Movies: Urbanism

Author and activist Jane Jacobs talks about the problems and virtues of North American cities....

Takumi and his daughter Hana live in Mizubiki Village, close to Tokyo. One day, the village inhabitants become aware of a plan to build a camping site near Takumi's house offering city residents a comfortable "escape" to nature....

This short documentary examines the complex range of issues affecting urban transport in developing countries. After examining cost and available technology, as well as the different needs of the industrialized middle class and the urban poor, the fi...

Nanni Moretti recalls in his diary three slice of life stories characterized by a sharply ironic look: in the first one he wanders through a deserted Rome, in the second he visits a reclusive friend on an island, and in the last he has to grapple wit...

Writer and urban activist Jane Jacobs fights to save historic New York City during the ruthless redevelopment era of urban planner Robert Moses in the 1960s....

The human side of town planning, as exemplified in Baltimore, Maryland. The Coldspring Project concerned a proposed housing development for lower and upper income levels on a three hundred-acre site adjoining a wildlife sanctuary. The film records th...

This documentary presents a before-and-after picture of people in a large-scale public housing project in Toronto. Due to a housing shortage, they were forced to live in squalid, dingy flats and ramshackle dwellings on a crowded street in Regent Park...

A young architect embarks on an ambitious real state development project in Brasília, convinced that he could actually help transform people’s lives and build a new form of society. But his utopia begins to fall apart when his dreams get in the way o...

Legault is an aging man who lived in a rural cabin, now a suburban cabin, as developments have popped up around him....

"Ellas en la ciudad" (Them in the City) focuses on the first settlers of the neighborhoods on the outskirts of Seville. Through their stories, we discover that they have been the backbone of a city that has turned its back on them....

A silent journey through the mysterious, dark heart of the city center....

A solitary man struggles to cultivate beauty in a desolate urban world. Lonely and dislocated, he drifts in and out of a dream state envisioning the promise of regeneration. ROSEWATER tells a story of hope sustained through perseverance, ritual and, ...

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In this documentary, Marie-Claire Rubinstein reveals to us, through the testimonies of the inhabitants who live there, the architectural achievements of the French urban planner Fernand Pouillon in Algiers. In particular the vast complexes of hundred...

A young woman wakes up on a train going to an unknown destination. She has no recollection of how she got there or where she is. She finds herself in a vast city; a forest of steel and iron and concrete, wandering the dark streets....

World in a City is a portrait of Toronto and the steps Torontonians are taking to create a society that welcomes and encourages new immigrants to flourish...

"This film is one of the first French Unit productions of the “Société Nouvelle/Challenge for Change” program. When an old area of Montréal is to be demolished to make way for a new low-income housing development, is there anything the residents can ...

Canada is facing a housing crisis, and cooperative housing might be a part of the solution....

Architect Stanley King involves the local Vancouver community in urban design....

Shows a campaign launched in Halifax in 1967 to probe the core of poverty in that city--low incomes, ill health and inadequate housing affect more than twelve thousand people in the central area. The project combines the efforts of local agencies wit...