Review of Citizen Jane: Battle for the City (2017) by Shubhra R — 07 May 2017

As someone with a degree in urban & regional planning, I was very interested in seeing this. We learned about Jane Jacobs, Robert Moses and Le Corbusier in school, so none of this was totally new.

Unfortunately, this wasn't a terribly compelling film, even with my interest in the subject. Lots of archival footage, voiceovers, talking heads...nothing exciting or different, just informative. Even the three major fights that formed the core of the film felt kind of distant...they just weren't really brought to life.

The film also felt like it wandered a bit for a while, even though it was all basically tied to a core thesis - big government planning = bad, although ostensibly there had to be enough planning in the first place to build the neighborhoods she cherished.

While I lean towards Jacobs' community-centric model, I don't know that either Jacobs or Moses was totally right or wrong, as not many places are like NYC, but there's ostensibly more community input now, although rather than government-led, most projects in general are developer-led, and what they say usually goes, for better or for worse.