of the most extraordinary examples of resistance in modern American history. Jane Jacobs had no

graduate degrees. I don't recall she had much of an undergraduate degree. She was a very smart

person writing for architectural forum as a journalist and realized that Robert Moses,

the city planner that almost ran New York for 30, 40 years starting in the New Deal,

was about to put an expressway through the middle of her neighborhood, which happened to be Greenwich Village in the 50s.

And Jane Jacobs went around and organized the neighborhood, and to this guy's consternation kept holding these meetings.

She got Mayor John Lindsay eventually involved, a bunch of other sort of notable people.

And Moses was reduced to going around sputtering that this giant project that he had planned out

so carefully was now being bollocks up, as he put it by a bunch of mothers.

What a line.

She had no credentials other than the fact she happened to be a housewife and a mom.

But she threw a giant spanner in the works of Robert Moses' plans for the Tribe

Bureau Expressway.

And if you enjoy Greenwich Village today and the neighborhood around NYU, it is because

this housewife, Jane Jacobs, very brilliantly organized a lot of people, got them out there,

pushback, completely aside from the fact that she also wrote a book about it called the Death

and Life of Great American Cities, which is a kind of Bible now of urban planning worldwide, really.