Robert Moses

In Sam Gennawey’s Walt Disney and the Promise of Progress City, Robert Moses stands as the archetype of top-down master-planning — one pole of the structural tension running underneath Walt Disney’s unbuilt EPCOT. Gennawey describes him as “arguably the most powerful man in New York for 48 years,” who built a power base through a string of semi-public agencies that let him reshape the city — tunnels, bridges, parks, and parkways, “all at the expense of mass transit” — “without having to be responsible to the public or to elected officials.” He “did not hesitate to destroy existing neighborhoods in pursuit of what he considered ‘progress.’”

The book frames Moses against his foe Jane Jacobs, the writer who “changed the way we look at our existing neighborhoods.” The Moses/Jacobs feud is the recurring case study of top-down control versus bottom-up urbanism — the same “benign, paternalistic” control problem Walt’s EPCOT (no landowners, no voting residents) never resolved. Kyle flagged the rivalry directly in a note on the book: “Someone should write a book about the feud between Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs” — a frame that ties Moses into Kyle’s broader interest in City Building and New Urbanism.

Context: Robert Moses (1888–1981) was the New York “master builder” whose career as an unelected public-works czar was chronicled in Robert Caro’s Pulitzer-winning biography The Power Broker (1974); the very book Kyle wished for about the Moses–Jacobs conflict has effectively been written several times over since.

Where this appears

• Walt Disney and the Promise of Progress City — Moses is the top-down-planner pole (vs. Jane Jacobs) underlying Walt’s unresolved EPCOT control problem; Kyle notes the Moses/Jacobs feud deserves a book.