WI no Jane Jacobs?

[Lycaon pictus]

Would the Lower Manhattan Expressway have been built?

How long would '50s-style urban renewal have continued, and what form would resistance to it have taken?

What would our cities look like today?

 

[f1b0nacc1]

Don't overstate her impact

Jane Jacobs wrote 1 great book (it is still one of my favorites), and lead a successful revolt against a horribly conceived project in Greenwich Village, but I have a hard time seeing her as being more than a product of the times, rather than an instigator of them.

If you want to address the broader question (What if no pushback...or ineffective pushback...against the urban renewal move plans of people like Robert Moses?) I suspect that a good look at most East European countries would be instructive. I am not saying that it would have gone that far, but the proliferation of massive apartment blocks, roads built with no real attention to usefulness or other value, etc. is probably a pretty good glimpse of it...