City Center and Pedestrians
1974 · 56m · Canada
Directed by Michel Régnier
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative
Several cities' attempts to build pedestrian-oriented downtown cores are compared, weighing the options and consequences of designing city centres around people on foot.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 56-minute documentary about city planning sounds like the most docile thing imaginable—until you realize Régnier is using comparative urban analysis as a Trojan horse to interrogate the entire modernist project and what we've actually built in the name of 'progress.'
Régnier's essay film sits squarely in the structural documentary tradition—methodical, comparative, rigorously composed—and uses the pedestrian-centered city as both subject and formal metaphor, building an argument through montage and juxtaposition that recalls the best of the NFB's pedagogical lineage.
The entire film hinges on Régnier's choice to let footsteps and ambient street sound carry the argument rather than narration or music—that single decision transforms what could've been a dry policy analysis into an immersive phenomenological experience of the spaces being studied.