Design
A 70-Year-Old Documentary About Cities Shows We Haven't Come Very Far
The walkable, bikable suburb of the "future" looks an awful lot like the smart growth ideas of today.
If you've ever found yourself looking around the sprawled-out, suburbanized American landscape and wondering how we could have thought this was a good idea, watch the 1939 documentary The City, a half-hour film produced by the American Institute of Planners. (Big thanks to @MarcoLangzi for linking to the film on Twitter.)
It’s an excellent and persuasive piece of film-making, directed by the influential filmmakers Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke, from an outline by the famed New Deal documentarian Pare Lorentz, with commentary by Lewis Mumford and a fine, evocative score by none other than Aaron Copland. The City begins by lauding the bygone village life of a more bucolic America. This was a decent and happy place, the narrator tells us: