Issue link: https://www.balharbourdigital.com/i/867968
mixed and some of her theories were taken to heart so in some places things got better. But it's certainly staggering to go to China or India and see the social capital of the cities in those countries wiped clean for towers in the park environments that she warned about. The other question the movie raises is that the world is inevitably urbanizing at an unprecedented pace so what are we going to do for the new urban fabric that's being developed? MS: What does it seem like that answer will be? Instead of housing projects in New York you now have luxury towers with $50 million apartments. MT: The book is really prescient and she covers a lot of these different ways we can screw up our cities and it didn't all have to deal with housing projects. There were lots of other things she was seeing and warning against: over-success of cities, gentrification, these issues we're facing now. The umbrella point, I think, is that when economic forces and government forces and people's inaction let the social capital of cities be destroyed then great violence is being done to society and great problems arise from that. This is Jacobs's great warning. It can take many forms and a lot of people don't understand that social capital is what cities really are. We tried to get that point across in a 90-minute film. MS: The pacing of the film and the plodding of this battle with Moses was very effective. Had you always thought to make their rivalry the focal point? MT: It's a very heavy subject and most people aren't interested in urban planning. So my conclusion early on was to make a movie that wasn't preaching to the converted—graduate students in urban planning—it should be a movie that was character driven and there happened to be two characters who could get the point across and they engage with each other in these battles at a critical time in both of their careers. Jacobs is making her name and Moses is about to be knocked off his pedestal. For me it's also the perfect time to set the movie visually, this glorious mid- century, Margaret Bourke-White, Helen Levitt, Rudi Burckhardt visualized city. I love that material and it seemed to me that if you wanted a theatrical film about urban planning that was a good way to go. MS: It seems like a lot of moviegoers would be in your position prior to reading Jacobs, thinking that Modernism won in a way, but your film makes the point that it lost and that those utopian projects—like Niemeyer with Brazil or the Bauhaus in Europe— didn't achieve the goals they'd set out to. MT: I couldn't agree more. I love Niemeyer and I love looking at pictures of Brasília and I love looking at pictures of Chandigarh and Louis Kahn's capital complex in Bangladesh— those masterplan, Modernist utopian visions. I could look at photos of them all day and I love them but then you realize these places didn't work at all. If you look at aerial photos of Brasília, the core that was planned by Niemeyer looks very orderly, but when you look around, there are these incredibly disorderly settlements—some would call them slums. That top down, command-and-control aesthetic doesn't really work. What Jacobs makes you see is that there's beauty in what on the surface seems to be mess that humans beings make of their cities. But there's a marvelous order to that and we should respect that because when we disrespect that the consequences can be dire. MS: Did you come across the next wave of Jacobs and Moses? MT: I think one of the legacy of Jacobs is that she launched a period of citizen activism and the whole concept of the community board exploded after her book. Now a lot of people mischaracterize her as the mother of all NIMBYs [Not In My Back Yard] but I don't think she really was. I think she was about putting more power in people's hands. There are urban planners everywhere and some of them have less power and some of them have more power such as in authoritarian places like China. They can have a lot of power and can do a lot of damage really quickly, but they can also do a lot of good really quickly. These are the questions we should be looking at. We went to China and India and met people who are on-the-ground citizen soldiers. It's baby steps, but one thing to realize about Jacobs was that these were 10-year battles. It's not for the faint of heart, but she's really self-taught. By her example you don't need to have an urban planning degree you just need to be bright, inquisitive, and intrepid to make a new path. She's a citizen warrior and I think she can be a great example to other people who want to go down that road. MS: I wonder what she'd make of New York today? MT: You never know, and you can't speak for her because everything is situational, but I think she'd be pretty discouraged. A lot of what she was fighting against was corporatization and collusion between governments and corporations. Look at Times Square. Everyone slams Times Square as being Disney-fied, but that was purposefully done. This big cleanup that top- down people want kills cities. Was the dangerous, hooker/peep show Times Square great? No, but I would argue that it was more interesting than the bizarre, hellish tourist nightmare that Times Square is now. I often wish she were around to comment about all these high-rises in Long Island City. Are the mayors giving too much away to developers? These are still pressing questions and she helped raise them in the public realm and made it popular for the average person to talk about these things. 194 BAL HARBOUR