Our Beautiful City: A series that opens conversation on urbanism and the future of Toronto.

Our series on the future of Toronto returns with this stunning survey of the world's megacities and the efforts of revolutionary Danish city planner Jan Gehl to re-think and re-design them on a smaller scale: the human scale. Around 1950, Gehl argues, city planning took on a very specific direction: "bird shit architecture." Driven by the rapid influx of cars, cities were designed to look good from a plane, ignoring the needs of humans below. The Human Scale explores how Gehl’s vision of a human megacity—intimate, lively, safe, sustainable and healthy—is being implemented in places like New York, Chongqing, Copenhagen and Melbourne.

Following the screening, a special guest will help us relate the film back to the civic challenges and opportunities that face Toronto today.