When Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses went to war in the early 1960s over Lomex, the 10-lane elevated Lower Manhattan Expressway—to Moses, it was the crowning jewel in New York’s modernization; for Jacobs, urban planning’s worst abomination—few would have picked her to win. Moses, an upper-class Manhattanite who controlled planning for the city and many adjacent areas, was the incarnation not just of bureaucratic power but of contemporary wisdom: cities needed to be rationalized and segregated into distinct areas of use (housing here, work sites there). Above all, they had to accommodate the car. Jacobs, a writer at Architectural Forum magazine, was an essentially self-educated migrant from Scranton, Penn., with some fringe ideas about traffic flows and how cities actually work, economically and socially.

But when the dust settled years later, it was Jacobs, later an urbanist icon in Toronto after she left the U.S. in 1968 in protest over the Vietnam War, who emerged the victor. Instead of racing across Moses’s neighbourhood-devouring expressway, visitors to New York’s Lower East Side now flock to the shops and galleries of SoHo. Continue…