Robert Moses

Moses built motorways, bridges, parks and housing on a scale with no equivalent, without ever winning an election. His power came from accumulating posts in autonomous authorities with their own budgets, beyond the mayor's control and public scrutiny.

His works cut through entire neighbourhoods, displaced hundreds of thousands of people and tied New York to the car for generations. His clash with Jane Jacobs over the Lower Manhattan Expressway is the founding episode of modern urbanism: she won, and with her a different way of deciding.

Born in 1888 and dead in 1981, Moses accumulated between the 1920s and the 1960s up to twelve simultaneous offices, none elected, from New York parks commissioner to chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, whose tolls gave him a budget of his own beyond the mayor's control. With that power he built Jones Beach, hundreds of playgrounds, thirteen bridges, hundreds of miles of expressways, Lincoln Center and the 1964 World's Fair, and demolished whole neighbourhoods, such as those on the path of the Cross Bronx Expressway, displacing hundreds of thousands of people, almost always poor and Black.

His fall began in the 1960s, when the residents of Greenwich Village, led by Jane Jacobs, stopped the Lower Manhattan Expressway, and it was fixed by The Power Broker (1974), Robert Caro's Pulitzer-winning biography that made him the symbol of car-centred planning and unchecked power. Later historians, such as Hilary Ballon and Kenneth Jackson in 2007, have qualified the portrait by recalling the pools, parks and public housing he left; the debate over his legacy is the debate over what a city may do without asking its residents.