The Human Scale

The Human Scale looks like an student project, a feature-length amateur video filled with nostalgic vamping about traditional urban lifestyle, virtues of walkability, and the conspiratorial evils of cars, highways, and modernist architecture; it's essentially regurgitating Marshal Berman without reproducing those ideas in a practical context. Many have done it better before, most successfully, I think, Alain de Botton in the Architecture of Happiness and the Channel 4 documentary based on it.

Without giving the historical and economical roots of modernism their due, The Human Scale goes through urban experiences in China, Denmark, US, Bangladesh, and New Zealand. In reality, these experiences are all complex, unique, and different, growing out of the discrete cultural and socio-political particularities of their own; but the big auteur Jan Gehl is looking at all of them a with the reductive and parsimonious lens that makes them all seem as the same bridge that leads to modernism (bad), so they are treated as the same.

Also the Soundtracks doesn't make any sense.