The Jane Jacobs Documentary - a feature length film focusing on the life and work of celebrated author and urban activist, Jane Jacobs - is set to be released Fall 2016. Coinciding with the author’s 100th birthday, Robert Hammond, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Friends of the High Line, and Matt Tyrnauer, producer/director of Valentino: The Last Emperor, plan to have the film tour festivals near the end of this year.
Jane Jacobs, who died in 2006, was a major force for “bottom-up” urban renewal, being one of the first to suggest that cities required delicate “urban acupuncture” to remedy their ills. Her groundbreaking 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, spoke out against the top-down, authoritarian urbanism of her time. She and the legendary master-planner of New York, Robert Moses would battle for years, her activism along with others preventing the destruction of Greenwich Village, SoHo, Chinatown and Little Italy.
“This is a film about our urban past and our urban future,” said Tyrnauer. “Jacobs’s ideas about healthy, just, and vibrant cities being planned and empowered from the bottom up are very important today, when discredited top-down planning is still destroying cities and lives all around the world.”
Find more information the film’s official website here.
