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Robert Caro Says It Best — Click here for more.

Robert Caro, Pulitzer Prize winning author says it best:

“It’s very important when cities are in their shaping, when they’re becoming big,” he said, “that what they do in shaping that growth is never lose sight of the fact that what makes a city great is whether or not it’s a home to its people, whether neighborhood values are safeguarded and treasured no matter what development is done.”

Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/life/content/life/stories/books/04/03//0403caro.html

Writer to tell ‘new urbanists’ perils of sprawl

Pulitzer Prize winner, LBJ biographer will discuss how Robert Moses transformation of New York led to urban sprawl.

By Patrick Beach
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

Thursday, April 03, 2008

Here’s a new one for Robert Caro, Lyndon Johnson biographer extraordinaire:

“It’s going to be very strange to be in Austin giving a speech not on Lyndon Johnson but Robert Moses,” he said from his office in Manhattan, where he’s at work on the fourth volume of “The Years of Lyndon Johnson.”

“It’s sort of thrilling,” he said.

The occasion is the 16th Congress for New Urbanism conference, which will bring together about 1,500 or more planners, developers and others to promote the development of walkable neighborhoods and bring sprawl to a halt.

At 5:30 p.m. Friday, Caro will talk about Moses and Caro’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York,” which documents how Moses, who never held elected office, oversaw a radical (some would say ruinous) transformation of greater New York that became a template for almost every city in postwar America.

Called “surely the greatest book ever written about a city” by the late journalist and author David Halberstam, the book, first published in 1974 and now in its 39th printing, has become a sacred text of sorts for new urbanists on how not to grow a city: by favoring cars and the highways they drive on over public transit.

The construction of expressways, which Moses oversaw, bulldozed neighborhoods, displaced a half-million New Yorkers and led directly to the sprawling, car-dependent suburbia on Long Island.

“He did not have a respect for what you would call the value of community, the value of neighborhood, exemplified by the way he ran these 13 expressways right across neighborhoods,” Caro said.

“It’s very important when cities are in their shaping, when they’re becoming big,” he said, “that what they do in shaping that growth is never lose sight of the fact that what makes a city great is whether or not it’s a home to its people, whether neighborhood values are safeguarded and treasured no matter what development is done.”

Another lesson inspired by Moses — unquestionably the most polarizing builder in American history — is the peril of letting an official unaccountable to voters accumulate vast power, Caro said.

“He was never elected to anything, but he had more power in the city and the state than anyone who was elected, and he held that power for 44 years,” Caro said. “An equally important lesson is, I will show his genius, his great vision, and the dangers that can come from a guy with that much vision and a savage drive for accomplishment to let that go unchecked.”

The book was named by the Modern Library as one of the 100 greatest books of the 20th century. Caro won his second Pulitzer Prize for “Master of the Senate,” the latest volume of his Johnson biography.

The three-day conference, based out of the Austin Convention Center, will allow professionals to check out Austin’s building boom — tours include downtown, the Domain and the Mueller airport redevelopment.

For more on the event, go to http://cnu.org.
pbeach@statesman.com; 445-3603