Roughly a year ago, the Honors English 1012 class watched a film about Robert Moses’s legacy as an NYC urban planner. The film portrayed Frances Goldin as the leader of the protest against construction of the Lower Manhattan Expressway and the success of this campaign made her a working class hero. Watching the film then and reading about Goldin now, it’s hard to believe that a grass roots movement could have effectively challenged the city government.

Perhaps due to my familiarity with the subject matter, this week’s reading did not appeal to me. I have several criticisms, the first of which is that the first ten pages seem as if they were written to meet a word count rather than provide any useful information. The substantive chunk of the work only begins on page 10. Even still, the author refers to later chapters so frequently, throughout the first chapter, that I’m more interested in reading chapters 2, 3, 4… However, I personally, I found the subsection on rational comprehensive planning to be the most informative. The subsection begins with an explanation of the thought behind this kind of planning, then the author describes the process itself. The author goes on to discuss its application during the Keynesian era followed by the neoliberal era.