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In the 1970s, New York City hit rock bottom. Crime was at its highest, middleclass exodus was in high gear, and bankruptcy loomed. Many people credit New York's master builder,” Robert Moses, with turning Gotham around, despite his heavy-handed ways. Roberta Brandes Gratz contradicts this conventional view. She argues that New York City recovered precisely because of the waning power of Moses and the growing influence of Jane Jacobs, the pioneer of organic renewal projects.
As American cities face a new economic crisis, Jacobs's philosophy is again vital for metropolitan life. Gratz gives an on-the-ground account of urban renewal and community success. Her writing at once personal, political, and instructive breaks down how the impossible was achieved.
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About the Author:
Roberta Brandes Gratz is an award-winning journalist, urban critic, and author whose articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times Magazine, Nation, and Daily News, among others. She lives in New York City.
From Publishers Weekly:
The mid-20th-century showdown between New York City planning czar Moses and legendary community urbanist Jacobs reverberates down the decades in this meandering polemic. A journalist and member of New York City's Landmarks Preservation Commission, Gratz (The Living City) views 50 years of economic and real estate development as a duel between the legacies of Moses, whose pharaonic highway and urban renewal projects obliterated neighborhoods, and Jacobs, who extolled urban diversity and disorderly mixed uses, hated cars, and championed organic, human-scale development. Through this lens, Gratz rehashes Jacobs's defeat of Moses's Manhattan expressway schemes, examines New York's (anti-)industrial policies and historical preservation laws, and attacks what she sees as latter-day boondoggles like Brooklyn's proposed mammoth Atlantic Yards development and Columbia University's expansion. The avowedly partisan author despises Moses as arrogant and racist, and sometimes cedes the book to Jacobs with lengthy excerpts from interviews with the late urbanist. Gratz offers some cogent critiques of contemporary urban planning (while also embracing a few, like urban farming). Alas, her exposition of Jacobs's ideas is larded with unfocused autobiography, and far less tightly argued than Jacobs's own classic writings. B&w photos. (Apr. 1)
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Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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- PublisherBold Type Books
- Publication date2011
- ISBN 10 1568586787
- ISBN 13 9781568586786
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages400
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