Directed by Fred Johnson 

The landscape is a familiar one to urban dwellers - towering impersonal buildings made of cold glass and steel usurping blocks and blocks of city streets, surrounded by eight lanes of cars bumper to bumper, white lights and red creeping through a toxic sunset - for every car leaving, there's another one coming in - a perfect visual metaphor of the circulatory system that feeds and feeds off of these power centers, as Garth Sheriff calls them. Where are the people who live in the shadows of these buildings, who have no cars, who walk to and from their destinations, who don't have bank accounts and credit cards. Where do their children go to school, where are the playing fields, the parks? If the profit motive continues to roll over the needs of the inner city, what does the future look like? Which is the point of this hard look at the contemporary urban landscape.

It's all about power & money. These new citadels of power, as Sosa calls them, and the profit motive that keeps them running, searching out and luring in the globilized highly mobile well-to-do at the expense of ordinary citizens, using public resources "to subsidize the rich to stay in town, or to come to town, and taking away from the ordinary people who live in town," as Harvey puts it.

There is very little green in this landscape, no public parks, no playgrounds, no common places where people can congregate. High-end shopping areas have become a public social experience, the intermingling of people in a pleasant environment which exists solely for them to spend money there. But make no mistake, these buildings are constructed in ways that control and enclose, that keep the privileged safely in and everybody else out. There are surveillence cameras to insure orderly conduct, someone is watching your every move, and if you have no money to spend, what are you doing there?

Featuring:
Edward SoJa, Professor of Urban and Regional Planning
David Harvey, Geographer
Sister Christine, Action for Secure Housing
Carl Trimble, Architect and Planner
Garth Sheriff, Architect