El siguiente artículo aparece en el número The UnPlanned City de la revista CITY LIMITS de Enero 2011. Es una reseña acerca del libro "The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs" de Roberta Brandes Gratz.
Les dejo extractos del artículo, y el link si lo quieren leer completo.
Ast!
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"The book is hard to categorize. Part biography, part urban history, sometimes manifesto, sometimes love letter to New York. Gratz, a former New York Post reporter who has penned several books on urbanism and has contributed to City Limits in the past, is probably one of the most authoritative interpreters of Jacobs' legacy. But while Jacobs is a huge presence in these pages, the book avoids hagiography. These are mostly Gratz's own ruminations about the city: her recounting of the battle to save SoHo, the process she went through to understand the fullness of Westway's threat, the decades of punishment she has seen delivered unto manufacturing in New York neighborhoods like Willets Point, the immense value she sees in the small wonders of the Upper West Side. She has much to say, and the book's structure can sometimes cloud its take-home message, but its fine-grain detail helps it avoid broad-brush ideology that could be a turnoff for the general reader. It's not that every development or City Hall proposal is a bad idea. There are good developers, and communities sometimes pick bad fights. The only absolute is that not everything labeled “progress” actually is."
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The public, writes Gratz, “has come to understand their right and value in being part of the process that leads to change. This is vintage Jane. Public process, on the other hand, was anathema to Moses.” She adds later: “If you accept the centrality of the idea of people being the best engine of change, then what is critical is removing the kind of impediments that thwart the capacity of the people.”
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In a 2005 letter to Mayor Bloomberg that Gratz prints in full, Jacobs weighed in on the city's proposal to rezone the Brooklyn waterfront in a way contrary to what the community had asked for in its own official vision, called a 197-A plan.
“If you follow the proposal before you today, you will maybe enrich a few heedless and ignorant developers, but at the cost of an ugly and intractable mistake. Even the presumed beneficiaries of this misuse of governmental powers, the developers and financiers of luxury towers, may not benefit; misused environments are not good long-term economic bets,” Jacobs wrote. “Come on, do the right thing. The community really does know best.”
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