By Martin Boughner

The Tri-City News

Cities and transportation planning are two areas that have seen paradigm shifts in the last half a century. Fifty years ago, the car was king and the highway was basis of thinking about getting people around — to work and to recreation.

The king of the highway was Robert Moses, in his time probably the most influential man in New York — State and City.

Urban decay was attacked by massive redevelopment projects, replacing the original housing stock with highrises, and frequently developed in conjunction with the growth of highways. The seminal figure changing these attitudes was Jane Jacobs, who argued for low density, mixed use and public transit.

We will consider two books, both classics, about and by these two figures.

Robert A. Caro’s The Power Broker is a biography of Robert Moses and traces his career from his early days as a New York City reformer through his transformation into the embodiment of the principle that “you have to go along to get along.” Caro writes beautifully — many of his sentences demand to be read twice — and his research is prodigious.

Moses’ early defeats as a reformer taught him such lessons as that if you can start a project before your opponents are organized, your forward momentum is assured by the fact that money has already been spent; that offering politicians a stake in a project guarantees its success; that “accomplishments” such as highways are always lauded, whether or not they actually accomplished what they were intended to do. Moses’ career really took off after he was successful in building a series of beautiful parks on Long Island, served by what was the new concept of “parkways” — landscaped highways that were designed to make driving a pleasant experience. Eventually, he even controlled his own finances.

As chair of the toll-collecting Triborough Bridge Authority, he was able to jigger the founding legislation so as to give himself a virtually free hand in dispensing the revenues. And always that dispensing was at the service of jobs for his political friends and the conferring of perks for those who needed to be influenced.

Good stuff, parks and parkways. But the class he was attempting to serve was a narrow one. The overpasses on those parkways were so low that it was impossible for buses to use them — no hoi polloi in his parks. His bias against underclasses, especially African-Americans, was a key factor in his decision making. As his power expanded, so did the size of his projects, and as his toll bridges poured more money into his Authority, he built up an empire, including such things as fully staffed dining rooms at all three of his offices, ready to serve those he was influencing and rewarding at a moment’s notice (although he, himself, was never particularly well off).

And as time went on, a curious fact was noticed: His highways would become congested; he would, plan and build another highway, and quite soon that highway would be as congested as the first, while the original highway was just as congested as ever. In other words, if you build it they will come.

The climax of the story is the construction of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, a stupendous (as Caro admits) engineering achievement that managed to hold the whole immense infrastructure of the Bronx (subways, water mains, power lines, buildings) intact while trenching through it. Whole neighbourhoods of liveable housing were destroyed while the remaining neighbourhoods were devalued: highways are in some ways good servants but they are not good neighbours.

Meanwhile, there was a growing realization that trading off liveable neighbourhoods for massive highway and bridges was not a sensible exchange. Moses’ first great loss was the defeat of the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would, among other things, destroy Washington Square Park. It was opposed by a citizens’ group with which Jane Jacobs was deeply involved, and it was fought to a standstill.

Jacobs laid out her manifesto in the 1961 Death and Life of Great American Cities, probably the most influential book on urban planning ever written. It is city planning from the ground up, dealing not with theory (although she bitterly attacks the theorists, including another Moses opponent, Lewis Mumford) but with detailed, loving observations of working liveable neighbourhoods.

From these observations she derived axioms: mixed use means there are people on the street (and observing the street) all the time, so a mixed-use neighbourhood is safer; short blocks are much more pleasant to walk on than long ones; a mixture of new, old, expensive and cheap living spaces creates vitality and intensity.

We can test many of these principles ourselves. Walk from Robson and Denman in Vancouver along Robson (long blocks) and then on Denman (short blocks) — which is more fun? Go to Arthur Erickson’s much vaunted provincial law courts and see how sterile the building is (and deserted). Wouldn’t a few (or many) stalls really help?

Jacobs’ Death and Life is the founding document of the New Urbanism (although she questioned whether you actually establish city centres outside of major cities), and is must reading for anyone interested in city planning.

A Good Read is a column by Tri-City

librarians that is published every Wednesday. Martin Boughner works at Port Moody Public Library.