In a recent review of Anthony Flint’s book on Jane Jacobs (Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs took on New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City), Jason Epstein* argues that Jacobs has had a remarkable effect on urban planning and development in North America. Her triumph over Robert Moses and James Felt (New York planners who wanted to build an expressway through the heart of Lower Manhattan) shifted that city’s focus from epic infrastructure projects, especially for cars, to the preservation of mixed-use neighborhoods, replete with multiple housing types, mixed commercial and industrial properties, and accessible streets that organically connected citizens and structures alike. However, as Epstein concedes, this preference for preservation over slum clearance came at a cost:
The West Village was saved, but as with all victories, unintended consequences ensued. Clarence Davies, a Felt ally and head of the Housing and Redevelopment Board that
replaced [Moses’s] Committeeon Slum Clearance wrote … “that if the Village area is left alone and if no middle-income housing is projected by the Board … eventually the Village will consist solely of luxury housing, which we, of course, will be powerless to prevent … This trend is already quite obvious and would itself destroy any semblance of the present Village that [Jacobs and her allies] seem so anxious to preserve.”
The term was not yet in use but Davies had foreseen the gentrification that would within twenty years turn the Village into some of the most expensive real estate on earth. The mixed-income neighborhood of dockworkers and middle-class households and artists’ lofts that Jacobs championed would become the victim of its own charm. There would be little room for working-class families or struggling artists in the Greenwich Village that Jacobs fought to preserve. “Her vision of organic city growth,” Flint writes, “would do little to curb gentrification.”
The dialectic of urban development, therefore, produces winners and losers. I`m now in Chilliwack. You can guess which side I am on. ………………
* Epstein, Jason (August 13, 2009), “New York: The Prophet.” The New York Review of Books, Vol. 56, Issue 13: 33-35.
Edited on: Thursday, September 24, 2009 4:50 PM
Categories: American Politics, BC Politics
