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Urbanism documentary and book recommendations


Alec

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Please share your recommendations for documentaries, lectures or books on urban challenges, living and design.

To start us off, I recommend episode 1 of BBC's Generation Earth (available on Netflix); it has great stats on urban dwellers and a very unique look at Brazil's response to urban favelas.

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Found a cool piece of retro future while I was on reddit. This is documentary called The City from the 1939 New York City World's Fair! It's definitely an interesting watch. I say it's a cool piece of "retro future" because we never really achieved this vision of the self sustaining, walkable, balanced, nonexpansive, suburban utopia. Instead the dream mutated into a quiet nightmare that stretched the city so thin it became almost unrecognizable. Instead of the dream of self-sustaining hamlets and towns of suburbs it became industrialized and like any machine hit the expansion button and never ceased. Yes, there were many interesting experiments which could be options on how to reform suburban culture and planning, but didn't really ever live up to the dream as portrayed in this documentary.

I personally love retro futures. It's so interesting to see where we thought we would be years in advance and how naive we were to what could transpire later on or how we could even assemble such a dream world of suburban life. Any opinions? Give the doc a watch. It's along 30mins and is a neat portal into the past while looking into a potential retro future we came close to achieving.

Hopefully this doesn't get turned into a urban vs. suburban battle. That's not what this is about. What did you think of it? Did we ever really achieve this kind of new city?

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  • 3 years later...
On ‎10‎/‎3‎/‎2015 at 12:36 PM, Alec said:
On ‎4‎/‎10‎/‎2015 at 7:24 PM, Luminare said:

Found a cool piece of retro future while I was on reddit. This is documentary called The City from the 1939 New York City World's Fair! It's definitely an interesting watch. I say it's a cool piece of "retro future" because we never really achieved this vision of the self sustaining, walkable, balanced, nonexpansive, suburban utopia. Instead the dream mutated into a quiet nightmare that stretched the city so thin it became almost unrecognizable. Instead of the dream of self-sustaining hamlets and towns of suburbs it became industrialized and like any machine hit the expansion button and never ceased. Yes, there were many interesting experiments which could be options on how to reform suburban culture and planning, but didn't really ever live up to the dream as portrayed in this documentary.

I personally love retro futures. It's so interesting to see where we thought we would be years in advance and how naive we were to what could transpire later on or how we could even assemble such a dream world of suburban life. Any opinions? Give the doc a watch. It's along 30mins and is a neat portal into the past while looking into a potential retro future we came close to achieving.

Hopefully this doesn't get turned into a urban vs. suburban battle. That's not what this is about. What did you think of it? Did we ever really achieve this kind of new city?

 

 

Lewis Mumford did this one, right?

 

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 2/12/2019 at 9:19 AM, H-Town Man said:

 

Lewis Mumford did this one, right?

 

 

Where did that quote of mine come from? haha That was from so long ago. If you mean that movie...no clue honestly.

 

I guess while I'm here I could make some recommendations as far as docs about design etc...

 

Netflix has quite a few. I absolutely love the docu-series "Abstract". Was having brunch this past weekend with my mother, and she said something like this: It felt like I finally got to see what it might be like to see what you see everyday. Basically, if you aren't exactly a creative type, its a great series to understanding the design mind/creative mind and how one with that mindset sees the world. I once told my mother I literally have an idea for a project every day as I'm walking or driving around, and watching the series helped her visualize/understand that.

 

Another Netflix one is called "Urbanized". Not sure if its still there anymore, but its also great.

 

ReasonTV on youtube has done quite a few pieces on urban issues that are interesting. Vox has done some too, but while the infographics are beautiful and there are some great info get from it its hampered by its own biases and its extreme focus on social issues. Their series Vox Borders is genuinely interesting though, even if the main guy talks a little to much and doesn't let the subject matter speak for itself.

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I've recently come across a Youtube channel called The B1M which is more of a construction showcase than documentary or urbanism focused resource.  It is really well done though and they shed some light on cool projects that I haven't even heard about from time to time.

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