Legendary director Francis Ford Coppola’s likely final major film, Megalopolis, celebrates design and urban planning. It is a dazzling mishmash of architectural, cinematic, and literary history.

“Without Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis, this film probably would not exist at all. From the Christopher Nolan Batman series, we get heroic shots of architect Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), the protagonist, peering down at New York City—which has the unsubtle allegorical name of New Rome, and where Catilina is head of the Design Authority—from on high. There’s a bit of Tim Burton’s wacky darkness, too. At the same time, the film’s campiness occasionally veers into John Waters territory.”
It was nearly four decades in the making—in other words, about as much time as a major urban infill development in California. Although the end product is not worthy of such sustained effort, Megalopolis is one of those rare films that explicitly celebrates architecture and urbanism, and it deserves to be memorialized, if only for that reason.
“Essentially, Catilina proposes for New Rome an updated version of mid-20th century urban renewal—although it’s not clear whether Coppola actually supports slum clearance or is simply daydreaming. Not coincidentally, he would have lived through the era of the great bulldozings and surely remembers it well. At best, Catilina’s plan is a metaphor for human creativity and unattainable benevolence. His other quirk is that he can stop time, which is a metaphor for the fact that humans cannot, in fact, stop time.”
FULL STORY: The Brilliant, Unhinged Spectacle of Megalopolis

Rethinking Redlining
For decades we have blamed 100-year-old maps for the patterns of spatial racial inequity that persist in American cities today. An esteemed researcher says: we’ve got it all wrong.

Planetizen Federal Action Tracker
A weekly monitor of how Trump’s orders and actions are impacting planners and planning in America.

California High-Speed Rail's Plan to Right Itself
The railroad's new CEO thinks he can get the project back on track. The stars will need to align this summer.

Opinion: Make Buses More Like Sidewalks
Sidewalks are an intuitive, low-cost, and easily accessible mobility tool. Can local buses function in the same way?

How Cities Can Support Climate Adaptation
In the face of federal cuts to climate resilience funding, a panel at ULI’s Resilience Summit offered suggestions for maintaining managed retreat and other climate adaptation programs.

Transportation Research Centers Lose Key Federal Funding
The federal University Transportation Center program funds critical transportation research and innovation at 35 consortia of colleges and universities.
Urban Design for Planners 1: Software Tools
This six-course series explores essential urban design concepts using open source software and equips planners with the tools they need to participate fully in the urban design process.
Planning for Universal Design
Learn the tools for implementing Universal Design in planning regulations.
City of Clovis
City of Moorpark
City of Camden Redevelopment Agency
City of Astoria
Transportation Research & Education Center (TREC) at Portland State University
Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada
Toledo-Lucas County Plan Commissions