Radiant City

by Gary Burns and Jim Brown, Directors
National Film Board of Canada and Alliance Films, Montreal, Canada, 2006
DVD, 85 mins., col.
Sales, $275.00 (DVD)
Distributor’s website: http://www.alliancefilms.com.

Reviewed by Anthony Enns
Department of English
Dalhousie University
Canada

anthony.enns@dal.ca

The films of Gary Burns, such as The Suburbanators and Waydowntown, often focus on the relationship between individuals and the built environment. The title of his latest film, which was co-written and co-directed by journalist Jim Brown, is taken from Le Corbusier’s 1933 book The Radiant City: Elements of a Doctrine of Urbanism to be Used as the Basis of Our Machine-Age Civilization. The film also begins with a famous quotation from Le Corbusier’s 1923 book Towards a New Architecture: “Modern life demands, and is waiting for, a new kind of plan, both for the house and for the city.” This opening may seem somewhat misleading, as Le Corbusier was explicitly criticizing the unhealthy conditions of the industrial city, while the film examines the rise of suburbia and the dehumanizing impact of suburban space on the lives of its inhabitants. It would also be wrong to conflate Le Corbusier’s “radiant city” model with suburbia itself, as Le Corbusier’s plan involved the densification of urban centers through high-rise housing projects. The only apparent connection between these ideas seems to be that Le Corbusier’s statement concerning early twentieth-century cities can also be applied to late twentieth-century suburbs: they are similarly unhealthy, and they require a thoughtful re-examination.

The film initially conducts this re-examination using conventional documentary techniques, as the filmmakers interview the members of the Moss family: Evan, his wife Anne, and their children, Nick and Jennifer. This family has just moved into a new housing development called “Evergreen,” which remains partially under construction. Evan and his children frequently complain about the unhealthy aspects of this environment, including their sense of isolation, the absence of any authentic community, and their detachment from the natural landscape. Evan is also an actor in a theatrical production of Suburb: The Musical, which openly ridicules suburbanites and their obsession with the perfect house, the perfect car, and the perfect lawn. These sentiments are echoed by various urban designers and theorists, such as Ken Greenberg, James Howard Kunstler, Mark Kingwell, Marc Boutin, and Bev Sandalack, who supplement the family’s observations with their own criticisms of suburban space. These theorists repeatedly emphasize the idea that older cities allow for the organic development of communities by integrating residential, commercial, and public space. In attempting to replicate the appearance of these communities, these theorists argue, postwar suburbs introduced low-density housing developments where people became increasingly alienated from and intolerant of one another. Kunstler argues, for example, that the suburban environment is “brutal, depressing, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading,” and Kingwell similarly claims that there is something cold, empty, and even “post-apocalyptic” about suburbia, which makes it an ideal setting for horror movies. These scenes are also intercut with various statistics that complement the arguments being made, such as the dramatic increase in the size of suburban homes over the course of the last fifty years and the amount of land and energy that these developments waste. Kunstler also refers to suburbia as “the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world,” and he adds that “in an era of energy scarcity, we are not going to be permitted to keep living this way.” This argument seems particularly urgent considering the dramatic rise of gas prices today, yet it remains unclear whether the film fully endorses Kunstler’s predictions of suburban obsolescence.

There is an abrupt plot twist near the end of the film, where it is revealed that the family is entirely fictional. The actor who plays Nick claims that this technique was designed to highlight to the degree to which most depictions of suburbia on film and television are not realistic. To be in the film the actors also had to live in suburbia themselves, and some of the actors note that they incorporated aspects of their own experience into their roles, yet for the most part they appear far more ambivalent about suburbia than their characters. The real-life actors, for example, often emphasize the convenience of living in the suburbs, which contradicts many of the critiques made earlier in the film, and some of them even prefer the design of North American suburbs over European cities, which provides a counterpoint to the claims made by the urban designers. The non-fictional portion of the film thus seems to provide a more complex and nuanced portrait of suburban existence, which shifts the discussion in an entirely new direction. This section also incorporates statements by urban theorists who seem less critical of suburbia. Joseph Heath points out, for example, that critiques of the suburbs are not new and “the standard critique of suburbia will not have an impact on suburbanization” because people still prefer to live there. Andrés Duany also claims that suburbia is capable of being densified by incorporating commercial space into housing developments and transforming shopping malls into town centers, and he refers to suburbia as a “first generation construction” that will gradually evolve over time into a more liveable and sustainable environment.

By breaking the rules of the documentary genre and incorporating multiple points of view, therefore, Radiant City effectively deconstructs the ways in which suburbia is commonly represented and avoids making any definitive pronouncements about the future of urban development. Burns thus seems to suggest that the standard critique of suburbia has become its own monolithic structure, which precludes the possibility of an open dialogue about the nature of suburban experience. The process of creating genuine communities that are healthy for both the inhabitants and the environment may require moving beyond simple nostalgia for the pre-suburban city and focusing instead on more practical solutions to the actual needs and desires of contemporary suburbanites.