CITIZEN JANE: BATTLE FOR THE CITY is a powerful documentary about journalist-activist Jane Jacobs and her fight against Robert Moses, a city planner and fervent advocate of urban development in the 1960s.
Director Matt Tyrnaeur spoke to Vanity Fair about Jacob’s legacy and resonance today: “Jacobs was fearless in speaking truth to power, the model of a citizen soldier. Her story resonates today, as we are faced with a president — an international developer, no less, of luxury towers — who throws around the terms ‘urban renewal’ and ‘American carnage.’ The film can be seen as a playbook for people who want to defend vulnerable minority communities everywhere. Certainly in this country, but also in the developing world, entrepreneurs and governments collude routinely to uproot low-income sections of cities in favor of towers for the rich. That is in large part what Jacobs was writing about, and it’s happening all over again, on a much bigger scale. As the economist Saskia Sassen says in the film, China and India today are ‘Moses on steroids… History has outdone him.’ This is why we need to know about Jane Jacobs.”
