Review: Citizen Jane: Battle for the City


 

 

 
 

 

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Review: Citizen Jane: Battle for the City

Citation for published version:
Clericuzio, P 2018, 'Review: Citizen Jane: Battle for the City', Journal of the Society of Architectural
Historians, vol. 77, no. 1, pp. 119-122. https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2018.77.1.119

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10.1525/jsah.2018.77.1.119

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Multimedia

Matt Tyrnauer, director
Citizen Jane: Battle for the City
Altimeter Films, Los Angeles, 2017, 92 min.,

http://www.altimeterfilms.com/citizen-jane-

battle-for-the-city

The current political climate in the United
States, wherein government officials with
an authoritarian bent attempt to imple-
ment “reforms” in the face of popular re-
sistance and disapproval, bears a strong
resemblance to the story of Robert Moses’s
efforts to reconfigure housing and transit
systems in New York City in the 1950s–
60s and the grassroots opposition to them
led by Jane Jacobs. The saltiness of the lan-
guage with which some might denigrate
Donald Trump’s presidential administra-
tion echoes, no doubt, the same sort of
diction one could use to describe Moses,
the de facto director of all municipal con-
struction and associated programs of urban
renewal in New York City for much of
the two decades after World War II. Mean-
while, the now-familiar mantra “Never-
theless, she persisted” could be applied
retroactively to Jacobs, whose unflagging
determination united her neighbors in
Greenwich Village. In the end, Jacobs and
her cohort scuttled Moses’s plans for an
elevated Lower Manhattan Expressway—
projected to destroy much of the vibrant
district and its trademark collection of
historic cast-iron buildings—along with his

political career. Indeed, while these com-
parisons are warranted, Matt Tyrnauer’s
documentary Citizen Jane: Battle for the City
spares us any discussion of the political
events of the recent past in favor of a focus
on those of nearly sixty years ago.

For seasoned students of the history of
urban planning in postwar America, Citizen
Jane offers few new insights. It is, for all in-
tents and purposes, a recounting of Jacobs’s
well-known struggle against Moses’s de-
struction of the “slums” he identified as
“cancerous areas” to be excised from the
urban fabric of New York City. Documen-
tary, in this case, is not scholarship, nor is it
necessarily meant to be. But in its ex-
ceptionally rich visual presentation, which
includes resurrected film footage of once-
bustling Manhattan neighborhoods juxta-
posed with shocking stills of the massive
empty blocks to which Moses—with
bomber-like precision—reduced them,
Citizen Jane emerges as a gripping reminder
of what went wrong between 1945 and
1975 in large American cities and the often
troubled legacy of the International Style
and modernist architecture. In this respect,
one of the most useful aspects of the film is
the way in which it contextualizes Jacobs’s
work, placing it within both the long-term
development of Progressivism in the
United States and the shorter-term activism
of the 1960s, as well as ultimately showing
the work’s importance in the face of con-
temporary global population growth.

Tyrnauer structures Citizen Jane around
clips of interviews with a wide variety of
experts in the fields of architectural and
urban studies (some of whom worked
closely with Jacobs) as well as with politi-
cians and others. Interviewees include
Mary Rowe, Mindy Fullilove, Alexander
Garvin, Alex Alexiou, former New York
mayor Ed Koch, Robert A. M. Stern, and
the ubiquitous Paul Goldberger. These

conversations, largely, conducted for the
film, complement excerpts of recorded in-
terviews with Jacobs, Moses, and activists
such as James Baldwin. Particularly effec-
tive is the way these clips are interspersed
with archival footage of the precise subject
matter being discussed on the sound track.
For instance, as an interviewee recounts
how Jacobs’s activism was subject to mi-
sogyny within the architectural and urban
planning communities, on-screen we see
period publicity photographs of the plan-
ners of Detroit’s Lafayette Park and New
York’s Lincoln Center. The latter consists
of an ominous, high-contrast view of nine
men in suits interspersed among the struc-
tures in a model of the performing arts
complex, gazing impassively and unsym-
pathetically out at us in a manner that only
underscores the ruthlessness of their mo-
tives and the clarity of their maquettes. In
retrospect, the arcade of the Metropolitan
Opera House bears an eerie similarity
to Giovanni Guerrini, Ernesto Bruno La
Padula, and Mario Romano’s Palazzo della
Civiltà Italiana, built for Benito Mus-
solini’s regime in Rome in 1938–43. If this
does not convince us of the ingrained
social bias against Jacobs because of her
gender, we are reminded later that New
Yorker critic Lewis Mumford—whose own
book The City in History, published the
same year as Jacobs’s The Death and Life of
Great American Cities (1961), also sharply
criticized many of the developments of
modern urban planning, most notably sub-
urban sprawl—dismissed Death and Life
soon after its publication in a lengthy cri-
tique titled “Mother Jacobs’ Home Reme-
dies,” indicating with little subtlety that
Jacobs was poking her nose into a field
where women clearly were not welcome.1

No less effective in the film is the music
that swells with every mention of Moses or
his grand urban schemes. One might argue

1 1 9

Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians
77, no. 1 (March 2018), 119–123, ISSN 0037-9808,
electronic ISSN 2150-5926. © 2018 by the Society
of Architectural Historians. All rights reserved. Please
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doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2018.77.1.119.

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https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2018.77.1.119
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that such embellishment is gratuitous for
an audience already sensitive to the prob-
lems of Moses and his legacy, but it is
worth underscoring how deceptive and
seductive the ideas of modernist urban
planning are—particularly for a generation
of university students who have experi-
enced firsthand only post-Moses urban
environments. Indeed, the footage of
Futurama from the 1939–40 New York
World’s Fair, the drawings of Le Corbusier’s
Ville Contemporaine of 1922, and even the
1967 perspective schemes for the Lower
Manhattan Expressway that are shown in
Citizen Jane still look inviting, peaceful, and
imaginative when unyoked from the film’s
sound track (Figure 1). As economist San-
ford Ikeda explains on camera, it is precisely
this order that makes “dead cities” attractive
in a purely platonic visual sense. Conversely,
we are reminded, it is the systematic chaos
and messiness of everyday urban life that
allows cities to function effectively. Jacobs
figured all this out when she conducted her
extensive anthropological fieldwork for
Death and Life. In contrast, Moses, who
practiced “armchair history” from the backs
of limousines and the protected zones of
municipal offices, could not understand why

ordinary people’s daily activities would not
simply conform to his architectural order.

The film is as much about Moses as it is
about Jacobs. Teachers of Jacobs’s theories
of how urban environments function and
flourish will welcome the background that
Citizen Jane provides for the emergence of
Moses and the forces against which Jacobs
fought and on which she honed her theory
of the city. Much of the first part of the film
is devoted to the origins of Moses’s ideas
during the Progressive Era, particularly the
period 1900–1920. It explains how he
drank deeply from the well of Progressive
thought, convincing himself that the sine-
cure of public office could afford him the
authority to forcibly reconfigure entire
urban districts, which, once physically al-
tered, would witness the eradication of pov-
erty, disease, and overcrowding. In other
words, the film recounts a story of how the
road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Moses launched his career in public service
at the dawn of the aviation age and the
seductive bird’s-eye view of the city it
afforded. This aerial perspective on the city,
exploited by Le Corbusier, Buckminster
Fuller, Hugh Ferriss, and Norman Bel
Geddes, among others, encouraged the

notion of the urban “master builder” as
an omniscient—and often anonymous—
godlike figure, able to reconfigure vast
urban spaces at will and removed from
having to live personally with the conse-
quences of his decisions should they go
awry.2 It is difficult to overemphasize the
extent to which Moses in reality approxi-
mated this imagined figure, since virtually
all of the offices that he held were appoint-
ments, subject to little oversight from
elected officials. As a result, he controlled
vast amounts of funding from the federal
government and toll revenues, among
other sources—powers that make Jacobs’s
victory all the more impressive. To the
filmmaker’s credit, Citizen Jane resists any
hyperbole of direct comparisons between
Moses and the leaders of the totalitarian
regimes of the 1930s and 1940s, whose em-
brace of control and the persona afforded
by the aerial view resembled Moses’s view-
point taken to its logical extreme.

The film neatly sets up the ideological
distinction between Moses and Jacobs in its
opening sequences, most strikingly with a
split-screen image of the two of them, a
duality that Tyrnauer sustains throughout
(Figure 2). Each interview with Jacobs

Figure 1 Detail of a perspective drawing for the Lower Manhattan Expressway, ca. 1967, as seen in Citizen Jane: Battle for the City (Library of Congress).

120 J S A H | 7 7 . 1 | M A R C H 2 0 1 8



reveals her calm, unpretentious, and ear-
nest personality. When discussing the
planning of the Lower Manhattan Express-
way, her former colleagues praise the way
she brilliantly strategized how to upset the
planners’ applecart, at one point using her
own daughter in a ribbon-tying ceremony
in New York’s Washington Square to pro-
test a southern extension of Fifth Avenue
through the park. By contrast, nearly every
clip of Moses portrays him as a brooding,
misanthropic, misunderstood bureaucrat,
brashly aware that his urban plans are
going to meet with opposition for destroy-
ing ordinary citizens’ lives, yet thoroughly
devoid of compassion.

More broadly, Citizen Jane contextual-
izes Jacobs’s struggle as part of the radical
changes of the 1960s, which included chal-
lenges to the conventions of social struc-
ture. It points out, for example, that The
Death and Life of Great American Cities,
Jacobs’s defining work, appeared within
two years of the publication of two other
pathbreaking books by women, Betty Frie-
dan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) and
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). In a
section devoted to St. Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe
housing project, the film deftly highlights
the ugly racial aspect of urban renewal

during the turbulent days of the Civil
Rights Movement. It reminds us that much
of such new housing was designed expressly
to remove black Americans from areas
ripe for redevelopment by whites, often
confining them to prison-like high-rise
structures.3

To be sure, Citizen Jane is not free of
faults. It is uneven in its dating of events,
for instance. We are not told precisely
when Jacobs began writing Death and Life
or when she began her campaign against
the Lower Manhattan Expressway, only
that she undertook the campaign after she
finished writing Death and Life. Likewise,
the film does not make clear that the idea
of the expressway was not finally quashed
until 1967. (Instead, we are led to believe
that it died after Jacobs disrupted a meeting
of the city commissioners in December
1962.) Later, Robert A. M. Stern informs
us in an interview that Le Corbusier’s
visions for housing never included “towers
in a park” configurations such as those
Moses implemented, but we know that
several of Le Corbusier’s housing schemes
from the mid-1920s onward consisted of
just that. Perhaps fittingly, Jacobs’s orga-
nized resistance to Moses mirrored the
grassroots opposition that had earlier

doomed Le Corbusier’s unité-based plans to
redevelop war-ravaged areas of France in
the mid-1940s, the adoptions of which Le
Corbusier attempted to force through using
similar top-down authoritarian methods.4

Finally, the film mentions only in passing
Jacobs’s work in Toronto opposing the
Spadina Expressway, a cause she took up
after she moved to Canada in 1968, the
success of which is testament to the power
of both her ideas and the depths of her per-
sonal commitment to them.

The most important part of Citizen Jane
is saved for last. In its closing sequence, the
film directs our attention to China, where
entire districts of newly built, uniform
apartment towers are creating what pro-
mise to be the slums of the future. The film
thus reinforces the old cliché that history,
when unlearned—or learned too well—too
easily repeats itself. Here, there is no reso-
lution to the mess created by Moses in
New York and by his followers elsewhere
in the United States; we are simply re-
minded that, once destroyed, the neighbor-
hoods that gave our cities their distinctive
architectural and social character can never
be re-created or duplicated. The most
potent aspects of Citizen Jane are thus the
questions and challenges the film poses to

Figure 2 Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, as seen in Citizen Jane: Battle for the City (photos by Fred McDarrah, CBS Archive, Getty Images).

M U L T I M E D I A 121



architects, planners, developers, real estate
owners, and designers in training: For
whom and by whom is the world of the
future going to be built? And will we all
want to live there?

PETER CLERICUZIO

University of Pittsburgh

Notes

1. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins,
Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961); Jane Jacobs,
The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New
York: Random House, 1961); Lewis Mumford,
“Mother Jacobs’ Home Remedies,” The Sky Line,
New Yorker, 1 Dec. 1962, 138–79.
2. On the development of the personification of
the master builder during the first half of the
twentieth century, particularly in the exploits of
Fuller, Ferriss, and Bel Geddes, see Adnan
Morshed, Impossible Heights: Skyscrapers, Flight, and
the Master Builder (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2015). Incidentally, Moses se-
cluded himself in a high-rise co-op apartment
overlooking the East River on Manhattan’s Upper
East Side; thus his back was strategically turned
toward the borough whose “slums” he had re-
moved with surgical precision. See Tanay War-
erkar, “Robert Moses’s Former Upper East Side
Co-op, on Top of FDR Drive, Hits the Market,”
Curbed, New York, 25 May 2017, https://ny.
curbed.com/2017/5/25/15690344/robert-moses-
upper-east-side-apartment-for-sale (accessed 14
July 2017).
3. The redevelopment of the Hill District of
Pittsburgh provides a good example. See Allen
Dieterich-Ward, Beyond Rust: Metropolitan Pitts-
burgh and the Fate of Industrial America (Philadel-
phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016),
esp. 172–98; Laura Grantmyre, “Visual Repre-
sentations of Redevelopment in Pittsburgh’s
Hill District, 1943–1968” (PhD diss., University
of Pittsburgh, 2014).
4. This in spite of Le Corbusier’s allies at
higher levels of the French national govern-
ment who also tried to force their adoption.
See Le Corbusier’s Ouevre complète, vol. 4,
1938–46 (Zurich: Éditions Girsberge, 1946);
Peter Clericuzio, “Le Corbusier and the Re-
construction of Saint-Dié: The Debate over
Modernism in France, 1944–46,” Chicago Art
Journal 20 (2009), 46–71.

Scalar and Omeka
https://scalar.me/anvc/

http://omeka.org

The migration of academic scholarship to
digital platforms over the past two decades

has seen its share of ups and downs. Advo-
cates of digitization and online publication
have pointed out the lower costs of pub-
lishing, the democratizing potential of the
Internet, and the increased opportunities
for collaboration and iterative work af-
forded by digital and online tools. At the
same time, critics of online publication
have pointed to questions of rigor and peer
review, along with dilemmas such as how to
preserve and cite works that are inherently
unstable, how to credit individuals involved
in collaborative efforts, and how to assess
work that by its nature involves ongoing
change and multiple versions.

To address some of the challenges of
digital scholarship, scholarly societies have
adopted standards for assessment, includ-
ing the “Guidelines for the Evaluation of
Digital Scholarship in Art and Architec-
tural History” developed by the Society of
Architectural Historians in partnership
with the College Art Association and re-
leased in 2016.1 At the same time, a num-
ber of university presses are investing in
the development of platforms that reimag-
ine the process of publishing peer-reviewed
born-digital work. Take, for instance, the
recently released platform Manifold Scho-
larship, which is being developed by the
University of Minnesota Press in collabo-
ration with GC Digital Scholarship Lab at
the City University of New York. Like
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source, meaning the original source code
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able for anyone to adopt or modify. In the
same spirit, this software departs from the
print and even e-book models for textual
academic scholarship in that the document
remains dynamic, collaborative, and itera-
tive, allowing for commentary from a com-
munity of readers as well as revision and
expansion of the project by the author
beyond its first release.

Even as Manifold and other university
press developments promise a rigorous
and redefined future for digital scholar-
ship, implementing these platforms for
an individual research project outside the
institutional support of a team of computer
programmers and information technology
specialists would likely be rather difficult, if
not formidable, for the general scholar.
However, platforms are increasingly avail-
able that allow nonexperts to engage in
electronic self-publishing, whether for the

dissemination of their own research or for
use in the classroom. With an eye to the
financial crisis faced by many university
presses, and in particular the high cost of
publishing media-rich scholarship, one of
the earliest examples of this new kind
of digital publication platform came out of
the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture,
which was formed in 2009 at the University
of Southern California. Supported by
funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foun-
dation, the ANVC proposed Scalar, a plat-
form that breaks from the linear mode of
reading inherent in the printed text and
allows scholars to reconsider the relation-
ship between the archive (in many cases
now digitized), analysis, and publication.
Central to the ANVC strategy are partner-
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centers, libraries, and university presses,
including the University of Michigan,
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These audiovisual media are treated as au-
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the text. With Scalar, the writer may orga-
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that guide a reader through a series of pa-
ges and may connect with other paths of
content. Despite their intended effects of
indeterminacy and multiplicity, paths in
Scalar ultimately encourage a linear read-
ing of the text. However, the author can
associate audiovisual media and textual
pages with tags that encourage a nonlinear
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built-in visualizations that the author may
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graphs, grids, and tag clouds. These visual-
izations can add a layer of analysis for the
author or provide a reader with additional
means of discovering and exploring the

122 J S A H | 7 7 . 1 | M A R C H 2 0 1 8

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