Emergent Urbanism

Rediscovering Urban Complexity

Calgary

Review of Radiant City

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Wed, 09/02/2009 - 16:14, last updated Mon, 04/09/2012 - 15:51

There is a scene early in the 2006 mockumentary Radiant City that provides the key explanation to the morphology of suburban sprawl. Our favorite writer James Howard Kunstler sits on a bench in a community bike trail that is enclosed in two rows of chain link fence in order to, I presume, secure it from the high-capacity arterial road that runs alongside it. The experience is vaguely what it must have been like to patrol the Berlin Wall, had it been encircled by an expressway.

Further comment

Please send your comments by email at mthl@mthl.info, or find me on Twitter @mathieuhelie. The commenting system is closed at the moment as no measures can hold back blog spamming bots.

Subscribe to Calgary
Loading