Urbanized

2011 has started with an emphasis on documentaries and Friday afternoon brought another terrific one to the table.

"Urbanized", directed by Greg Hustwit, is a survey of current thinking on urban planning and design around the globe. Given that it is estimated that 75% of the world's population will reside in urban environments by 2050, it's a very timely film on an important subject.

The examples provided span every continent except for Australia and Antarctica, highlighting cities ranging in size from 200,000 up to 36 million (the latter is Mumbai, whose slums have a population the size of New York City).

For the most part, it was a terrific film, offering some examples of some of the forward thinking at play in cities like New York, Capetown and Bogota (the mayor of Bogota talked at length about their approach to public transit and cycling infrastructure to which the audience responded enthusiastically). The tone was mostly positive, although they did touch on some of the "mistakes" of urban planning (for example, the stunning architecture of Brasilia was contrasted with its terrible transportation infrastructure). One of the striking visuals was an elevated train ride through downtown Detroit. Detroit's population has plummeted over the past few years and it is some time in the sequence before you see a single person on foot -- it's a modern ghost town.

The only flat point of the film involved a transportation project called Stuttgart 21 that involved pitched confrontations between the city government, developers and citizens over a transit project. It was the one time when it felt like there wasn't enough context to the story to understand the visuals.

In the Q&A that followed the film, the director was well aware of the controversies on urban issues at play in Toronto. Both his responses as well as the examples provided in the film demonstrated the degree to which our mayor is completely out of touch on current thinking.

Highly recommended.
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