[LINK] "Was Jane Jacobs a saint?"

[rfmcdonald]

In the Globe and Mail on the 29th of August, columnist John Barber asked this controversial question. In Toronto, she undergirds the whole conception of Toronto as a modern livable metropolis of neighbourhoods. In New York City? Apparently not so much.

Jane Jacobs got a rough ride in her old home town on the occasion of her death three years ago at the age of 89, beginning with a waspish assessment in The New York Times and culminating with the opening, less than a year later, of an influential exhibition celebrating the achievements of Robert Moses, the legendary city builder whom the writer and urban activist famously took on and brought down before leaving New York for Toronto in 1968.

"At least he got it built!" declared Eliot Spitzer, then on his way to being elected state governor, summing up nostalgia for the can-do age that Mr. Moses dominated, when New York produced great public works at an astonishing rate. And it was the sainted Jane Jacobs, others added, who ruined the dream of a great metro- polis by empowering the "not in my backyard" naysayers.

Ms. Jacobs merely gave "an eloquent voice to Greenwich Village chauvinism," Moses scholar Joel Schwartz wrote in Robert Moses and the Modern City, a book of essays accompanying the exhibition. Her real concern was Democratic Party politics and the result was "a selfish NIMBYism," he charged, ridiculing the myth of "Saint Jane and the Dragon."

With no wisdom more widely received than the commandments Jane Jacobs had laid down almost 50 years earlier in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, revision was inevitable. The most pointed critic of all was an unidentified caller to a New York radio show, Jacobs biographer Anthony Flint says. "He said, 'You know, Jane Jacobs enabled hipsters in Greenwich Village and New Jersey shoppers in SoHo. But there are still workers living in the houses Robert Moses built.' "

It happens that there are still workers living in Toronto's now-fashionable St. Lawrence neighbourhood, a pioneering, mixed-income housing project built in the 1970s with the enthusiastic support of Ms. Jacobs. Remembering only the dragon-slayer, New Yorkers remain unaware of the vital role she played as a promoter of respectful, socially inclusive urban renewal in her adopted country. She disappeared from the U.S. view at the same time as federal funding for affordable housing dried up, and somehow got the blame.

The whole article's quite worth reading, trust me.

Can my New Yorker readers offer anything on this subject?