Citizen Jane: Battle for the City

Director Matt Tyrnauer tells a remarkable David and Goliath tale in this exceptional documentary about the battle that Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) waged during the 1960s against the grandiose schemes of Robert Moses, a construction mogul who had dominated New York City's urban planning program for decades. Having developed a kaleidoscopic vision of the city's vibrant textures and rhythms that was totally at odds with Moses's sterile conception of a metropolis with high-rise housing projects and expressways slicing neighborhoods in half, Jacobs first articulated her objections to Moses's philosophy in 1961's The Death and Life of Great American Cities, going on to become a public crusader against a succession of his projects: to extend Fifth Avenue through Washington Square Park, to bulldoze Greenwich Village's historic buildings, and finally to bisect lower Manhattan with a high-speed expressway. Tyrnauer tells the story of their struggle—which resulted in a radical shift in the concept of urban renewal—using a combination of archival material (including news footage and substantial excerpts from interviews with Jacobs and Moses), readings from their writings by Marisa Tomei and Vincent D'Onofrio, and incisive commentary by journalists and scholars. It is not hard to discern where Tyrnauer's sympathies lie, but he has imbued what might have been a dry historical account with extraordinary vitality, and he adds a powerful warning that China is now not only making the same mistakes that New York did under Moses, but doing so on a much larger scale. Highly recommended. (F. Swietek)