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The Death and Life of Great American Cities is a book almost entirely bereft of photos and graphics. "There's just a note from Jane Jacobs that basically says—and I'm paraphrasing here—'if you want to experience a city, go out onto the street. See it,'" director Matt Tyrnauer tells me. In a sense, Citizen Jane: Battle for the City accomplishes just that.
Debuting to the world at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) on September 9th, the documentary offers a rare visual window into Jacobs' work within the context of mid-century urban planning and social politics. Chronicling the legendary urban theorist's thought and activism in New York, the film frames Jacobs' thought through interviews, archival footage, and plenty of quotes. Most importantly, however, it successfully frames it in the visual logic of cinema.
Aerial shots accompany discussions of Robert Moses and and Le Corbusier, but Jane Jacobs' voice comes to us with intimate views—both archival and contemporary—of life on street. We see Moses tower over grand scale models, admiring his creation from above. For architect Le Corbusier, meanwhile, a view of Paris from an airplane window inspired the tower-in-the-park model intended to emancipate residents from the real and perceived miseries of city life.
Tyrnaeur shows us these views from afar, and we come to understand the city as a mechanized abstraction. For Moses and Le Corbusier, the city is a machine, a sort of computer where individual people are little more than the constituent parts of a prescribed whole. For Jacobs, however, the city is enriched by the diversity of its people, and its vitality is in the wealth of interactions between them. The cold 'top-down' rationalism of mid-century planning is visually contrasted with the empirical 'bottom-up' approach favoured by Jacobs. These were, and to a degree, still are, two fundamentally opposing ways to understand the city.
From fighting an extension of 5th Avenue that would have cut through the heart of Washington Square Park to eventually spearheading the effort to halt the Lower Manhattan Expressway, the film is a study of Jacobs' now-legendary battles with the colossal influence of New York city planner Robert Moses. Focusing mostly on Jacobs' work in the 50s and 60s, the documentary highlights a number of watershed moments in 20th century New York, enriching a narrative of Jacobs' civic activism with an overview of the revolutionary concepts presented in 1961's The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
Perspective, the film suggests, informs the logic of the ideology. Indeed, there is a strange, sanitized beauty to expressways and tower-in-the-park housing projects from above. But then there's also often a dysfunctional, imposed landscape below. In the older urban neighbourhoods championed by Jacobs, there may be chaos from above, but there's surprising vitality, dynamism, and economic diversity below.
"I've always loved Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe," Tyrnauer explains, "and their idea of 'the city as a work of art' is very appealing to me. The perspective Jane Jacobs provides is something entirely different though," he tells me, "and it's very compelling."
The film also looks at Jacobs' influence within the larger social context of feminism and civil rights. Beyond the technical issues of urban planning, there's also Jacobs the woman, the journalist, and the "mere housewife" who refused to back down to the institutionalized dogma of male power.
While the geography of the urban realm remains the broad focus, the film also widens its perspective to provide a socio-historical context, drawing parallels between Jacobs and second-wave feminist icons like Germaine Greer and Betty Friedan. Drawing a link to the 21st century, Citizen Jane also reveals that mid-century planning principles remain in vogue throughout many parts of the world, lending the film a greater sense of immediacy.
While a central, focused narrative isn't always apparent—and the film suffers somewhat for it—the documentary's intelligence lies in its visual elucidation of urban thought. Despite drawing strongly on the principles set out in Jacobs' 1961 magnum opus, the film is a thought-provoking work in its own right. "A movie isn't a book, and a book isn't a movie," says Tyrnauer, and he's right to say it. The film is another entity, one that supplements—and doesn't merely summarize—the book. Ultimately, however, Citizen Jane succeeds because Tyrnauer understands what Jacobs understood; he understands where to look.
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Citizen Jane: Battle for the City premiers at TIFF's Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema—formerly known as the Bloor Cinema—at 2:45 PM on Friday, September 9th. The film will also be shown on Saturday, September 10th, Tuesday September 13th, and Sunday, September 18th. Tickets are available via the film festival's official site.
