Citizen Jane: St. Paul Street following her plans
Have you ever been to a film and want to discuss it with your friend but the topic seems elusive at the moment?
It won’t be like that after you’ve seen Citizen Jane at the downtown St. Catharines Film House. You will walk smack-dab into the subject matter.
Right in front of you the ideas in the documentary — about Jane Jacobs and her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities — are playing out. A broader sidewalk with more public space is being constructed. Repurposed and revived buildings are in view. Around the corner a former 19th-century factory now Brock University’s school of fine and performing arts. The new-built streetscape scales back the former dominance of the automobile.
Urbanist writer and thinker Jacobs and her book published in 1961 helped change approaches to city planning and building. The documentary Citizen Jane: Battle for the City gives a good account of city design over the past century and considers the importance of urban sanity in a fast urbanizing world.
The conflict of ideas, ethics and politics around planning and design was written large in New York City. Much of the story told here is framed as a “battle for the city.” Citizen Jane’s adversary, Robert Moses, was commissioner of construction of highways, and new housing projects followed his clearing of slums. Moses has more screen time than our hero Jacobs. His authoritarian approach brands him a bully and his quotes and appearances make him a really threatening guy. Citizen Jane and her ideas win out.
Jacobs, through observation and discovery brought people-centred ideas to the planning of cities and challenged a bulldozer and topdown approaches to urban matters that were all too common then. A massive amount of supporting visuals and interview clips are a stellar documentary achievement.
Quotes from her book clatter out in typewriter typeface. Those on-screen quotes move her story along. She was a wordsmith.
This is also a good account of Jacobs’ activism and community organizing stopping Moses’s plans for an expressway through Washington Square Park. The conflict may be good storytelling. But … While Jacobs lived this chapter of conflict, she also lived her life with the delight of joyful discovery of new ideas and new ways of thinking about human behaviour in cities and neighbourhoods. In Toronto, to where she moved in 1968 and lived until her death in 2006, she went on to write about a whole new order of ideas about economies of cities, environment and governance. Overall, she prided herself as a non-fiction writer, not the often-attributed “urban guru.”
In the closing scenes of the documentary, her writing shines through as narration to a visual essay of her wonder at the complex order of people living in the city.
“Living in the city is an art form,” she says, ”creating a complex form of order all composed of movement and change … likened to a dance … All miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole.”
There are many chapters of Jacobs’ story not told here. Jane Jacobs became a Canadian. Citizen Jane was a citizen of Canada.
Filmgoers are encouraged to stay for a short panel discussion and Q&A with Don Alexander, Scott Ritchie of the City of St. Catharines urban planning department, and Michael Ripmeester from the Brock geography department after the film showing tonight at 7.