This year is the 50th anniversary of Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker,” one of the most famous and influential nonfiction books of all time. The anniversary comes at an interesting time for Caro’s subject, Robert Moses, who was the single most influential midcentury American urban planner.
I think it’s fair to say that post-1970s American urbanism was heavily influenced by Moses’s critics, including Caro and Jane Jacobs. Over the past 10-15 years, though, there’s been a rising tide of criticism of the post-1970s urbanist paradigm, which has naturally raised the question, “Was Moses right after all?”
The Moses revisionist literature has succeeded in poking significant holes in Caro’s account. The claim that Moses’s decisions about parkway clearances were driven by racism seems largely false to me. It’s always a little hard to say with these things, because there’s plenty of evidence that Moses — like almost all white people of his vintage — held some racist attitudes, so we can’t entirely know how these things added up in his head. But the evidence behind the claim in the book is flimsy, and it now reads more like Caro doing oppo research on a guy he doesn’t like than serious history. And I certainly agree with Henry Grabar that politicians interested in urban issues desperately need to read another book, because a lot has changed. Redoubling support for Moses’s critics isn’t going to help anyone or solve anything.
But I also really don’t think we need a revival of Moses’s thinking or to resurrect him as a kind of proto-YIMBY avatar. What we need is a different, third thing.
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