Making fun of the suburbs is nothing new, says Joseph Heath, one of the academic commentators featured in Radiant City, a documentary by filmmaker Gary Burns and journalist Jim Brown.
Nothing new indeed. Contempt for suburban living is almost a cornerstone of popular culture. In this respect, the tone of Radiant City rings pretty familiar.
Combining a reality television style of storytelling with commentary from a handful of urban design experts and cultural critics, Radiant City is more fun than most documentaries. Burns and Brown are both Albertans, and they use Calgary, with its oil-fuelled economy and supercharged housing market, as their model. The docudrama bits, which
focus on a few weeks in the life of a suburban family, deliver a dry kind of comedy. And far from weighing the movie down, the various talking head experts provide a series of nicely-placed breaks in the
narrative.
While style of the movie is appealing, the substance is not really anything we haven’t heard before: the suburbs alienate people from each other; they are environmentally wasteful, they're esthetically bereft, and so on. The most sprited defense of suburban living is provided by characters the audience is clearly intended to laugh at. A realtor, for instance, earnestly selling the viewer on the proximity of new subdivisions to ‘power centres’ (shopping malls).
I agree with the gist of Radiant City's message, but I can’t help but think that there’s something missing in the film’s analysis.
Its not just that people live in the suburbs because it’s a place where you can have some space at an affordable price, especially if you have a family. There are other problems with high density living than the issue
of less space for the money.
Look at the Lower Mainland. When you consider the downside of high-density property, from problems with the quality of condo construction over the past couple of decades to often dysfunctional strata governance, can you really blame people for choosing the suburban
option?
In an interview with the New York Times a few months back, Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan was quoted as saying “If we want to convince people to live in higher densities we have to provide them with the amenities that will make that type of living attractive.”
He was talking about green spaces like Stanley Park, but how about also providing people with buildings that are solidly built, or have suites that are a reasonable size, in which you don’t have to listen to everything the person beside/below/above you is doing?
Increasingly I come across downtown apartment dwellers looking for secondary properties out of town due to the nerve-rattling nature of downtown living. It can be a cheaper option than buying a house in many suburbs. The result is that you just end up with sprawl that is exported a little farther afield, to places like the Gulf Islands, or the Sunshine Coast, or the Interior.
And the intense downtown condo development we've seen in Vancouver has displaced a lot of downtown office and industrial space. What you start to get is a reverse commute, wherein people live in the city and work in the suburbs.
Anecdotal stuff? Maybe (although the issue of a depleting downtown office and industrial space is of genuine concern to planners).
But my point is that if not done properly, high density development can be as sterile as the suburbs, and a component of a lifestyle that may not end up being any more environmentally friendly.
In fact, you can easily envision a sequel to Radiant City. Instead of laughing at suburban realtors and their power centres, you’d amuse yourself with hipster urban realtors talking about ‘vibe’ and ‘edginess.’ Instead of a panel of academics railing against the social ills of suburbia, you’d have some commentary on all the people packed into small apartments of questionable construction quality, commuting each day to their jobs in the suburban industrial park.
Radiant City is a good film, well worth seeing. But I think its conclusions, like the suburbs it mocks, are a little too cookie cutter in their design.
