stores are postwar phenomena. An enhanced notion of city planning entered the world, and in New York that development took shape in one exceptionally powerful man named Robert Moses, whose ideas boiled down to eradicating whole neighborhoods, especially those of the middle class and the poor, and erecting massive modernist apartment blocks. Moses wanted to make huge concessions to the automobile, to help cars move quickly and efficiently; he would sacrifice things old and gracious and settled by people to expressways.
The term “urban renewal” described the process of tearing down what some called slums to build this new kind of environment. I remember a trip to New Haven, Connecticut, with my father in the early 1960s. The heart of the city was a wasteland of vacant lots that looked as if the city had been bombed. My father told me that this was urban renewal. Only years later did I learn that New Haven was one of the great examples of the failure of Robert Moses’ kind of vision.
But in many cities, the housing projects were built, and Citizen Jane shows that not many years later, some of those immense projects were literally blown up – the archival film of those buildings imploding became famous as a chronicle of profound wrong-headedness. There’s a long shot of a cluster of outsized buildings. A small cloud of dust shoots out at the bottom, and then the building slumps down on itself.
Into this world came Jane Jacobs, a journalist who first praised the modernist ideas of Robert Moses and then realized that his ideas were fully anti-human, and wrote the famous book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs championed the life of the street and made the case that tearing down neighborhoods where people lived, shopped, played with their children, and sat on stoops to visit with the neighbors were safe places and humane places. The big apartments created isolation, social dislocation, sterility of life and crime. In the dozens of archival shots of Moses disparaging his opponents, he’s the very picture of contempt and superiority.
Citizen Jane is not a so-called balanced film. It’s about how Jacobs mobilized people while Moses relied on raw political power. But when Moses proposed running Fifth Avenue through Washington Square Park, Jacobs orchestrated his first major defeat. Moses planned to build a highway across the hallowed Greenwich Village, and Jacobs again rallied people against the governmental forces. The perky and brilliant gray-haired woman mixes it up among the people, while Moses literally looks down his nose.
Citizen Jane presents an account of a great urban conflict. It makes a straightforward case for a set of ideas and events, and uses interviews, old photos and film clips to do it. It’s solid and wonderfully researched, but it’s not imaginative filmmaking – a good lecture presented with terrific footage of mostly New York, but other cities also.
Citizen Jane is not naïve. It doesn’t pretend that all neighborhoods were paradise on Earth, but as one of the commentators points out, many neighborhoods Moses wanted to bulldoze worked. They were full of human interaction of the kind that allows people to feel that their lives may actually be their own.
