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The Human Scale: it’s a ticking time bomb. In the next 40 years the number of people living in cities will nearly double. There is not enough time to build the necessary infrastructure to accomodate all of us. According to revolutionary Danish city planner Jan Gehl, even the largest of megacities must be re-thought, re-designed and re-sized to the human scale.

Director Andreas M. Dalsgaard travels around the world to explore how Gehl’s vision of a human megacity – intimate, lively, safe, sustainable and healthy – is being implemented in places like New York, Chongqing and Christchurch. Thinkers, architects and urban planners across the globe question our assumptions about modernity. Against the backdrop of powerful shots of urban landscapes, they explore what happens when we put people at the heart of our planning.

Directed by Andreas M. Dalsgaard
Duration: 77′
Year: 2012

This screening is part of a summer season looking at the way technological changes are shaping the way we document the world and interact with it. See the full programme here.

What is Progress? Does it by definition mean improvement? Is it possible to continue growing at the same rate? These are questions directors Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks address in their elaborate docu-essay Surviving Progress.

Based on the 2004 best selling book What is Progress? by Ronald Wright, the film includes interviews with scientists, philosophers and cultural critics who tackle Wright’s central thesis that, although progress sounds seductive, we are caught in a "progress trap".

Human culture has become detached from the pace of natural evolution in a world where technological innovations succeed one another at such speed that our footprint is threatening to become too large.

Surviving Progress makes connections between economics, the environment, history and science to argue that the rules the world currently lives by are unsustainable. A wide range of contemporary thinkers both amplify or argue against Wright’s warnings. Among them are chimpanzee expert Jane Goodall, astrophysicist Stephen Hawking and DNA mapper J. Craig Venter.

Directed by: Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks

Year: 2011

Duration: 87′