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New York City Planning Essay

698 Words3 Pages

The United States thus far has in planning has treated people in its’ path as a nuisance to be solved. If we look at planning from Boyer’s (1986) point of view, who highlights planning as a “search for spatial order”, planning has overlooked who its’ order is suppose to benefit. Planning has been treating the masses as a sickness that is named disorder, rather than as beneficiaries.
In 1890, Jacob Rite, published How the Other Half Live, which provided vivid descriptions of the New York City Slums and its’ residents with the majority being immigrants (cited in Hall, 2014). Housing was the major issue to fix, not the people. Most planners attempted to fix the tenement housing with building codes not social reform. However, during the same time, …show more content…

Robert Moses, another famous planner of the 20th century, followed Le Corbusier’s automobile centric thinking of planning. In the later portion the the 20th century large scale planning projects were pushed by the federal Government, including a large number of highway projects after WWII. Robert Moses’ vision of the Cross Bronx Expressway construction in New York City was funded by all levels of government (Cato, 1975). Moses’ Expressway construction displaced nearly 10,000 people over a 14 block portion of the Bronx’s with the direct purpose of placing automobile in the heart of the city (Burns, 1989). He consistently disregarded citizens of the areas he destroyed. Jane Jacobs was the core citizen and organizer of Moses' highway resistance. Jacobs published a book called, The Life and Death of American Cities” in 1961, which criticized planning for ignoring the the people while its’ predominantly male planners focused on planning for the modern inventions of spatial order, like the automobile (Avila, 2014). As a working mother and resident of this area Moses ripped through, she organized and fought highways destroying New York City. Moses saw these voices of dissent as something to be ignore and not worth his time (Cato, 1975). This effectively proves he was not looking to help the residents of New York City, just

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