In the 1970s, New York City hit rock bottom.
She splits her time between New York City and New Orleans..
She previously served on the NYC Landmark\'s Preservation Commission and currently sits on the Sustainability Advisory Board for NYC.
Her writing has also appeared in the Nation , the New York Times Magazine , and the Wall Street Journal .
About author(s): Roberta Brandes Gratz is an acclaimed urbanist who has published three previous books on the subject, including most recently The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs .
Gratz who was named as one of Planetizen\'s Top 100 Urban Thinkers gives an on-the-ground account of urban renewal and community success.
As American cities face a devastating economic crisis, Jacobs\'s philosophy is again vital for the redevelopment of metropolitan life.
His decline in the late 1960s and the drying up of big government funding for urban renewal projects allowed New York to organically regenerate according to the precepts defined by Jane Jacobs in her classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities , and in contradiction to Moses\'s urban philosophy.
New York City, Gratz argues, recovered precisely because of the waning power of Moses.
Urban critic and journalist Roberta Brandes Gratz contradicts this conventional view. and demolition-heavy ways.
Many people credit New York\'s master builder Robert Moses with turning Gotham around, despite his brutal, undemocratic.
Crime was at its highest, the middle class exodus was in high gear, and bankruptcy loomed.
In the 1970s, New York City hit rock bottom
