The Suburban Vision of 'Radiant City'

"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."