The question raised particularly about the Jane Jacobs reading was interesting to me. Was she attacking Moses in that chapter? For the other readings, there is no question about who the author is addressing. They clearly mention Moses by name, and discuss specific actions and policies of his. Jane Jacobs on the other hand writes in a much more broad sense. She seems to be discussing city planning in general. In fact, one might be led to believe that she is not addressing Moses at all, as she mentions various other planners by name. However, knowing the time frame in which she wrote the book, as well as her personal troubles with Moses, it’s pretty clear that she intends this book to be a criticism of him as well. At one point, she even says “of course planners, including the highwaymen with fabulous sums of money and enormous powers at their disposal, are at a loss to make automobiles and cities compatible with one another. They do not know what to do with automobiles in cities because they do not know how to plan for workable and vital cities anyhow-with or without automobiles.” This, to me, was clearly a direct critique of Moses.
What I found interesting were her ideas concerning city planning which were basically, we shouldn’t do city planning. She compared the idea of city planning to bloodletting. It is something that everyone was convinced worked for many years, while really, it was probably hurting the person more. She brought examples, including North End, a neighborhood in Boston with bad city planning, still considered a slum, despite the thriving non-violent community with very low death rates. People believed it was a slum because of what they assumed should be there, not because of what actually was there. She accused many people of being “interested only in how a city ought to look and uninterested in how it works.” I actually think that Robert Moses was not guilty of this. He was thinking about how the city worked. He wanted highways to make the city more connected and better for travelling. However, he looked at the workings of the city, and not of the individuals living there. So while his projet was intended to improve the workings of the city, he ignored a vital part of that which was the people and businesses who were there previously.
