I just realized something about kids movies and urban planning.
For a long time, I couldn’t understand why I felt such a strange affinity for those vast concrete spaces dotted with carefully placed patches of neatly mown grass and singular trees, surrounded by towering glass skyscrapers beneath a perfectly clear blue sky. Most people see these places as cold and unwelcoming business districts, but to me they’ve always felt oddly fascinating and captivating.
I think La DĂ©fense is a perfect example of this kind of place.
^^ La Defence from the Arc.
But see, I grew up in a small city without any skyscapers or such. Nature was prevelant everywhere you went - most of the time unkept and rather wild. Nothing very pretty unless it was a proper forest or park. Either way, you might think I felt most at home in such a place where most people only dream to live in - and certainly I do feel at home, but I am not usually curious about it.
Then it occurred to me that many childhood animated films — like The Incredibles — are set in these kinds of huge, clean urban environments. That’s probably because the storytellers themselves grew up around them and expect many of the viewers to live in similar places. Through those movies, you become familiar with that type of urban planning from the lens of these fantastic and aspiring stories without ever living in one. Unconsciously you might even start to connect that those types of places are reserved for just imagination, as places of corporate world fantasy. The fantasy of the adult world.
^^ From The Incredibles (2004).
So, when I visited La Defense some time ago, I was hit with this wave of simultaneous nostalgia, fascination and immense curiosity. It felt like stepping into a world I had already known somehow, despite never truly believing it existed. I knew it was there of course, through photos and all that.
But really being there, surrounded by those tall buildings and the subtext-like sense of some urabn designers having done their best to emulate nature to create these small but very intentional and probably very expensive places of wellbeing in the middle of all that concrete, that certain type of artificiality meeting with the reality of what happens in these places was quite astounding and exactly the feeling you get from watching one of those animated films set in these types of locations: an idealized, almost dreamlike version of urban corporate life made tangible. That truly feels quite remarkable to me about these places no matter what anyone says.
