Vídeo do livro Morte e Vida de Grandes Cidades

Cities are in many ways the greatest invention that human beings have brought the world cities have been expanding and urbanization has been expanding on the globe in an exponential fashion most extraordinarily we are urbanizing people on the planet at maybe one and a half million people Every week in less than two months there be the equivalent to another los angeles metropolitan area on this planet this scale and speed of urbanization has never ever happened in human history this is the first time when you look at what is being built in cities you have endless endless

row after row of homogenizing towers and you see more and more highways [Music] at this moment you're going to shape the cities for generations to come people need to realize this is an opportunity which will never come again [Music] there are a couple of ways of approaching the design of cities the question is always who decides what the physical form will be how the city is going to function And who is going to live in the city [Music] in order to understand what's happening today we need to think about two great figures in the middle

of the 20th century who embodied the struggle for the city the legendary power broker robert moses represented the authority of the great man who was going to come into the city with his carving knife And clear away the cancerous tissue and replace it with the shiny implements of modernist planning [Music] you have to move a lot of people out of the way of a big housing project or a sun clearance project a lot of them are not going to like it many of them are misinformed in opposition to the homogenizing clarity of moses was jane

jacobs I have very little faith in in even the kind of person who prefers to take a large overall view of things jacobs was an outsider to believe the city is not about buildings the city is about people it is about public spaces and the street and she stood up for that she evolved both a theory of what made a good and just city and a theory of opposition to the kind of planning practice that moses Represented there's a prudishness a fear of life a wish to direct things from some uncontaminated refuge that is part

and parcel of their bad plan were famously at eyes with each other it really did become a war between opposing forces today we're still fighting these battles across the world [Music] When we look across the spectrum of all the problems generated by urbanization there is the extraordinary realization that my gosh you know these have been problems that have been around for the last 100 years in cities new york of course is the greatest example of that in the 1930s new york was the world's greatest city you know A very special place just the exuberance of

metropolitan life in the early 20th century [Music] that's you know the great age of the first real great skyscrapers you know the empire state building is the very climax of that [Music] but then it all kind of crashes with the Depression through the entire decades of the 30s is just one problem after another [Music] now this is a unfortunate period for the city we've done an immense amount to cure these diseases and we have much more to do robert moses started to work in an era where we had a great many people living in truly

Horrible conditions he began his professional life in opposition to those conditions moses emerged out of the progressive movement early in the 20th century in new york the progressives were eager to improve the city his early work in developing public parks and public beaches was about making life better for people who were not rich Now if we don't clean out these slums the central areas are going to rot and it's all nonsense to say that the problem can be solved by rehabilitating and fixing up old law tenements can't be done that problem we've got to face

just about every progressive believed that the way to solve the city's problems was To wipe the slate clean start all over again we didn't understand how high the price was how we were giving up so many things that were so very important until jane jacobs came along [Music] i just loved coming to new york it was an inexhaustible just to walk around its streets and Wonder at it so many streets different so many neighborhoods different so much going on [Music] she lived in greenwich village and just viscerally felt the pulse of the city and was

extraordinarily intuitive it was extremely observant [Music] New york was a place where you don't have to be big and important and rich or have a great plot of land or a great development scheme or something like that to do something and maybe even do something new and do something interesting a place that has scope for all kinds of people what she saw was the soul of new york And what it meant to be a city in a city meaning a community of people [Music] after the war the most sensational thing that came was the full

flowering of this vision of the expressway tower city [Music] this generation of idealistic city planners comes along and they're infected with the modernist purity idea And they certainly have the tools at their disposal to sweep away large tracts of land we recognize the problems that your community faces and we know that you share them with hundreds of cities everywhere now what's involved in making your city a better place well things like housing industrial development better streets and highways improving All these things adds up to a better city i'm sure that you will see the exciting

opportunity that exists for your city to become better the planners conceiving these urban renewal projects are doing this from that god-like vantage point in the sky to be able to look down and you're able to imagine massive transformations they thought that applying the logic of The machine age was going to do that the problem had to be solved by some supervisor noticing where the slums were noticing where the traffic was and going in and bulldozing and building grand projects well we got out of brochure just now telling when everybody has to move robert moses was

a great embodiment of [Applause] this [Music] i don't honestly believe that considering the large numbers of people we've had to move out of the way of public housing and other public improvements i don't believe that we've done any very substantial amount of harm there must be people who are discommoded inconvenienced or call it what you will on the old theory but you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs [Music] [Music] after the second world war robert moses began to amass power he was the longest parks commissioner in the city of new york and he

got power to build parkways he was appointed the city's construction coordinator he built thousands of apartments he became urban renewal czar the head of the mayor's committee on slum clearance By the time that moses was running the urban renewal program we had torn down literally thousands of tenement buildings in cities like new york and chicago you know there's the pre-war moses and the post-war moses the pre-war moses was mostly an angel post-war moses was increasingly problematic for nearly half a century this man has pushed people around new york Almost anybody who is anybody has cursed

him fought him knuckled under to him and admired him the list of his adversaries include franklin roosevelt fanny hearst elmer davis who once compared him to hitler walter o'malley and hundreds of thousands of landowners who thought their property was sacred [Music] absolute power corrupts absolutely and Robert moses was absolutely powerful so he had amassed not simply an incredible amount of power but had insulated himself from oversight by political authorities and by the broader public don't forget that it's one thing to buy a park or a big big chunk of land for one owner it's quite

another thing to get a right-of-way Where hundreds and even thousands of people own it theoretically and according to some of the uh gugu's and uplift organizations we ought to negotiate with every individual until he's happy you imagine when you build anything on those conditions moses along with all of the people that were involved in the urban rule program had an agreed-upon agenda People needed adequate housing adequate recreation facilities and the motor car was coming to america and it needed to be accommodated on a large scale that was the agenda [Music] moses became one polar view

of what you could do [Music] until all of a sudden there was an alternative Jane jacobs has in the death and life of great american cities written a book that advances with the controlled and implacable power of a bulldozer against modern orthodox city planning and rebuilding i first began to look into city planning and and housing and it was unbelievably awful uh insane [Music] When death and life comes down to the 60s it's a clarion call it's martin luther nailing those 95 theses to the to the cathedral door the book is really the first cogent

accessible articulation of a whole set of ideas that questions the mainstream thinking about our cities she is constantly probing by that example she's saying You reader you have the ability to question look what we have built low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace middle-income housing projects which are truly marvels of dullness and regimentation [Music] Sealed against any buoyancy or vitality of city life luxury housing projects that mitigate their inanity or try to with a vapid vulgarity cultural centers that are unable to

support a good bookstore civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums who have fewer choices of loitering place than others expressways that eviscerate great cities This is not the rebuilding of cities this is the sacking of cities she was questioning orthodoxy and in essence saying the emperor has no clothes [Music] at a time when women were not welcomed in those kinds of environments if you want to see what kind of a city can flourish you need to look at the cities where it's happening There must be a lot of diversity continually building up diversity

of kinds of work diversity of kinds of people she revealed the way to create better cities is by working with the people who live there and the fabric that existed the traditional fabric that people inhabited there have to be areas of the city which people use a lot walking on the streets And use at all times of day jane understood neighborhoods need lots of connections short blocks lots of turns allowing different kinds of interaction neighborhoods need a mix of buildings old and new they need diverse uses 24 7. so that they're safer constant connection with

neighborhoods around so that you're not isolated you need public spaces that are accessible to People it's all a great network in a city it's all related she observed these early early qualities at a time when housing was being built in complete the opposite direction they were isolating communities they were creating dead-end streets they were separating work uses and recreation and residential uses she was explaining how life worked [Music] before death and life she was a journalist she was a very savvy observer of human behavior of places of cities jacob started writing about the city when

she was 18 years old she was the secretary for a candy company she was determined to write on the side she did what any good enterprising writer would do she got Freelance jobs her curiosity was so remarkable she writes about specific economic districts in the city she does the jewelry district she does the fur district she does the flower district she develops a voice and where does she sell them to vogue magazine she was writing pieces about what she was observing and seeing in the city the best way to plan for downtown Is to see

how people use it today to look for its strengths and to exploit and reinforce them there is no logic that can be superimposed on the city people make it and it is to them not buildings that we must fit our plans she's curious she's got a really good craft she knows how to write and she finds herself in a staff job with architectural form [Music] Mrs jacobs an associate editor of the magazine architectural forum has been a new yorker for 27 years and loves it mrs jane jacobs thank you very much mr dolby air one

fine day the architectural forum put me on an assignment about some urban renewal projects that were being done in philadelphia as a matter of fact we have found in our work in rebuilding philadelphia that a central design idea well Developed and clearly expressed can of itself become a major creative force and can make more meaningful the work of individual architects in various parts of an area i found out what they had in mind and what they were planning to do and how it was going to look according to the drawings and what great things it

was going to accomplish I came back and wrote enthusiastic articles about this all was well i was in very cozy with the planners and the project builders anyhow time passed and some of these things were actually built society hill is residential the oldest part of the city it is the site of an intensive restoration project houses many predating the american revolution Slowly had grown dilapidated and had been converted to other uses in addition there was room for new dramatically contemporary towers society hill emerges as a combination of ancient and modern but they didn't work at

all the way they should have worked the city around them didn't react the way theoretically the city around them Should have reacted she is the hypersensitive antennae you know that's picking up something here that no one else is seeing why did stores that look very cheerful and supposed to be doing a great booming business in the plans actually go empty or languish well i would bring these questions up with the people who had been responsible for the planning of these places And i got quite a lot of alibis boiling down to people are stupid they

don't do what they're supposed to do and this was a great shock to me never mind highfalutin theories and so forth what are we looking at what are we seeing do you want to trust some theory that somebody figured out sitting in an office somewhere or do you want to trust what you actually see out There with your own eyes maybe the experts didn't really know as much as they pretended to know about this time gentlemen came into the office of the architectural forum he was very much worried about east harlem about 300 million dollars

worth of city rebuilding money had been put to work he could see that their problems were growing greater than they had ever been in the past She goes up to harlem and she is taken around by william kirk of the union settlement house and he's showing her all the things that are being lost in this community when it's being demolished he would walk me around east harlem we would stop in at stores stopping at housing projects i began to see that just out of the Accumulation of all of this i was beginning to understand how

things worked many little details of cause and effect she describes it as the very beginning the sort of moment when the light bulb kind of went off in her head what i was seeing in fact was uh what makes the very intricate order of the city this has to do with equality that's called rather vaguely Urbanism [Music] cities are extremely physical places it's not an inert mass it's enterprises and people reacting in certain ways to each other and mutually supporting each other and wherever it worked properly there seemed to be an awful lot of diversity

many different kinds of enterprises many different kinds of people Mutually supporting and supplementing each other jane jacobs is thinking about how does a neighborhood work how does the street work what functions the sidewalk play what she's really after is a new theory of how cities function in death and life of great american cities she's asking what is the problem of a city she argues a city is a problem of Organized complexity [Music] looks on the surface like it's complex and disordered but in fact there's an underlying structure it looks like chaos but in fact there's

a balance there's a productive mix of different functions and organisms she draws on ecological metaphors biological Metaphors to suggest how it's really an ecosystem she wrote to see complex systems of functional order as order and not as chaos takes understanding the leaves dropping from the trees in the autumn the interior of an airplane engine the entrails of a dissected rabbit the city desk of a newspaper all appear to be chaos if they are seen without comprehension Once they are seen as systems of order they actually look different jacobs understood when cities really work they're phenomena

that come from the bottom up so a great neighborhood is what happens when thousands of different actors and it's the shopkeepers bar owners the people walking the streets they spontaneously come together in an Uncoordinated but meaningful way to create the kind of flavor and personality of a distinct neighborhood that's not planned that's much more a question of organized complexity planners they don't see any of the wondrous human qualities that jacobs is seeing the very forms of urbanism that she wrote about the urban renewalists sought to destroy So what would you do for harlem the slum

corner of harlem i take that and all the other similar slums i tear them all out every bit of them it's a cancerous thing and you just got to wipe them out [Music] i say that you have a cancerous growth there that has to be carved out All right you've carved it out now you've replaced it with something new yes that's right something that's decent something that involves light in the air and new schools and playgrounds and parks and i say that's a hell of a big contribution and certainly all the contribution that i would

be able to make with all the people i can persuade to Make it instead of following the natural way that people used space city planning in this post-war era and modern architecture created this abstract vision of what it should be concentrated on the utopian and the [Music] ideal in the 1920s you get the rise of this curious Mystical figure um out of switzerland uh who calls himself le corbusier he's done some architecture and he's be thinking himself not only an architect but a great urban visionary [Music] the corbusier envisioned tearing down huge sections of paris

and replacing it with slabs modern slabs cruciform buildings he proposed super highways That went through green open space and they were going to terminate in super blocks and the super blocks had high-rise buildings and the high-rise buildings were so that people would have light and air and they could get out of the slums and he was thoroughly of the opinion that if you had uh good architecture the lives of people would be improved and that architecture Improved people and people would improve architecture until perfectability would descend on us like the holy ghost and we'd be

happy forever after corb did this plan and made his models and uh it excited a lot of people but in france they weren't so excited the idea of the viewer use and the tower in a park ended up moving to america just like the rest of Modernism did [Music] the public housing model that we picked in the united states was a misinterpretation of the corpus a the towers in his 1923 plan were for offices and then around the towers were low seven-story buildings with generous balconies he never called for people living in high-rise towers it

was one of those odd moments where A set of intellectual ideas could be corrupted very quickly and easily into something cheap and commercial the simplest formula to make quick money is modernism it was very cheap very quick to produce and could suddenly enable huge amounts of building to happen very quickly and robert moses totally understood that [Music] the one thing missing completely from That vision is streets and the idea that a street is something you actually walk on and a street is a place where things happen jane jacobs saw that at a time when everybody

else was thinking the sidewalk was a kind of foolish leftover of another age this is something everyone already knows a well-used city street is apt to be a safe street a deserted city street is apt to be Unsafe but how does this work really there must be eyes upon the street eyes belonging to those we may call the natural proprietors of the street the buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers and to ensure the safety of both residents and strangers must be oriented to the street they cannot turn their backs or blank sides on

it and leave it blind Philosophically what she recognized was safety doesn't come from armed security guards blocking the entrances what makes a neighborhood great is precisely the fact that there are people on the street the sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously both to add to the numbers of effective eyes on the street and to induce the people in the buildings along the street to watch the sidewalks in sufficient Numbers nobody enjoys sitting on a stoop or looking out a window at an empty street [Music] almost nobody does such a thing [Music] large numbers

of people entertain themselves off and on by watching street activity she went out and looked at things when she said that the doormen were paid eyes on the street and That the same thing could happen from bars on the street in west village i understood what she's talking about nobody has to worry about things where there are a lot of people on the street jane jacobs reverses the vantage point what is it like action to live in these places from street level and it's that simple change of perspective that led her away from the orthodoxy

at The time robert moses had no interest really in paying attention to what was there in neighborhoods [Music] what was there he viewed as simply an obstacle to what he wanted to make happen people oppose moses all the time whether he wanted lincoln's center for the performing arts a bridge across the entrance to new york harbor A parking lot where mothers aired their babies in central park a highway down the spine of fire island or one through the middle of washington square vehement opposition was what he expected and what he got oh opposition to everything

that's progressive and everything is new the opinion of people who were activists as we were in the village where robert moses was terrible And robert moses was destroying the city and robert moses had to be stopped jane got involved in several efforts to stop robert moses from ripping the city to pieces starting with the his attempt to run fifth avenue down through washington square the first time i became aware of the threat of what the highways were doing and could do to new york was when along came The plan to push fifth avenue through washington

square park and down below it as continuous street they wanted to have the 5th avenue buses go through the park down into west broadway and change the name of that to 50th avenue south so it's to make it more valuable for rents and that was the robert moses project This wasn't in the abstract for jane jacobs this was happening close to home right in her backyard this is where she brought her kids and strollers to play in that park this is the circle on weekdays it's a wading pool for village kids but on sundays the

water is turned off and the circle becomes a meeting place for guitarists bongo and banjo players villagers on a stroll Folk singers and tourists to me and many others we were outraged about a road going through washington square and we were going to save washington square park washington square was really jane jacobs beginning as a civic activist all of the activists myself included were involved in trying to stop that the leaders there included jane jacobs and shirley hayes Jane was not deferential to power so she ups the ante on that washington square fight and says

i'm going to write the mayor i have heard with alarm and almost with disbelief the plans to run a sunken highway through the center of washington square my husband and i are amongst the citizens who truly believe in new york to the extent that we have bought a home in the heart of the city and remodeled It with a lot of hard work it's very discouraging to do our best to make the city more habitable and then to learn that the city itself is thinking up schemes to make it uninhabitable [Music] jane's example that she

set for herself is an example for other people to follow if a highway is coming through that's going to be very destructive and you know it's an idiotic thing you Fight that highway protest against startification and the status quo and things that touch you and your neighborhood directly i think she was effective because of the force of her personality and the fact that she was able to mobilize a lot of people and margaret mead and susan sontag and all the various folks that jane was involved with were drawn to the tangibility of this Particular [Music]

fight you get too many critics you get too many mud throwers too many people who follow their nest and they were oh that's our trouble too many people sitting around calling names like mumford people that what do they contribute do you have any problem to solve any difficulty you never call upon them Call upon them for four letter words they already have very good vocabulary in my book robert moses wasn't used to anybody saying no to him he'd fire off these letters to people of greenwich village i realized that in the process of rebuilding south

of washington square there would be cries of anguish from those who are honestly convinced the sistine madonna was painted in the Basement of one of the old buildings there not presently occupied by a cabaret or speakeasy that michelangelo's david was fashioned in a garrett in the same neighborhood and that anyone who lays hands on these sacred landmarks will be executed if he has not already been struck down by a bolt from heaven they managed to show moses as this bully And they they got a lot of important people on their side including eleanor roosevelt i

would feel very strongly that destroying the square by putting a large artery for traffic through the square would harm not only the square itself but the whole neighborhood and really the city i'm not opposed to change in fact i believe in change but i think That good tradition has to be preserved jacobs was a brilliant strategist when it came to civil action she had a real sense for the photo op in washington square park she arranged for her daughter and another girl to conduct a ribbon-tying ceremony this of course is the opposite of the ribbon-cutting

ceremony that politicians Love to celebrate with public works at one of the hearings where moses was foolish enough to say that nobody's against us except a bunch of mothers how could he be so tactless only if you think that people don't matter at all could you make a statement like that she was a housewife that's how they treated her i mean of course she was a professional journalist that was not somehow when you Wanted to dismiss her you just said there was this housewife from the lunch history try to mess with a bunch of mothers

uh i think that he underestimated what the effectiveness of these mothers might in fact be literally thousands of people turned to and it took quite a few years but did save it it ended up being an extraordinarily potent opposition which he'd never met before Moses had never met this before he has he had it coming [Music] washington square park was certainly the first uh public defeat for robert moses and it was a a major [ __ ] in his armor the battle over washington square is is jane's first taste of victory [Music] not long after

the washington square victory death and life is published And bennett surf head of random house sends a copy to robert moses and moses sends it back i am returning the book you sent me aside from the fact it is intemperate and accurate [Music] it is also libelous i call your attention for example to page 131 [Music] robert moses has made an art of using control of public money To get his way with those whom the voters elect and depend on to represent their frequently opposing interests this is of course in other guises an old sad

story of democratic government he didn't even want to recognize the existence of the book or of jane others uh were also not charitable including lewis mumford lewis mumford The great architectural critic for the new yorker his famous review of her book had the title mother jacob's home remedies he's immediately telling you jane jacobs was just this sweet old lady trying to get some homeopathic medicine into the city instead of doing the serious surgery that a real doctor would do [Music] Right around the time of death and life of great american cities ironically her own neighborhood

of the west village the very neighborhood that she had had proclaimed as a model for what neighborhoods could be was earmarked for urban renewal [Music] moses was commissioner of housing and the urban renewal effort to build more public housing in new york City he actually stepped down from that position but before he did he designated the west village as eligible for slum designation [Music] [Music] i got the book finished finally and thought ah now i can think about something else and for three weeks i did think about other things then i opened the new york

times one Morning and found that our own area of the west village was going to have an urban renewal project in it she really didn't think of herself as a community organizer as a street fighter of that search she's a writer she didn't appreciate the distraction she really didn't but you knew she had to do it she was sad i mean she would shrug his Shoulders and say what can i do you know that thing about an inert object well there is nothing more in earth than a government bureau there is nothing more in earth

than a planning office it gets going in one direction and it is never going to change of its own accord so i suddenly had to put into practice my own premises that if anything was going to happen to Reverse the way things were being done and the citizens had to take some initiative and the citizens had to frustrate the planners i thereupon began to devote myself to frustrating planners [Music] and so did the whole neighborhood jane calls the meeting of local residents at the lion's head a favorite neighborhood hangout Organizes people to speak at public

meetings and gets everybody to wear sunglasses with an x painted on them [Music] they were fairly sophisticated i think in the tactics that they would employ and they're tackling somebody who's been writing for a living for a couple of decades and knows how to make an argument we all knew one another and we're Constantly planning on how to get the mayor on our side now to threaten them and we did we got them on our side she filed a lawsuit against the city of new york to try to block the urban renewal plan i think

that the time has come to put the west village urban renewal proposal to rest promptly remove the west village Designation cordially robert f wagner they prevailed and at the end of the day the slum designation never happened in the west village [Music] she effectively showed the people of greenwich village that they could fight city hall that they did not have to accept the plans of the planners at their drafting tables And that they could reject those lines being drawn around their homes any city that's tearing down its buildings just to make money for a development

or just to have novelty is doing something criminal [Music] fellow who gets up in the upper stories of a of a public housing project where he has a view It's matter with him you've got a nice place to live hasn't he i think that the objection that some might have was that the view is just another housing development on another highway no i don't conceive that it wasn't just that they wanted new housing in place of the old they wanted an entirely different looking city [Music] robert moses and his constituency he Wanted it all to

be very simplified very sterilized it was the hubris of moses and his ilk the idea that we're going to rearrange the spaces and therefore we're going to rearrange the social relations it had to do with this towers in the park mentality it had to do with the creation of a new form of ghetto whole downtowns were being bulldozed in The name of people but not for the people they were destroying lives and replacing them with these housing projects and why because it was making a lot of people a lot of money it was making developers

a lot of money politicians a lot of money and it was fast money so they kept doing it over and over and Over again in cities all over the country it was several years after robert moses had begun building these projects that the other cities caught up what they were building was the kabusian model you saw the kind of building of these uh these housing projects across the united states you know 25 story block apartment buildings With playgrounds and gardens around them that looked great in all the drawings here in bright new buildings with spacious

grounds they can live live with indoor plumbing electric lights fresh plastered walls and the rest of the conveniences that are expected in the 20th century in these projects children can play in safety on the wide lawns not in the littered alleys and vacant lots We must make sure that every family in america lives in a home of dignity in a neighborhood of pride and the community of opportunity and a city of common and hope but what ended up happening is nobody ever hung out on uh in the kind of public space around these uh projects

and so they became these under-populated places and they actually very quickly became some of the most dangerous places In the world concentrated poverty this was uh you know the really the worst thing about the projects and therefore amplified all of the pathological and anti-social elements of poverty these institutions became fortress you become cornered you feel cornered you feel trapped they left people more vulnerable public Housing became places of fear [Music] high-rise fortresses like these were built this way to save money in the long run they didn't even do that the problem was that they were

all wrong for the people who wound up living in them rural blacks broken families allowed in and to stay in only if their incomes were low enough [Music] most cities now are engaged in something called urban renewal which means moving negroes out it means negro removal that is what it means the federal government is an accomplice to this fact now this we're talking about human beings there's not such a thing as a monolithic wall or you know some abstraction called negro problem these negro boys and girls Who had 16 and 17 don't believe the country

means anything that it says don't feel they have any place here the phrase urban renewal is negan removal was an acknowledgement by african americans that that this was an assault removal is in a sense of out over there away far away someplace inhospitable where you can just die and a huge part of what happened to people was that they were put in Inhospitable places and americans were put in at the margins of the city in places that were could barely support the vital kind of life that people need to prosper it's as though the builders

have not realized that children would be living there nor do they foresee the crime the vandalism which is really the acting out of rage and Self-loathing that can make people want to destroy their own property people had lived in communities that were messy but they worked people had social capitals people watched each other's child when somebody was not there all this was actually taken away people had no investment emotionally people resented these projects that had been built for them because they were poor So you see a lot of windows broken up they all weren't broken

out by children throwing rocks and what's more natural than children throwing rocks they don't have nothing else to do there's absolutely no recreation facilities here and uh the playground like this is a mockery for thousands of children attendants had no input as to what they Wanted it was built because somebody said this would be good for children to play on there were graffiti everywhere and there were drug problems and all the problems that you can imagine come from when you uproot people without their will [Music] and what do you expect that they will love these

projects no That wasn't going to happen through it i go if you really see an uh an aerial view of it those buildings were spaced quite a distance apart if you took them and threw them on their faces which is where they should have fallen you will get lovely housing 20 feet high you can take a look at a little exercise here that if these towers the slabs Are removed from the towers you begin to see a different attitude of what is visible you begin to see through the site as opposed to looking at a

slab of buildings running one thing the tenants are really stressing is for a low-rise building closer to a home something that they can relate to what we're trying to do here is to take a given situation And try to bring it back to a community where people would want to live [Music] after thinking about the problem of the pruitt igo housing project the city planners blew it up just dynamited it away the projects end up being tremendous failures you know we know all about that failure now and everywhere they existed 30 40 years Later they're

all being torn down [Music] [Music] you can't put streets back where you took them out you can't put stores back you can't put the daily life and all the institutions it takes generations to build up those institutions [Music] that's what was eliminated by these Projects the superblock urbanism of the modernist ilk that jane jacobs writes about is is destroying cities you also have at the very same time the automobile being rammed through this causes as many problems as the urban renewal projects the most profound influence on the city in the last hundred years Has been

the automobile the decision made almost inevitably was to drive the freeways the interstate system right through the cities and through neighborhoods whose value city elites and developers wanted to ultimately reclaim [Music] we wouldn't have any american economy without the automobile business that's Literally true we believe that that this is a great industry that has to go on and has to keep on turning out cars and trucks and buses then there have to be places for them to run they have to be modern roles the first of moses commandments for progress is thou shalt drive [Music]

jane jacobs was one of the very first People to say the car is not supreme the people who walk on the sidewalk are what makes the city it isn't hard to understand that producing and consuming automobiles might seem all important to the management of ford and chrysler and general motors but it's harder to understand why the production and consumption of automobiles should be the purpose of Life for all the rest of us moses was about realizing a very particular vision of the american dream that was you know what's good for general motors is good for

the united states of america i am privileged to present the winner of the grand national award robert moses of new york robert moses new york city construction coordinator is a world famous highway planner a man Who knows his business [Applause] what he was really doing was tearing up vital neighborhoods for example in the south bronx where he built the cross bronx expressway [Music] this is the single most destructive decision ever made about u.s cities the cross bronx expressway An artery whose history was marked by such gigantic problems of construction financing relocation and organized obstruction that

it took 17 years to complete [Music] [Music] the cross bronx expressway ripped through the heart and the middle of the bronx creating what was a wall between what eventually was known as the Northern and the southern part of the bronx robert moses thought he'd get away with anything who's going to stop him he's got all the city politicians around his side because he's bringing a lot of federal money from the federal highway program and that gets passed around today our greatest single problem is tenant removal The uh tendency on the part of people in politics

as well as those who are living on these rights away who are immediately affected is to assume that the people who are doing this job are unsympathetic they're even sadistic well of course that isn't the truth at all when you remove the daily life when you remove the stores you remove the places that constitute where they Spend time what we would call the public realm the sidewalks the bars the grocery stores you remove the city and that's what jane jacobs says you draw away the people with a prescription that is guaranteed to hurt cities well

you have to pull it through you've got to do it it's like all these these things that have opposition the fact that 2 000 people come and agitate Against the extension of an expressway doesn't prove that you're not going to build the expressway so many of the problems of the south bronx grew directly out of the devastation caused by building that expressway which of course became totally gridlocked 15 minutes after it was open i mean moses thought he was improving the city by bringing it up to date By making it work for the automobile and

as it became clear that urban highways were in fact uh profoundly destructive it really became a battle between opposing forces of course in lower manhattan uh moses uh wanted to build a road right across um uh the city there the whole cast iron district would have been basically obliterated the lower manhattan expressway was To have connected the holland tunnel with the williamsburg and manhattan bridges it would have destroyed most of soho we would have lost one of the greatest inventories of 19th century buildings not just in new york but in the world the highways of

course destroyed the neighborhoods that they went through where was this going to end [Music] the whole place was going to be laced with highways what would we have left of manhattan on any day of the week if you walk along canal street and it's often faster than riding this is what you'll see the crush of endless waiting traffic now look at the solution the lower manhattan expressway only practical highway crossing serving The lower manhattan commercial and business districts can we afford to let one section of our city slowly strangle in hopeless traffic congestion there was

an awful campaign against that neighborhood it was called hell's hundred acres a bottled up stagnating section of the city no new private buildings erected in 30 years A valley of economic depression the need is urgent we must have a lower manhattan expressway now local priest a church on broome street had heard about jane's successful defenses fighting moses and asked if she could help father what effect do you feel that the expressway will have on the neighborhood well the expressway will will destroy The neighborhood this is the worst thing about these monumental plans there is no

way there that old buildings can easily be torn down new ones put up old things adapted to different use it's settled well that's not planning for the future reminded of some of the opposition to his long time dream for an expressway across lower manhattan Moses was specific about what it takes to override the inevitable roadblocks you've got to move people and the political leaders naturally if they have people ticketed and they know where they are and they vote right they don't want to move them and have them go somewhere else i tried to do in

new york what we've done successfully in other places which is to pay more money to people in cash Come take the money and go away these are people who rent they don't own anything so what difference does it take when you're talking about a uh an expressway that costs 84 million dollars stop being victims i think it's wicked in a way to be a victim it's even wickeder to be a predator but it's wicked to be a victim and allow it You can't as an individual you can't do anything but you can organize if you're

being victimized by an expressway that a bureaucracy is putting through for the benefit of the automobile people then you fight that you refuse to be a victim of that what effect do you think this will have on the neighborhood itself it will destroy the neighborhood it's one of the few neighborhoods that you could a woman can go down the street tonight and be Safe and the women know it and i know it two or three o'clock in the morning the men are sitting in the cafes and they're watching you taking care of you they want

to build up neighborhoods like this they say let's get back to the old safe neighborhood this is it [Music] memorandum to arthur hodgkiss from robert moses The lower manhattan will move very soon please keep an eye on it mr sumlin are you saying that they're trying to sneak it through i would say it's a sleeper if this thing is passed these are how these things happen if they're not watched uh it's a sleeper who do you think is pushing this well as only one man and i can think of can be pushed They seem to

think that they have a choice that they'd rather stay in the houses than they've lived in all this time the whole federal arterial aid program running into billions of dollars depend upon the votes of a few very few people in one section we wouldn't build anything nothing would be built there'd be no highways there'd be no no housing there there'd be no public Improvements please do not build this express highway if most of these people consider automobiles more than the human being it is not right i think it's awful i don't think it's a fair

i don't think it's very good because i live there i look at my window the truck the car and everything they don't need expressway What they're gonna do throw them in the street after 51 years i'm citizen and everything there's something awful they think every day they're gonna throw you out i think this awful thing they make me sick i hope god they have to be damn sick that's what i heard it was going to be a defining hearing in which they would approve the expressway And jane said when they discuss this issue i'm going

to get up and i'm going to speak against it i went up to the microphone i was very angry they weren't listening to us they had made their decision that was clear they were really only aaron boys who had no power to make decisions so we had better let them take back a message we would never stand for this expressway i intended just to climb up to their Level and walk across the stage there was a stenotypist who had a new machine she was frightened and she picked up her stenotype machine and clasped it to

her bosom the tapes fell out of the machine they ran across the floor like confetti people began tossing it in the air i knew it had to be brought to an end so an inspiration struck me I said there is no hearing because the record is gone and without a record there can't be a hearing the chief state person was saying arrest that woman arrest that woman as i went out police captain told me that i was arrested the police were very apologetic they knew who she was and what was going on she was charged

with three felonies Which is pretty rotten for what she did what did she do she didn't hurt anybody she became the hero and the politics just shifted at that point board of estimate in an executive session today voted unanimously to turn down a proposal for a lower manhattan expressway the board pleased that was the decisive moment and moses Couldn't do anything he was just a pure villain the politicians were villains at that point it was clear that no politician was going to get away with this the lower manhattan expressway was really the beginning of the

end for robert moses [Music] robert moses was finally squeezed out by nelson rockefeller as governor of new york might have been The first public official powerful enough to call his bluff moses was famous for threatening to resign when he was unhappy with something rockefeller said at one point okay and moses had no choice he couldn't back down and he was gone after the moses expressway situation was finally settled jane felt she could go to canada with her typewriter i became a writer again Her husband who was an architect was building hospitals up there and the

sons were there to keep out of that awful vietnam war of course as soon as she got to toronto she she said there was another expressway heading right for her house the spadina expressway she stopped that too and then got to work the lower manhattan expressway was Officially dead in the year 1970 meanwhile across the country these kinds of freeway revolts were taking place and similar roadways were being defeated but the lower manhattan expressway was really the leading example if that had happened there would be no soho the entire history of development and redevelopment and

adaptive reuse In the city would have played out in a different way it would have been the single most damaging intervention in the urban fabric in manhattan in the 20th century period a city is not just a physical object [Music] the city is a living thing it will always morph and change our goal has to be to manage change well not to freeze it in time [Music] as cities around the world are obliged to house this dramatically increasing population we still have the conversation in terms of top-down versus bottom-up formality versus informality these are the

eternal polarities of thinking about the city [Music] if you go to china you see huge swaths Of farmland that are now being urbanized in exactly the model that america used in 1950s and we know that it failed china today is moses on steroids you know and the notion that moses could not have conceived of this extraordinary scaling up of what it means to bill in that sense history has outdone him These isolated developments with hundreds of similar looking blocks with no urbanism no street who can live in them and how would you live in them

what they are building today i think is the slums of the future and they're made in concrete they're going to last at least 60 years we're condemning future generations to an absolute world without hope [Music] given the scale of the problem we have that makes a completely different context in which jane jacobs i just again now have a new incarnation [Music] it is so easy to blame the decay of cities on traffic or immigrants or the whimsies of the middle class the decay of cities goes deeper and is More complicated it goes right down to

what we think we want and to our ignorance about how cities work [Music] with the amount of people who now need to live in cities you have to accept that you're going to need more density but a lot of densely built up terrain [Music] is not a city [Music] if one were to build a city no matter how fast it is without building a great public realm you don't have a city that's what change talks about historically solutions to city problems have very seldom come from the top [Music] they come from people who understand the

problems firsthand because they're Living with them and who have new and ingenious and often very offbeat ideas of how to solve them [Music] the creativity and the concern and the ideas down there in city neighborhoods and city communities has to be given a chance has to be released people have to insist on government trying things Their way [Music] if you give people an environment that they could shape themselves they would not only be happier [Music] but you would have a completely different kind of city [Music] the key thing about jane jacobs much more important than

loving stoops and streets and stuff was A willingness to be skeptical a willingness to doubt the received wisdom [Music] and to trust our eyes instead [Music] under the seeming disorder of the old city [Music] wherever the old city is working successfully [Music] Is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the street and the freedom of the city [Music] it is a complex order this order is all composed of movement and change and although it is life not art we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance

not to a simple-minded precision dance With everyone kicking up at the same time twirling in unison and bowing off on moss [Music] but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole [Music] utopia season continues here on bbc four And can utopian visions of life really survive the needs and greed of individuals we continue in search of the dream on tuesday at nine and then on wednesday famous as the home of concrete cows it's also an ambitious experiment in social

engineering milton keynes and me also at 9.