Abstract
Robert Moses, the consummate modern planner, built an intricate network of bridges, parkways, and tunnels that expertly bound together the five boroughs that compose New York City. At first glance, it is difficult to question Moses’s democratic bona fides. He built scores of playgrounds, parks, and parkways in the City and on Long Island—providing hardworking city dwellers with the recreational opportunities and mobility they craved; however, not only did Moses co-opt ostensibly democratic institutions, he was also responsible for evicting hundreds of thousands of residents and destroying the integrity of dozens of neighborhoods and ecologically sensitive sites. This chapter highlights Robert Moses’s democratic inconsistency and, by extension, explicates the democratic ambivalence of the modernist design philosophy he embodies.
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Notes
- 1.
Statutorily, New York had limited the power of authorities by “setting a time limit on their bonds, a date by which each authority must redeem all its bonds, surrender control of all its facilities and go out of existence,” but Moses , the master drafter of legislation, inserted new language into amendments to the Triborough Act, altering and therefore removing this bulwark (Caro 1975, 625).
- 2.
A helpful contrast here might be Daniel Burnham, who, like Moses , was a great urban visionary and who profoundly altered the built environment one of America’s greatest cities; in Burnham’s case, the city was Chicago. Much of Burnham’s 1909 Plan for Chicago, however, was never built, largely because he needed the approval of the Chicago City Council and because he relied on the financial backing of Chicago’s patrician class for the plan’s development and marketing. Thus, there were many hands and minds between Burnham’s vision and its implementation, people who could modify or veto parts of his plan (Smith 2007, 131). Not so Moses . His strategy, as we have seen, was to sharply minimize the number of hands and minds that could thwart his designs, and the public authority was one of his main tools.
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Roulier, S.M. (2018). Democratic Ambivalence: Robert Moses and Modernist Urban Planning. In: Shaping American Democracy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68810-7_6
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