Lecture: Urbanized

Urbanized (2011)

In our lecture, we were shown Urbanized, a 2011 documentary film by Gary Hustwit. The focus of the film was to "change people's ideas about something", and to show the use of architecture and the different shift of changes cities are influenced by depending on the city.

The film starts out with a voice over, saying that 'everything we see has been designed and planned'. We're shown several unique locations; Copenhagen, New York, Chile, Brazil, Detroit, Brighton, Cape Town, Stuttgart and New Orleans. The idea of the documentary was to show how architecture has influenced each individual place: New Orleans was severely affected by Hurricane Katrina, so a lot of the land that was being built upon had no set plans, as this was originally not meant to be un-occupied land. It "allowed architectures to have a lot of fun" with the plans, because there was no requirement to be met.

 

http://www.iwishthiswas.com

New Orleans was a good example of architectures and designers communicating with the community to gather their opinions on what they wanted their city to be like, such as the I Wish This Was project. The idea behind was to place stickers in derelict buildings or ones that the community did not appreciate, placing a sharpie marker so they could write their opinions on what they wanted the building to become in the future. This is effective because of the anonymity; they would be able to write their real opinion on the building and what they wanted it to become, and because it involved the people of the surrounding area.

This is an example of many places and the people in it who have been affected by architecture in the city. The documentary shows many examples of different concepts that cities have approached the community with or simply built around the way their city moves. This is shown in Copenhagen, Denmark; the huge cycling aspect of the city meant that they wanted to encourage this even more, due to its health benefits and influence on the enviroment.

 

Copenhagen, Denmark

The solution Copenhagen provided was to evenly space out bike lanes to each other lanes. This would then mean they would be: side walks, for slower pedestrians, bikes, parked cars and then the actual car lane, filtering out the more speedy cars so thus would reduce crashes. Overall, 37% of Copenhagen arrive on bicycles - the designers have made this fairer to the people who use them instead of forcing cars and cyclists to share one lane.

Overall, we were shown many examples of creative solutions to problems in the documentary, as well as the darker side to architecture/building (such as protests in Stuttgart over the removal of a train station, which was described as "really like civil war") and it's influence on the government. Stuttgart was a prime example of this, as the influence over the government trying to remove the train station voted them out of office, giving Stuttgart an entirely Gren Party president.

The film showned the power of design in all it's forms, especially in terms of visual communication, and touched a lot on how design can be shown entirely in different ways based on the POV - some people agreed, some disagreed, which made a much more interesting documentary to watch. It allowed us to view how design big or small can make such an influence on a city and shapes the world even today.