CITIES ON SPEED
WORLD VIEW
Thursday 5th August at 8.30pm
For the first time in history, over 50% of the world’s population is now living in urban areas. By 2050, this figure is expected to increase to 80%.
At this very moment, giant urban organisms are growing at unprecedented rates. For some time now, growth in cities like Shanghai, Mumbai, Cairo and Bogotá has far outpaced planning. These cities are expanding so rapidly that urban administration and the keeping of official statistics have become largely impossible, and population figures are increasingly nothing more than rough estimates. They are truly Cities on Speed.
Cities on Speed, Thursday 5th August at 8.30pm only on the Documentary Channel is a series of four films – Bogotà Change, Mumbai Disconnected, Cairo Garbage and Shanghai Space, directed by four different filmmakers who tell character-based stories on four of the world’s largest megacities. Focusing on urban problems and the people who are working on radical solutions.
Mumbai is growing like it was on steroids. But a collapsing infrastructure is threatening to put an end to the booming economy, and is making the daily commute close to unbearable for Mumbai’s 20 million citizens, where 13 people die every day on the railroads. In Mumbai, Veena Singhal was born and raised in Mumbai, and has lived 39 years on Pedder Road, where she is president of the Pedder Road Residents Association and has fought for eight years against a planned flyover, a highway overpass, which according to her and the other area residents would increase pollution 540 percent and destroy their neighbourhood.
In Shanghi - in order to find the space needed for the millions of inhabitants, planners are now looking underground. But can people grow accustomed to a life below street level? Professor Shu is convinced that nature will come to man’s aid. He dreams of creating a number of underground parks that can help nourish people in their busy everyday lives.
Directed by Andreas Dalsgaard, Bogotá Change, is the unique and surprising story of two mayors, Antanas Mockus and Enrique Peñalosa, who have changed behaviour patterns in the Colombian capital, bringing Bogotá out of a negative spiral of violence and chaos and remaking it as something of a visionary role model for other megacities.
“The real secret behind Mockus and Peñalosa’s success is that they are two people characterized by extreme honesty and integrity in everything they do. They are two leaders who have the necessary courage to stay true to their visions, even when the opinion polls go against them. Unlike other politicians who are controlled by strategies and tactics, they have not been driven by a lust for power, only by their ideas and philosophies. And if there is a lesson to be learned by their story, it must be that the change they have managed to bring about could never have come from the traditional political system. It could only have come from the outside.” – Andreas Dalsgaard
Cairo Garbage, directed by Mikala Krogh, takes us on a journey into Cairo’s “garbage cities,” entire neighbourhoods where people earn a living sorting and recycling garbage. The so-called ‘garbage people’ have been able to manage Cairo’s total waste production. But as a result of the city’s explosive population growth, city authorities have outsourced part of the waste collection and management work to a number of foreign companies, including the Italian firm, Ama Arab, in order to avoid an environmental catastrophe.
Take a fascinating look at Cities on Speed, Thursday 5th August at 8.30pm only on the Documentary Channel.