Moses revisited (Jane Jacobs...)

[ish mailian]

The collapse of modernist grandiosity accelerated a swerve in urban
planning towards the view articulated by Jane Jacobs in The Death and
Life of Great American Cities(1961), which promoted a new emphasis on
protecting vital neighbourhoods and allowing for unpredictable social
encounters in public spaces. This was a turn to a different modernism:
the sort embodied in Stephen Dedalus’s definition of God as ‘a shout
in the street’; the sort that celebrated spontaneity, improvisation
and play. For half a century, Jacobs’s humane perspective has leavened
the discourse of urban revitalisation while at the same time
unleashing a flood of preppy bars and cleverly themed emporia – the
benign but by now predictable markers of gentrification. Still Moses’s
monuments remain: swooping ribbons of steel, clogged with cars;
futuristic fantasies of speed, stuck in traffic; concrete embodiments
of his modernist hubris.

While Moses’s utopia was crashing and burning, Robert Caro was writing
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. It was first
published in 1974.

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n06/jackson-lears/capitalisms-capital
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