City Limits

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

The Bigger Bubble

After starting a painting business right before the housing crash, a filmmaker drives over 35,000 miles to track down the people who saw it coming and look ahead to the consequences of a decade of secret bank bailouts and 0% interest.

The Bubble

Diving deep into the true causes of the Great Recession, the financial crisis of the 2010s, renowned economists, investors and business leaders explain what America is facing if we don't learn from our past mistakes. Is the economy really improving or are we just blowing up another Bubble?

Ellas en la ciudad

"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.

The Block

In central Oslo, Egil (78) and his neighbors in an apartment block are threatened with losing their rented flats to a billionaire raiding such old apartment blocks around Oslo, just as he has done all over Northern Europe. We face the harsh reality of living on the wrong side of the shiny welfare state in one of the world’s wealthiest countries. The film portrays what happens when a group of people constantly live in fear of being thrown out of their homes in an affluent society.

Amancio Williams

A biography documentary of the Argentine modernist architect Amancio Williams.

Dandara: Enquanto Morar for um Privilégio, Ocupar é um Direito

Everything Will Be

Sundance award-winning director Julia Kwan’s documentary Everything Will Be captures the subtle nuances of a culturally diverse neighbourhood—Vancouver’s once thriving Chinatown—in the midst of transformation. The community’s oldest and newest members offer their intimate perspectives on the shifting landscape as they reflect on change, memory and legacy. Night and day, a neon sign that reads "EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT" looms over Chinatown. Everything is going to be alright, indeed, but the big question is for whom?

Encounter on Urban Environment

This feature documentary takes a look at how the Halifax/Dartmouth community in Nova Scotia was stimulated by a week-long session held by a panel of specialists from different fields who met with members of this urban community to consider the future of the area and the responsibility of the citizens and government in planning the future.

The Coldspring Project

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 the differences aired in meetings of various interest groups that tried to modify the plan according to their views, and the compromise reached, based on plans drawn up by Montréal architect Moshe Safdie.

Farewell Oak Street

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 North; now they have access to new, modern housing developments designed to offer them privacy, light and space.

Some People Have to Suffer

Bridgeview, British Columbia is less than 30 kilometres from downtown Vancouver. The residents were promised a sewer system in 1953, but more than 20 years later the sewer system has yet to be built.

Halifax Neighbourhood Center Project

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 with those of government agencies to alleviate these conditions.

Legault's Place

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

Fernand Pouillon, Une architecture habitée

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 hundreds of social housing units, including the most famous Diar E Saâd (1953), Diar El Mahçoul (1954) and Climat de France (1957). The historical context, during the war of independence is related by the historian Benjamin Stora and Nadir Boumaza. This documentary also evokes the personality of Fernand Pouillon in a post-colonial context.

New Towns for Old

Sheffield stands in as 'Smokedale', an industrial Everytown, in this stirring call for "new schools, new hospitals, new roads, new life", after WWII.

Mobility

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 film proposes some surprising solutions.

Operation: Jane Walk

The war zone of a dystopian multiplayer shooting game is used to embark some urban explorers on a winter walk, avoiding the combats whenever possible, as peaceful observers, inhabitants of a digital world, which is a detailed replica of Midtown Manhattan.

Little Burgundy

"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 do to protect their own interests? The film documents such a situation in the Little Burgundy district of Montréal and shows how the residents organized themselves into a committee that successfully influenced the city’s housing policy." - Anthology Film Archives

Jaime Lerner - Uma História de Sonhos