The City

Made possible by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York and produced for the 1939 World’s Fair, is a problem-solving documentary that announces the “age of rebuilding is here,” but also warns that Americans must find a balance between working, living, and the land.  The force behind the film was its writer,  Lewis Mumford, an influential social critic at the time, who saw cities as ultimately de-humanizing but had faith, as the film shows, in the redemptive powers of technology. In the film, sequences focus on a New England village, a mill town, a city, and a “new town,” culminating with a strong suggestion that Mumford’s model “new town” —a small, planned, and in many ways self-sustaining community that provided Americans with jobs they could walk to, along with social services, schools, and shops was the ideal  environment for American workers.