Director Gary Hustwit is fast making a name for himself as a documentary filmmaker focused on the seemingly mundane. His first movie, 2007’s Helvetica, was entirely about the titular font. In 2009, he tackled industrial design in Objectified. Now he’s wrapping his design film trilogy with another documentary about something you see every day and never think twice about. This time it’s urban planning and design in Urbanized.
Urbanized premiered this year at Toronto, and we’ve got the trailer below.
Synopsis:
The final documentary in director Gary Hustwit’s design film trilogy (HELVETICA and OBJECTIFIED), URBANIZED asks who is allowed to shape our cities, and how do they do it? How does the design of our cities affect our lives? Traveling to over 40 cities and exploring a diverse range of urban design projects around the world, from massive infrastructure initiatives to temporary interventions, URBANIZED frames a global discussion on the future of cities.
The film features some of the world’s foremost architects, planners, policymakers, and thinkers, including Sir Norman Foster, Rem Koolhaas, Jan Gehl, Oscar Niemeyer, Amanda Burden, Enrique Peñalosa, Alejandro Aravena, Eduardo Paes, Ricky Burdett, Michael Sorkin, Bruce Katz, Candy Chang, and many more, including extraordinary citizens who have affected change in their cities.
I admit I have no idea who any of those people are, but if Urbanized is anything like Hustwit’s other design docs, I’m sure they’re all enormously influential in their fields . Urban planning seems a lot more interesting than a font, and Helvetica was was of the more informative documentaries I’ve seen recently, so I have high hopes for design doc no. 3.
Urbanized opens on October 28th in New York City and will open in select theaters across the country after that.
How do you think Urbanized will compare to the other films in the design trilogy?