Citizen Jane: Battle for the City

Citizen Jane: Battle for the City means a lot to us at Jane's Walk Ottawa-Gatineau. Jane's Walk partnered with the Bytowne Cinema on a presentation of the film when it premiered in Ottawa in April, 2017, and we showed it again in 2018 as a Jane's Walk film night at Saint Paul's University. I was very excited to find it was available to stream online. If you can't get out to Jane's Walk, this might be the next best thing. Get out the popcorn, put up your feet, and learn more about Jane Jacobs and what she was fighting for.

When urban renewal became synonymous with the destruction of historic neighborhoods, writer and urban planning advocate Jane Jacobs battled (and beat) some of New York's most powerful people to save communities like Greenwich Village and Little Italy. The conflict between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses (who considered himself the master builder of New York City and later New York State) is an old one, dating from the 1960's, but it continues to be relevant today. Jacobs later fought (and won) a similar fight in Toronto against the Spadina Expressway. This film is not a biography of Jacobs, but it documents how her ideas galvanized urban dwellers in NYC and how the fight over development helped shape her arguments in turn.

Watch:  At the moment (March 2025), Citizen Jane: Battle for the City is available to stream for free from Hoopla, a media library that is available to all Ottawa Public Library cardholders. Link to the title on Hoopla.

View the trailer for Citizen Jane on YouTube.

Discussion and reviews of Citizen Jane: Battle for the City

A video series on TVO called The Housing Gap by Mikael Colville-Andersen, host of The Life Size City, introduces a number of documentaries on Canada's housing crisis in a series . Episode 4 discusses Citizen Jane.

Reviews:

•    New York Times (sorry, paywall)
•    The Guardian
•    Vanity Fair

A shorter video on essentially the same topic, the PBS American Masters episode entitled Urban Fight of the Century: Jane Jacobs vs Robert Moses, is available to stream from YouTube.