Gary Hustwit’s theatrically released documentary Urbanized is an extraordinarily ambitious attempt to make sense of a world flowing into cities. This visually arresting film, like Hustwit’s past work, elegantly conveys the omnipresence of design in daily life. If planning and architecture are so fluid in our surroundings that we scarcely think about them, Urbanized cries out for an eyes-wide-open meditation. At the same time its contemplative style belies urgent social imperatives. An unprecedented 75 percent of the world will live in cities by 2050. If cities are containers, as Louis Mumford posited, than what happens when the cup runneth over?

Urbanized makes clear that trend lines point toward demographic dystopia, particularly in burgeoning Asian and African megacities. The film advances this narrative with images of slums, skylines, packed streets, and third-world traffic jams. Images like these are on the verge of cinematic cliché in a world where social problems are fast becoming urbanized. This might be problematic had Hustwit not elevated the bar so high. In the film’s most telling scene, we run the loop of Detroit’s innocently futuristic downtown people mover, coursing through buildings bereft of modern use. Just as cities expand beyond all reason, they decline. What, if any, meaning do this city’s silent arteries retain?

This is one of the most haunting images of corrupted urbanity since Jennifer Baichwal’s Manufactured Landscapes silently scrolled through the vast dehumanizing aesthetics of a Chinese factory. Hustwit’s global sensibilities are especially relevant at a time when urban inequality is shaped by economic forces much larger than any one individual or community. In an urban rendition of Thoreau, Urbanized posits that city dwellers must not only forge an innovative self-reliance, they must imagine higher forms of living. The radical fluctuations of growth and decline happening in modern cities necessitate infinite innovation. For Detroit, this means welcoming so-called urban pioneers. For Mumbai, it means bringing sanitation to slums. In Santiago it means affordable construction through frugal design.

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For a month now New York’s Zuccotti Park has been a digitally radiating lamentation of capitalism’s cruelest traits. The Great Recession, the park’s inhabitants say, made it impossible to mask hypercompetitive, socially atomizing forces inherent in the status quo. It’s an odd scene set against the forbidding façade of World Trade Center One, rising comically out of proportion to every unfortunate park, street or building near its base. Somewhere down there the general assemblies of Zuccotti Park scramble for alternatives to the system of irrational speculation that, incidentally, spawned WTC One. What would that system look like?

The major critique of Occupy Wall Street is that they haven’t uniformly articulated such a system yet.  But their spontaneous reinvention of Zuccotti Park offers glimpses of alternative urban design in real time. It brings to life the art world’s increasingly popular genre of social experimentation. As I’ve written about before, the temporary Guggenheim Lab used vacant space to invite civic input on urban design alongside a stream of expert informers. Creative Time’s “Living as Form” in the Lower East Side’s historic Essex Street Market did much the same thing, but from a consciously radical perspective in tune with the emergent zeitgeist. The exhibit, which closed Sunday, was a study of how to foster substantive social interaction.

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On the one hand, New Urbanists say that cities should have minimal impact on their natural surroundings, while on the other hand world-class designs are defined by unconventional schemes that strive to minimize the use of non-renewables.  It seems, then, the twenty-first century building is a machine designed to rationalize its inputs while maintaining high function. But the agreement between the two groups ends there.

Should all architectural projects resort to minimalism out of ecological necessity? Or should those who create them strive for ever-inventive ways to trounce gravity? And if the interests of global commerce command the latter course, do these questions even matter?

Two current exhibits in New York showcase competing answers. The free, experimental public space that is the Guggenheim Lab on Manhattan’s Lower East Side (open through October 16th) personifies a democratic, minimalist approach.  Supertall! at the New York Skyscraper Museum (running through next January) posits that natural boundaries exist to be crushed.

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