Jane Jacobs Research Paper

While the definition of what a city is up to the idea one’s mind, Anthropologist Jane Jacobs, philosopher Marshall Berman and Urban planner Robert Moses had polar opposite ideas of how a city should be portrayed. Jane Jacobs’s rather utopian ideal of sidewalk New York City was the true sense of a city but bulldozed by the modernization of Robert Moses.

Jane Jacobs believed that creating a community is the soul and the life of a city. To create this environment was by having contact, create relationships with your neighbors and having common areas, such as: candy stores, bars and even the stoop, to build bonds with your neighbors (Jacobs 1961). The vision Jacobs paints cannot be achieved due to urban planners like Moses. What Moses envisioned

and created was a city made for traffic, cars, commerce, and movement. He succeeded in building dozens of parkway, bridges, highways and infamously the Cross-Bronx Expressway that divided the entire Bronx County (Berman 1982). The Bronx was a great example of what Jacobs meant a city should be, but with the construction and completion of the Cross-Bronx Expressway threw “that something like 60,000 working- and lower-middle-class people, mostly Jews, but with many Italians, Irish and Blacks,” (Berman et al. 1982:298) out of their homes. Heavy remodeling creates distance, distrust, and does not help diminish racial discrimination and segregation, but does create fear and an anti-social community.
Jacobs and Berman had a true idea of what a city comprises of. Berman and Jacobs understood that the approach Moses was taking was only hurting the people living in the city by throwing them out of their homes and creating separation of people. Even recent studies like Urban Danger (2002), Sally Engle Merry that separation creates fear of others in their own neighborhood.