Much of what I gathered in reading about Robert Moses was that he was a guy who really wanted to cause a ruckus. He was extremely combative, and never hesitated to take an argument as far as it could go. He was also in a position of power, being on the board for NYC projects and other such things, which made his job a very interesting one. Moses was more of an idealist when it came to his urban planning philosophy. He believed in the ultimate in efficiency, arguing that space should be used accordingly, even if it meant the combining of recreation and transportation in an already busy section of town- a concept he really drove in with the public with the Washington Square Park ordeal. He wanted to alter the structure of the park to accommodate for “better” traffic flow and providing a connection for Lower Fifth Avenue which dead-ended at the park perimeter. He proposed to build a very wide stretch of street to meet the tail end of Fifth Avenue that would completely bisect the park. This launched an enormous good guy/bad guy debate between the citizens of the surrounding neighborhoods- most specifically the group of Greenwich Village mothers, the “Washington Square Committee”, who depended on the park greatly for family recreation. Fishman calls this a production called “The People versus the Planner”. In the end, the mothers (and those in the same way of mind) won the argument, and Washington Square Park stayed super-road free- a cause that was largely aided by Jane Jacobs (one of the mothers) and her more realist theories which she wrote about in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
Death and Life was published after the effects of the Housing Act of 1949 had begun to show their ugly faces in big cities. In the introduction, Jacobs writes that with her book, she was going to explore “what kinds of city streets are safe and what kinds are not; why some city parks are marvelous and others are vice traps and death traps; why some slums stay slums and other slums regenerate themselves even against financial and official opposition…”. She writes about the myth that if the government and its people had enough money they could fix all the problems in the city, reverse decay, get rid of slums, etc etc, and how that kind of thinking (ahem, urban renewal) produced slums that were worse than the slums they tore down to build the new slums. She touched on a very interesting concept that was being buzzed about at the time that involved the belief that if people were exposed to air, light, sunshine and green grass (whether those people be desk workers in skyscrapers or housing project dwellers)- then they would be ultimately happy.
She also made her case against traditional city planners with her example of the North End of Boston that became a slum, and unslummed itself but remained with the label as slum because city planners were unwilling to spend time getting to know the the neighborhood and why its citizens chose to stay there.
I focused on Chapter 15: Unslumming and slumming. During the mid-century, areas of cities that were deemed blighted were leveled and rebuilt as purposeful slums in the name of transformation. The results ended up being that the areas became worse slums than they were before. Jacobs attempts to break down what she understands is a cyclic effect of “slumming and unslumming”. The gist is that dull neighborhoods breed unhappy people, and once those people reach a certain level of economic stability they use that money to move to a more exciting place, which decreases the dull neighborhood’s value which in turn only attracts those who are economically disadvantaged enough so the people keep filtering through, thus, creating the ‘perpetual slum’. Jacobs then equates these areas to jungles.
Jacob writes about a solution to these problems which involves working to create a sense of community and attachment from neighborhood residents so that if they should become more advantaged economically, they feel it would be better to invest that into their current surroundings instead of finding new surroundings. This idea is what unslums slums, but doesn’t frequently occur. Thus, we are now bred with these notions of “the projects” and “the ghetto”, and, in Chicago, “the South Side”.
This idea requires a craving for diversity in all forms from those responsible for our landscape…
And now the work of David Schalliol, a chicago sociologist and photographer:
Bon soir!
Reflections on Cities and Their Image 