City 21: Multiple Perspectives on Urban Futures

From the producers of the ward winning documentary,  Ecological Design: Inventing the Future, comes the update on cities today: City 21. The film explores the effects of over-population, unrelenting urban sprawl, and bureaucratically driven generic design programs, all of which threaten the promising conceptual breakthroughs of just a few decades ago.

We have fallen into responding to these pressures with a debilitating resignation. Jaded phrases like: "you can't fight City Hall" make it imperative that alternative and eminently achievable visions for the future be known to as many people as possible. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, otherwise: We will get the Cities we deserve. City 21 is constructed for deep educational and explorative purposes and is presented in themes designed to  open the urban imagination. Themes include:

The Sacred Origins of the City:  Arnold Toynbee on the origin of Civilization/City Plans through time.
Magical Architecture: The intentional Eco-Community of Damanhur, in Northern Italy.
Utopian Imagination: Poetry and Architecture/The Open City Project in Ritoque, Chile.
Regenerative Design: Nature and Architecture, the transformation of The Biosphere2 Project into  Eco-Village design with Architect Phil Hawes.
Energy Independence: The White Gold of the North/Renewable Energy in Iceland.
The City as Memory Theater: Mythic design wisdom transmitted through the generations with David Mayernik.
The Creative Green City: The Lighthouse Project in Glasgow.
Creating Eco-Villages: The Findhorn Experiment in Scotland
Cities and Time: The Long Now perspective with Stewart Brand.

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