Movies: Urban development

The living Volkswagen Beetle helps an old lady protect her home from a corrupt developer....

Two penniless orphans, Black and White, struggle to survive on the mean streets of Treasure Town. When a megacorporation threatens to tear down the town to build an amusement park, Black and White engage in the fight of their life....

An intimate portrait of Christopher Alexander, a critic of modern architecture on a lifelong quest to build harmonious, livable places in today’s world. The film tells the story of two projects – a spectacular high school in Japan and an innovative ...

Undine is a historian and tour guide at the Berlin City Museum specializing in urban development, while Christoph is an industrial diver. Linked by a love of the water, the two form an intense bond, which can only do so much to help Undine overcome t...

Underground people who exhale toxic gas appear in Tokyo's S-Ward, which is dealing with construction noise from urban development projects. Everyone panic, but it turns out that five middle-aged guys are unaffected by the poisonous gas. They undergo ...

While looking for a new home for his family, a Haitian demolition worker is faced with the realities of redevelopment as he is tasked with dismantling his rapidly gentrifying Miami neighborhood....

"At the beginning of the 19th century there is no Chicago. There was a fort that was set on fire by Indians shortly thereafter. Later, the turbulent expansion of a settlement began, which became a center for the immigrant workforce, traditional indus...

Su Friedrich's personal essay charting the destruction of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. After living in the neighborhood for 20 years, the filmmaker was one of many who were forced out after the city passed a rezoning plan allowing developers to build luxu...

Since the end of World War II, one of kind of urban residential development has dominate how cities in North America have grown, the suburbs. In these artificial neighborhoods, there is a sense of careless sprawl in an car dominated culture that inef...

A couple moves from the country to istanbul to get proper schooling for their son, who has Down syndrome. However, the house they move to will be demolished in a number of months, the father can't get a job and has to resort to begging. Meanwhile, th...

Prague faces the challenge of a new zoning plan. The city's development leads to conflicts between the private developer lobby, city residents, and elected officials. By following several years of town council meetings, the film paints an image of a ...

Since World War II North Americans have invested much of their newfound wealth in suburbia. It has promised a sense of space, affordability, family life and upward mobility. As the population of suburban sprawl has exploded in the past 50 years Subur...

A sophisticated and beautifully constructed account of landscape change in and around Paris in the early 1960s. The film raises complex issues about the meaning and experience of modern landscapes and the enigmatic characteristics of features such as...

As development encroaches on a farming community, they struggle with the loss of their heritage and land....

A prescient portrait of late-1970s Washington, D.C., that chronicles the city's creeping gentrification, the systematic expulsion of poor Black residents, and the community response in the form of the Seaton Street Project, in which tenants banded to...

Yirrkala is an Aboriginal township on the Gove Peninsula in Northeast Arnhem Land. It was established as a Methodist mission in 1935 and over the years Yolngu from many different clans moved there. Conversations With Dundiwuy Wanambi is a personal f...

This witty and original film is about the open spaces of cities and why some of them work for people while others don't. Beginning at New York's Seagram Plaza, one of the most used open areas in the city, the film proceeds to analyze why this space i...

Recent graduate, Arthur Macdonald, narrowly avoids a collision with a truck when he takes a short-cut to work. In his job as traffic safety engineer he proposes to erect a median barrier to prevent collisions. His proposal meets with derision from h...

Greek internal migrants in Athens, after the Greek Civil War colonize the tops of the Tourkovounia hills....

Terry Wilson is a 70-year-old lifelong resident of Meadowvale Village, Ontario's first heritage district. As development looms and begins to destroy Terry's favourite place in the world, he recreates pieces of history in his backyard, crafting an oas...