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August 25, 2011
Jacobs v. Moses: New York City as Laboratory for Urban America
Beyond Chron
by Randy Shaw
Last year, I read Cities Back from the Edge: New Life for Downtown, an insightful 1998 book whose primary author is Roberta Brandes Gratz. I had never heard of Brandes Gratz, but learned that she is a disciple of Jane Jacobs and an unusually astute analyst of urban neighborhoods. Brandes Gratz most recent book, The Battle of Gotham: New York in The Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, expands upon the themes of her earlier work using New York City as a laboratory for assessing what urban development polices work, and which fail. One is hard-pressed to think of another recent book with such a perceptive, nuanced, and common sense approach to assessing how city neighborhoods regenerate. And regeneration rather than large-scale demolition is Brandes Gratz’s essential message, as she shows how nurturing the seeds of neighborhood regeneration consistently proves more cost effective and better for the public than the urban renewal, “bigness as a solution” strategy that still harms NYC and other cities.
...Gratz wrote the book as the Robert Moses-like Atlantic Yards abomination was gaining approval in Brooklyn, showing that while many planners seem to believe “we are all Jane Jacobs now,” that city officials continue to approve massive projects guaranteed not to regenerate existing communities.
When you read her account of Atlantic Yards, or a similar, “urban renewal” strategy Columbia University has underway, one can only wonder why today’s planners are repeating past mistakes. The obvious answer is that money and political clout drive these land use disasters, along with a new strategy of using world-class architects (Gehry and Piano, respectively) as part of their marketing.
NoLandGrab: The key word there being "marketing," since Frank Gehry, of course, was the Trojan Horse employed by Bruce Ratner to gain key support from the likes of the cultural elitists plying The New York Times's architectural beat.
Well played, Bruce.
Posted by eric at August 25, 2011 11:42 AM