All great cities are combinations of Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses. Cities grow organically, and often the soul of a city is found in its emergent form, in the thousands of incremental bottom-up tweaks and in what Michael Polanyi called “tacit knowledge.”

On the other hand, it’s wrong to think cities don’t also need large-scale planning and building. Early 19thcentury Paris was a clotted, pestilential mess of organic growth that had become basically insupportable when Georges-Eugène Haussmann, prefect of the Seine under Napoleon III, undertook urban renewal on an unprecedentedly grand scale. Many were those — like Victor Hugo — who protested Haussmann. Yet within only a couple of decades Paris emerged as the City of Light, emulated by cities around the world.

Unsurprisingly, Haussmann fascinated Moses.

Many New Yorkers’ minds can’t be changed when it comes to Moses. Their minds were made up in 1974, when Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker” seemed as though it would forever stand as the definitive account of Moses. But how could it? Moses was still alive and his public career had only recently ended when Mr. Caro’s book came out.

“The Power Broker” will always be an essential New York text. And a new three-part exhibition (with accompanying book), “Robert Moses and the Modern City,” doesn’t set out to reverse Mr. Caro. But it does seek to present a balanced appraisal of Moses that only the passage of time could make possible.

Many, mostly younger, New Yorkers will find in “Robert Moses and the Modern City” much food for thought. The scope, scholarship, and curatorial vigor of this exhibition, which opened this week, are extraordinary. Credit goes to the curator, Professor Hilary Ballon of Columbia University. Ms. Ballon, who is one of the most eminent architectural historians in the world, is interested in Moses’s actual accomplishments and not in his personality or even much in his ways of getting things done. She grants that he was bullying, arrogant, and often uncaring and unfeeling toward those displaced or otherwise adversely affected by his projects. But the same could be said of many public figures of today. Where they differ from Moses is that they keep better check on their public pronouncements — and that they seldom succeed as well as Moses did. It’s one thing to be an ineffectual bully, another to be one who gets things done (often in spite of the bullying).

But before going any further, one of the principal things “Robert Moses and the Modern City” tells us is that Moses was not as omnipotent as we tend to think. Ms. Ballon says that Moses often acted as though he were omnipotent — while in the background he scrambled and schemed and shored up his plans and dreams with Scotch Tape and rubber bands. Moses’s opponents often succeeded. Several of his fondest projects went unrealized — the Mid-Manhattan and Lower Manhattan expressways, for example. Many later projects lacked aesthetic niceties because of funding constraints.

Another important thing the show makes clear is that Moses did not originate the values by which he operated. He did not invent modern suburbia or automotive culture (he never even learned how to drive). He did not invent modern housing projects or the superblock. These were built everywhere. A great deal of what Moses effected was suggested in the 1929 “Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs,” the Regional Plan Association’s blueprint for the future of New York — a plan with which Moses had nothing to do. And we also sometimes overstate his control over certain projects. He ceded control of many large developments to private interests — because the financing mechanisms constrained him to do so. And so on.

Yet when all is said and done no New Yorker, and few city builders in history, left such a physical legacy as did Moses. He built modern New York.

The exhibition takes place at three venues: “Remaking the Metropolis” takes place at the Museum of the City of New York, “The Road to Recreation” opens Sunday at the Queens Museum, and “Slum Clearance and the Superblock Solution” is on view at Columbia’s Wallach Gallery.

Each venue tells its story by use of projects’ original models (which are superb), archival photographs, excellent contemporary photographs by Andrew Moore, letters, memoranda, newspaper articles, maps, drawings, and, not least, Moses’s own beautifully designed publications, which, like his prose, are models of declarative expression.

At the Museum of the City of New York, the exhibition divides into four sections: The Accessible City, the Livable City, the Monumental City, and Defeats.

The Accessible City treats various transportation projects. The highlight is a model of the Mid-Manhattan Expressway. The model has been restored after being in storage for perhaps as long as 40 years. It alone is worth a visit to this exhibition. This section also presents material on the West Side Improvement, which yielded a vastly expanded Riverside Park, the Henry Hudson Parkway, the 79th Street Boat Basin, and the “High Line” — a Moses creation now championed by those weaned on Jacobs’s vision of the city.

The Livable City presents the Triborough Bridge in the context of what Moses called the “Hellgate Waterfront” redevelopment: The three-part bridge would connect Queens, the Bronx, and Manhattan, while Randall’s Island and Ward’s Island would be made into a great recreational park. A pedestrian bridge would connect new public housing in East Harlem to the park. Moses noted that the islands represented the last major parcel of Manhattan land that could be transformed into a major park — the “Central Park for the 20th century.” The bridge got built, of course, and ranked in its time as the most complex feat of steel construction in history, a fact made more impressive by Moses’s having done it in the midst of the Great Depression, after the city had all but given up on the venture. (It is well to note that this bridge, which provided Moses his fiefdom called the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, was not conceived by Moses.) But to underscore the troubles Moses had in fully realizing many of his visions, he never was able to get New York State to cede the land occupied by Manhattan State Hospital, which severely compromised his vision of a “Central Park for the 20th century.”

The Monumental City is in some ways the most poignant part of the show. Moses fervently believed that he saved the central city by making it function in a new world that threatened to diminish the city — and thereby to impoverish itself. “Civilization is an outgrowth of cities,” he said. “You need not live in a city, but you must be nearby or visit now and then if you expect to be recognized as a civilized man.” Moses conceived of Lincoln Center as part of a chain of urban renewal projects that would house middleclass families near the heart of the city (as in the vast Lincoln Towers) while providing a locus of the arts that would doubly serve to lure development to the West Side and provide a powerful image that would reinforce New York’s newly won status as the de facto culture capital of the world. Similarly, Moses worked tirelessly to ensure that the United Nations would be in New York. He wanted it in Queens — but in the end worked with Nelson Rockefeller to bring the United Nations to Turtle Bay.

At last we come to failures. The Lower Manhattan Expressway stands in most people’s minds for the dégringolade of Robert Moses, and so it was. Photos of Jacobs and Assemblyman Louis DeSalvio stare out at us as we read a quote from Moses about his critics “with their excited maggoty brains,” and realize that his personality, as much as the projects, undermined him by the 1960s — a decade that wasn’t made for men like Moses.

“Slum Clearance and the Superblock Solution” at the Wallach Gallery covers Moses’s use of federal funds for urban renewal projects in the 1950s. The “superblock” housing projects transformed the city even more than the expressways did.

“The Road to Recreation” is an innocuous title for the extravaganza at the Queens Museum in Moses’s own Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. Ms. Ballon and the museum’s Valerie Smith divide the vast show into sections on swimming pools, parks and playgrounds, roadways, and beaches. The special things here are a breathtaking model of Moses’s unbuilt Long Island Sound Crossing, and his relationship to landscape architect Gilmore Clarke, whose work in Westchester County Moses became aware of when he was working on Jones Beach. Together they made Orchard Beach in the Bronx, one of this city’s spectacular artifacts, and much else.

Indeed, Moses and his talented team — Clarke, engineer Othmar Ammann, and architect Aymar Embury II — transformed New York itself into the most spectacular artifact of the 20th century.

These exhibitions will help you decide for yourself whether they saved the city or hastened its fall.

MCNY until May 28 (1220 Fifth Ave. at 104th Street, 212-534-1672); QMA until May 27 (Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, 718-592-9700);

Columbia University until April 14 (Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Schermerhorn Hall, eighth floor, 212-854-7288).