Earlier this year, I was asked by the Centre for Researching Cities at Newcastle University to make a short documentary on the theme of the “good city”. My brief was to interview local leaders and get their views on the good city and pair these views with some eye-catching material. The film was made on a shoestring and this is why it concentrates only on Newcastle and has a limited number of talking heads. I didn’t have a million pound budget that could take me to Tokyo or New York or Copenhagen. While I have included some famous markers of the Toon, I wanted much of it to stand in for an abstract general “good city”. I’ll let the audience be the judge of whether I succeeded at this. The film is a conversation starter and hopefully will feed into my larger project “Brasília of the North” which I am currently working on whenever I get a free moment.

I also captured the Good City project’s Roundtable discussion in documentary style. You can watch this too below.