“BUILDING LIKE MOSES WITH JACOBS IN MIND”: Contemporary Planning in New York City by Scott Larson (review)

Among the questions raised by the November 2013 election of Bill de Blasio as mayor of New York City was: would the ambitious building program of Michael Bloomberg’s three-term administration continue? The progressive candidate’s victory makes uncertain the maintenance of recently transformed public spaces and the completion of in-process projects. Still to be seen is how de Blasio can privilege affordable housing without continuing his predecessor’s incentivizing of private real estate developers.

Within this transitional moment, Scott Larson’s “Building Like Moses with Jacobs in Mind”: Contemporary Planning in New York City is a timely study. Larson does not set out to write a comprehensive record of projects undertaken in the previous twelve years, a topic partially tackled by Jayne Merkel’s recent We Build the City: New York City’s Design + Construction Excellence Program (2014). Instead, Larson’s text is a narrative about narratives.

Larson’s subject is both the recent history of the Bloomberg administration and the longer history of planning in New York City since the postwar period. He adopts a critical lens towards city administrators’ selective calling-upon of the principles of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, manipulating the ideologies of each (often wrongly polarized as incommensurate) in service of advancing a bold agenda. In the context of reevaluations of Jacobs and Moses by urban historians such as Hillary Ballon, Kenneth Jackson, and Christopher Klemek in the last decade, Larson interrogates what it has meant for the Bloomberg administration to invoke the specters of Moses and Jacobs to advance its policy of selective rezoning and class-based urban development.

Larson positions Bloomberg’s legacy as controlling space to maximize capital accumulation and benefit those of greater class privilege. Yet, recognizing Jacobs-inspired community-level resistance to large-scale municipal projects, this “neoliberal building spree” necessitated a “citizen buy-in to see it through” (77). To convince neighborhood populations threatened with displacement (due to eminent domain rulings or gentrification-caused rent increases) of the rightness of these building choices, narratives of imminent dangers posed to the city should redevelopment not take place and equations of good design to civic virtue were advanced. This second strategy, the administration’s use of “an aesthetic imperative” to normalize selective values, reveals an embedded target in Larson’s study (134).

Larson’s title comes from a phrase oft-repeated in speeches by Amanda Burden, the Director of City Planning for the Bloomberg administration. Arriving at the end of his mostly balanced study of projects both realized and unrealized—the proposed development of the West Side of Manhattan, part of a bid for the 2012 Summer Olympics; the Hudson and Atlantic rail yards in Manhattan and Brooklyn, respectively; and Columbia University’s expansion into the Manhattanville section of Harlem—and close reading of neoliberal policies outlined in the Regional Plan Association’s A Region at Risk, Larson’s discussion of Burden shifts tone and vocabulary. In contrast to his otherwise careful sourcing of public statements, conference panels, interviews, academic texts, and exhibitions catalogues, Larson offers several damning critiques of Burden with attribution only to unnamed “staff and “one architect” (140, 141). Her biography is scrutinized and her “fixation” on unified design is cast as micro-managerial, at best (141).

More productive is Larson’s positioning of New York City in light of the 2008 global economic crisis. He unpacks the limited utility of both Moses and Jacobs to present-day city governments. Larson asks his reader to consider not just how Moses and Jacobs insufficiently sell an urban ideal but how focusing on these historical models distracts from engaging with more pressing issues (e.g., ongoing class and racial segregation and insufficient affordable housing) affecting contemporary cities.