Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City

In the early 1990s, a long-simmering urban planning movement finally found its legs. For thirty years, a small group of urban advocates had grown weary of merely expounding the virtues contained in Jacobs’s book and decided to get organized. In 1993, the Congress for New Urbanism (CNU) had their first meeting. Its founders included the influential

During his decades of power, the public works decisions that determined the city’s shape were made on the basis not of democratic but of economic considerations. During most of his reign—the post-La Guardia portion of it—the city’s people had no real voice at all in determining the city’s future.