Robert Moses

The Niagara Falls speak to us with great clarity about the evolution of the relationship between man and nature in Western culture. Here a shift can be recognized both in aesthetic and physical terms – from feelings of repulsion and anxiety to ones of enchantment and delight, from the fear of the overwhelming power of the falling waters to the illusion of man’s total control of them. Paradoxically, the Niagara region, a key node of the Great Lakes ecological and economic system, is a region that did not lack planning: the construction of the western end of the Erie Canal, the system of parks designed by Olmsted and Vaux in both Niagara Falls and Buffalo, and the large infrastructures Robert Moses and his Power Authority built in Niagara County, not to mention all of the utopian urban projects that were developed for Grand Island and Niagara Falls. Yet today Niagara is one of the poorest and most socially devastated counties in the state of New York. Its once booming industry has nearly completely evaporated, hiding a territory riddled with toxic landfills and decrepit neighbourhoods behind the touristy curtain of the falls. So what went wrong? How did the grandeur of the past get lost?

Bob Moses was a civil rights pioneer who made a difference in the state of Mississippi, and his indelible impact was felt by a whole generation of voters, which included Anne Moody, author of Coming of Age in Mississippi. Moses died on Sunday, July 25, at his home in Hollywood, Fla. He was 86. This blog post reviews some of Moody’s comments about him in her classic memoir.

"This film is part of a curatorial project carried out by Francesco Garutti while in residence as Emerging Curator 2013-2014 at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. The film explores the controversial story of the planning and politics of a series of overpasses on Long Island, commissioned in the 1920s and 1930s by the influential American public administrator Robert Moses. The story suggests that the bridges had been designed expressly to prevent the passage of buses, thereby only allowing people who could afford to own a car to access Long Island's leisure spaces. The questions that the story raises are timlier now than ever before. They engage with issues of secrecy and control, the morals of power and the effects of technology: What is the relationship between politics and artefacts? How and to what degree can a project's intentions be deliberately concealed? What are the deviously designed effects and the unplanned political consequences of the agency of the artefacts that surround us? The film explores these questions through interviews with four scholars who in the 1980s and 1990s debated possible interpretations of the case. The film alludes rather than explains, interweaving reportage with the abstraction of theories. It mixes the deafening sound of automobiles with the singing of the birds that live along the parkways of Long Island, which are now almost one hundred years old."

http://www.cca.qc.ca/en/search/details/library/publication/233297Misleading Innocence
http://www.domusweb.it/en/news/2015/07/02/misleading_innocence_francesco_garutti_cca.html
http://www.cca.qc.ca/en/issues/3/technology-sometimes-falls-short/2236
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_g2WWeR7b8

In the 1950s, the Committee on Slum Clearance of the City of New York, headed by Robert Moses, published twenty-six site-specific slum clearance brochures. A major portion of each one of these brochures attempted to demonstrate the blighted conditions that prevailed in the area to be redeveloped. These sections included maps, statistics, descriptions, and photographs. Moses wanted to keep the texts in the brochures short and allow the photographs and the illustrations to demonstrate the shortcomings of the areas designated as slums. This article analyzes the photographs that appeared in the “Demonstration of Slum Conditions” (later renamed to “Demonstration of Blight”) section of the brochures and raises a number of questions concerning the process and the paradigm under which Moses’s slum clearance organization was operating. Both the process and the paradigm of slum clearance in New York City involved elected officials, planning commissioners, and even the judiciary.

Overview of the cross-currents of American art from the Ashcan School to the advent of abstract expressionism, with a focus on the 1930's as a fulcrum of socio-political change. Subsequently published in The 1930's/ the Reality and the Promise, ed. Bennington, DaSilva, D'Innocenzo, and Pugliese (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), pp. 217-226. See published papers section.

As batalhas travadas entre Jane Jacobs e Robert Moses na Nova York dos anos 1950-1960 representam o conflito urbano típico da modernidade, cuja origem é traçada até as reformas do Barão de Haussmann na Paris de meados do século XIX. A luta entre cidadãos comuns e aqueles que controlam o dinheiro por quem decide o futuro da cidade se acentua nas sociedades democráticas, como manifestado pela experiência brasileira no decorrer do século XX, que culmina no capítulo da Política Urbana da Constituição de 1988 e no Estatuto das Cidades de 2001. Mesmo em um tempo em que as relações humanas remotas ganham cada vez mais importância, o palco da luta pela cidade permanece sendo a vizinhança.

In 1974, Robert Caro published The Power Broker, a critical biography of Robert Moses’s dictatorial tenure as the "master builder" of mid-century New York. Moses profoundly transformed the urban fabric and transportation system of New York, producing the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, the Westside Highway, the Cross-Bronx Expressway, the Lincoln Center, the UN headquarters, Shea Stadium, Jones Beach State Park and many other projects. However, The Power Broker did lasting damage to his public image and today he remains one of the most polarizing figures in city planning history. On August 26, 1974, Moses issued a turgid 23-page statement denouncing Caro’s work as "full of mistakes, unsupported charges, nasty baseless personalities, and random haymakers." His statement disputed several of Caro’s assertions one at a time. Moses's original typewritten statement survives today as a grainy photocopy in the New York City Parks Department archive. To better preserve and disseminate it, I have extracted and transcribed its text using optical character recognition, and edited the result to correct transcription errors.

La última dictadura militar argentina (1976-1983) llevó adelante un ambicioso plan de construcción de autopistas urbanas en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. Su autor fue Guillermo Laura, quien en 1970 editó “La ciudad arterial”, donde expone sus ideas y cómo llevarlas adelante. Esas ideas encuentran sus influencias en la corriente urbanista moderna de Le Corbusier y la Carta de Atenas; y el modo de gestión sobre el territorio puede dialogar con la metodología del urbanista norteamericano Robert Moses y sus planes de autopistas para Nueva York.

This essay (mis-titled due a publisher error "The City in the Literary Imagination") discusses the cultural, ideological, and political forces that drove the transformation of urban geography in the U.S. after World War II and discusses the way the apocalyptic visions that inspired urban renewal appeared in literary and cinematic texts of the 1940s.