PLAN 704 - Planning Theory: Film & Video

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Days before the 1906 earthquake (video clip)

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This program thoroughly maps out the transformation of Paris during the 19th century from a stifling, congested city of narrow and winding streets to an aesthetically pleasing model of Industrial Age modernity (streaming film, 58 minutes).

This film covers the many forms suburbia has taken, like the first planned suburban development in Llewellyn Park, N.J.; detached dwellings in sylvan surroundings, with restrictive land use and minimum cost regulations (Olmstead and Vauz' Riverside); the company town, whose prototype is Pullman, IL.; a suburb like Forest Hills successfully inserted into the very heart of New York; and Levittown, PA, which addressed the problem of affordable individual housing for large masses and their automobiles (streaming film, 58 minutes).

Episode 7 from the landmark PBS documentary film series on New York City devotes a whole hour to the battle between Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs (streaming film, 141 minutes).

Part 1 (Mud Hole to Metropolis) from the American Experience series on PBS covers the explosive growth of one of the world's most vibrant cities (streaming film, 87 minutes).

An ongoing PBS series about the pioneers and innovators in the field of sustainable architecture. Each episode examines the built environment's effects — both ecological, and social — and the design innovations that can reduce buildings' contribution to climate change.
Episodes: 1-The Green Apple (NYC) | 2-Green for All | 3-The Green Machine (Chicago) | 4-Gray to Green (Boston's Big Dig) | 5-China: From Red to Green | 6-Deeper Shades of Green (streaming films, 27 minutes each).

The film uses the bitter struggle over equal housing rights in Yonkers, New York during the 1980s to show the 'massive resistance' the Civil Rights movement confronted when it moved North. Films on Video (available for viewing at the MDC.)

Through the voices of committed residents, activists and city officials, this award-winning documentary shows how a Boston community organized the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative and was able to create and carry out its own agenda for change. DVD | VHS.
Films on Video (available for viewing at the MDC.)

Michael Moore's first film documenting his efforts to meet General Motors chairman Roger Smith and to get Smith to visit Flint, Michigan to confront the effects of deindustrialization on Moore's hometown.

Examines the results of gentrification in Columbus, Ohio, when African American inner-city residents are met with an influx of white gay home buyers (and it even includes a zoning meeting!).

"China Blue, which was made without permission from the Chinese authorities, offers an alarming report on the economic pressures applied by Western companies and the resulting human consequences, as the real profits are made–and kept–in first-world countries. The unexpected ending makes the connection between the exploited workers and U.S. consumers even clearer." (from the PBS webpage. for the film)

Documentary which examines the emergence of the country's automobile culture and its antecedents by looking at the dynamics of how rail lines were made to appear as burdensome and obsolete.

Q2P is a film about toilets and the city-- about gender, class, caste and most of all about space, urban development and the twisted myth of the global metropolis.

This documentary captures how a community was betrayed by greed, political hypocrisy, and good intentions gone astray. Don Normark's haunting photographs evoke a lost Mexican-American village in the heart of downtown LA, razed in the 1950's to build an enormous low-income housing project. Instead, the federally purchased land was used for Dodger Stadium.

Using empty beer cans, old tires, plastic bottles and other garbage, iconoclastic architect Michael Reynolds, based in New Mexico, has been building ecologically sustainable structures for 35 years. Calling his structures "earthships," Reynolds has had conflicts with government officials over inflexible zoning and housing laws, but his architectural ideas were put to use in the Andaman Islands following the 2005 tsunami.

"The fourteen–acre community garden at 41st and Alameda in South Central Los Angeles is the largest of its kind in the United States. Started as a form of healing after the devastating L.A. riots in 1992, the South Central Farmers have since created a miracle in one of the country's most blighted neighborhoods. Growing their own food. Feeding their families. Creating a community. But now, bulldozers are poised to level their 14–acre oasis."