Most of what you said echoed the sentiments expressed in the reading and other sources about Jane Jacobs I read. I definitely see all of her/your points as valid, and understand from where they stem.

Jane Jacobs was criticized as a “housewife” and told her work was also unscholarly and imprecise. While insulting Jacobs based on her marital status is an ad-hominem logical fallacy, the notion of criticizing the impracticality of her ideas of preserving communities based on their own natural development can be taken seriously.

Take the analogy of some horrible traffic on the highway, caused by a cardboard box on the road. While obviously, the cardboard box could easily be moved, every driver simply goes around it, and speeds ahead. Each individual sees no need to move the box, as it doesn’t directly inhibit them once they are passing it, yet it would impact large numbers of people, for one person to just stop for a second and move the box… This analogy epitomizes the benefit of a central force, working on behalf of the ‘greater good’. Nobody wants their house or property to be the sacrificial lamb used to benefit the ‘greater good’ yet somehow consensus is reached about the projects deeming them positive.

On the opposite side of the same coin, there is no way to ever repay  a displaced person. Their dwellings are invaluable for sentimental reasons, and impossible to calculate, especially after public projects change the value of surrounding properties.

While Jacobs was definitely an ‘activist’ of sorts, she can also be presented as a coward. Soon after she was arrested in 1968, Jane Jacobs abandoned New York and moved to Toronto (she said it was to avoid her children’s military draft into the Vietnam War.) It seems, as though when comparing her to Moses, Moses presented a greater level of dedication, basing much of his work on New York, and looking at it in a task/goal oriented fashion, as opposed to causing some helter-skelter, and running away.

A further criticism of both Jacobs writings and actions are implied gentrification. Jacobs lived in a New York converted candy shop- turned house in an up and coming neighborhood.  Again, poor people and old city dynamics are uprooted by new changes and rich people- proving that there is no ‘fair way’, only some are more natural.

During the construction of the Eiffel Tower in Paris there were many protests as it was called an eyesore. Guy de Maupassant said he went to a restaurant right under the Eiffel Tower daily because “it is the only place in Paris one can’t see the structure”. Yet today, Parisians generally love the Eiffel tower and appreciate it as an integral part of their city.

The Eiffel Tower analogy implies that nobody really knows what’s best. People’s opinions change and the world rapidly moves. What will we like/hate tomorrow nobody (including Moses) knows….