Cover of Radiant City
Movie night at the Building Sustainable Communities Conference kicked off with the film “Radiant City”, a comical documentary about the suburbs – using Calgary as a great example of the sprawling subdivisions landlocked by freeways, fences and sound attenuation barriers.
A surprise for me in this movie was the use of James Howard Kunstler as an expert. Kunstler is one of my favourite authors and speakers on the suburbs and he presents a compelling argument against the continued degradation of the built environment by bad architecture and bad planning.
Check out the movie for yourself to see just what the sprawl in Calgary looks like and to get a fresh perspective on what this is doing to our lives.
If you enjoyed this post, why not try these ones:
- Transition Movie Preview
- Density and Sustainable Design
- Cowtown – The Sprawling City
- Urban Edmonton – A Reflection
- Canada’s Sub-Prime Situation and Peak Oil
Mike Thomas
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I feel this “documentary” would have been better without actors, personally.
Realizing that they were actors and not real people, made me enjoy this movie less.
It would have been more powerful a message to have gotten a real family’s reactions and thoughts on current suburbia.
In the end, all i could think of is “hollywood”, rather than “wow, real people in suburbia. So that’s what they’re thinking”.