Ikiru (生きる) is the perfect city planning movie.

Kurosawa's stunning rumination on life is also a perfect encapsulation of civic failure; or, the need for pornography in center cities.

“Why can’t we have a park here?” — Ikiru‘s Watanabe Kanji, likely, and most city planners, likely.

About two-thirds the way through Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru the audience learns that the lead character, a Tolstoy-cum-Japanese sadman, has died, but not before the city finished his park.

In what amounted to his life’s work, completion of this small park was a monumental accomplishment, if nothing else than it improved the life of a single other person. This notion is at the core of urbanism and humanism, really two sides of the same coin, that often gets lost, as we see in Ikiru, in the wave of bureaucracy, which is, perfectly, the opposite of both.

In other words, there is no humanism without urbanism; there is no urbanism without humanism. Bureaucracy, that ill-defined and technocratic institution that “helps” projects get done, is the ice pick to both. What makes Ikiru such a tremendous study is it single-handedly celebrates the former and condemns the latter. It’s a truly tremendous fe…