The Suburban Vision of 'Radiant City'

2 April 2007 - 12:00pm

A new documentary called Radiant City paints a peculiar portrait of contemporary suburbia.

"Taking its title from Le Corbusier's 1935 manifesto on the ideal factory-inspired urban design, the semi-documentary Radiant City juggles conventional wisdom and deception in what amounts to an entertaining if peculiar cinematic exercise. Although this National Film Board-produced film is promoted as a documentary, it's really a combination of essay and drama about that favourite bugbear, suburbia.

Superficially, Radiant City, co-directed by CBC broadcaster Jim Brown, is a straightforward critique of urban sprawl. A roll call of architects, planners and academics recites variations on the reigning orthodoxy that modern suburbia is a travesty of the idea of community, as well as a soul-destroying, aesthetically stunted, impractical, inefficient and unhealthy way of living."

Source: The Globe & Mail, March 30, 2007

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Suburbia

Isn't suburbia more like the 'Broadacre City' or 'Garden City' than the "towers in the park" Radiant City?

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For the past half century we have been building communities for the wrong reasons. We built them to sell cars. This created all sorts of problems.