The Woman Who Saved Manhattan From a Freeway Running Through It (bbc.com)

dryriver quotes a report from BBC: A massive freeway project dreamed up by city planner Robert Moses would have destroyed Greenwich Village and altered much of Lower Manhattan if not for one woman's efforts -- those of Jane Jacobs. As vast tracts of this U.S. journalist's adopted New York were razed to make way for theoretically fast-flowing urban freeways potted about with soulless high-rise housing projects for the urban poor, Jane Jacobs, skeptical of grand plans and nobody's victim, took on the City of New York through her urgent writing and by galvanizing protest groups who took to the streets of Manhattan to save the city from being dismembered, disinfected and depopulated. Robert Moses wanted to clean up New York while investing heavily in its infrastructure: its public parks, swimming pools, bridges, playgrounds, parkways, Shea Stadium, Lincoln Center and the United Nations headquarters. For many years, New York's intellectual elite supported such developments, including the destruction of working-class neighborhoods Moses saw as "cancerous growths" in need of surgical removal. He accrued ever more power and pushed through and proposed ever more radical schemes -- notably expressways that sliced through quarters of the city like blunt knives. This powerful and disdainful planner made enemies, and none more so than Jane Jacobs.

Comments

Biased

[Avarist]

Well that's a horribly biased piece and whoever wrote that should be shunned. The article is not so much trying to inform you but much rather convince you which is never what journalism should be. I'm not saying I'm on one side or the other of the argument.

Re:Biased

[ShanghaiBill]

Well that's a horribly biased piece and whoever wrote that should be shunned.

Indeed. TFA is portraying NIMBYism as heroic. The freeway may have been a bad idea, but the other projects would have been nice to have. Cities should be dynamic, with growth, change, and progress. Stagnation is bad for our economy and is a major source of inequality, as rents are driven up, and poorer people are driven out of the most prosperous areas, while the rich cash in on the rising property values driven by artificial scarcity.

Re:Biased

[kenj123]

Please post an article with a counter view that defends the plan. I think the plan was ridiculous. NYC is a city for people, not for cars. Moses's previous project, the cross Bronx expressway is just as ridiculous. Why divert one of the most important national highways, route 80 and 95 through the heart of densely urban area like the Bronx? the problem is the alternate route would have gone through the Hudson valley and there are too many wealthy connected people who live there that would have shutdown the project. So it ends up in a lower middleclass immigrant area like the Bronx. The problem is its ridiculous for both the people who are just trying to pass through and get caught in local traffic and it destroyed many establish local neighborhoods. The disaster that cross Bronx represents was a big reason Jacobs could mobilize sentiment against Moses lower manhattan plan which would have done the same thing.

Re:Biased

[ArmoredDragon]

I'm still trying to figure out how this is an appropriate slashdot topic. This sounds more like a topic for People's World.

Re: Biased

[dunkelfalke]

Cities also should be built for people, not for cars.

Re: Biased

[MangoCats]

For the last 70+ years, people come with cars semi-attached. People are no longer satisfied to simply walk from home to store to work and back, they like to move around more and more freely than buses and trains will permit.

Now, have mistakes been made about how to accommodate people's cars in urban environments? Absolutely, and freeways bisecting urban areas is one of the biggest ones, especially when built on-ground with limited access from one side to the other, that serves neither people nor cars of the neighborhood, it simply makes it easier for thru traffic.

When battery energy density reaches about 3-5x of current commercially deployed tech, we can finally have our VTOL flying cars, then we'll have a whole new set of problems, but the urban freeways can be torn down and walkable neighborhoods regrown in their absence.

Re: Biased

[Anonymous Coward]

In more enlightened cities, cars account for less than 10% of the people transporting themselves/being transported, and people manage to keep their everyday life together just fine. And even more now, that e-bikes are becoming more affordable and thus more common.

By enlightened, you mean poor? Because I expect that there are approximately zero rich people who don't own a car. Cars are simply priced outside the budget of people living in cities.

News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters

[Anonymous Coward]

How is this either?

Cities should be about people, not infrastructure

[Anonymous Coward]

The core of Jacob's ideas is that cities should be designed for the people living there: Walkable areas where people know their neighbors and will watch out for each other.

Robert Moses built for the sake of building and to accrue himself power and influence- and displaced/impoverished many working class people to do it. He ignored the research that shows that building more freeways actually creates MORE traffic jams because it encourages more driving-only development and thus more automobile commuters. NYC's other transit options have never caught up from the lack of investment in them during the mid-20th century.

And if you think NYC is still something from The Warriors/1980s, try visiting the Village some time- it's one of the nicest neighborhoods of any city in North America. /urban planner steps off that soapbox.