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Reviews
New York: A Documentary Film (1999)
Metropolis VS. The Cities we Live in
Touching, well-researched and featuring great contributors. I couldn't recommend strongly enough the 6th and 7th parts, where an analysis is made of how the urbanistic principles of modernism (Le Corbusier) were fiercely implemented in NY, and from there almost worldwide. Men like Robert Moses took away from us the streets which used to be ours to live, rendering them to cars, monofunctional buildings and monofunctional "zones". The result, a couple of decades later, is that our cities are no longer organic entities where different social actors interact, for good and for worse, in each of its parts, but are socially divided and made into machines, each zone with its specific function, separated from each other by non-places designed for mobility. The saying that what matters is the journey itself took a cruel turn in this ideology: for the journey was made into an experiential nullity. Don't miss also, in the 7th part, activist Jane Jacobs, who fought back.