Fighting the good development fight with Citizen Jane
In 1960, Jane Jacobs’s book The Death and Life of Great American Cities sent shockwaves through the architecture and planning worlds, with its exploration of the consequences of modern planners’ and architects’ reconfiguration of cities.
Jacobs was also an activist, who was involved in many fights in mid-century New York, to stop “master builder” Robert Moses from running roughshod over the city. Citizen Jane: Battle for the City retraces the battles for the city as personified by Jacobs and Moses, as urbanization moves to the very front of the global agenda.
Many of the clues for formulating solutions to the dizzying array of urban issues can be found in Jacobs’s prescient text, and a close second look at her thinking and writing about cities is very much in order.
This film, helmed by director Matt Tyrnauer, sets out to examine the city of today through the lens of one of its greatest champions.
“Mr. Tyrnauer has heightened the human drama by focusing on Jacobs, an improbable David to Moses’s Goliath,” raves Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal, while Glenn Kenny at The New York Times says, “The movie lights up whenever it shows archival footage of its antagonists: Jacobs is sensible, warm and witty; Moses is cocksure, occasionally truculent, openly contemptuous of the people his big ideas are likely to displace.”
Citizen Jane: Battle for the City
Opens Friday, 7 p.m.
Palace Picture House
818 Georgia Ave.
(423) 803-6578
www.chattpalace.com