Over Two Centuries of Urban Expansion, Shown in Nine Minutes

Metropolis by Rob Carter - Last 3 minutes from Rob Carter on Vimeo.

What does more than 200 years of urban expansion look like? Visual artist Rob Carter has developed a unique and entertaining way of showing the history of a city on video, using uses stop-motion animation, time-lapse video and large format photographs. In his film Metropolis, he depicts the development from infancy of Charlotte, North Carolina, beginning with the construction of the city’s first house in the 1700s. Carter chose the city because it’s one of the fastest growing urban areas in the U.S., mostly due to a massive influx of major banks that led to a mass architectural and population expansion — one that shows no sign of slowing post-financial crisis. Carter describes his vision as follows:

[W]e see the town develop through the historic dismissal of the English, to the prosperity made by the discovery of gold and the subsequent roots of the building of the multitude of churches that the city is famous for. Now the landscape turns white with cotton, and the modern city is ‘born’, with a more detailed re-creation of the economic boom and surprising architectural transformation that has occurred in the past 20 years….

Made entirely from images printed on paper, the animation literally represents this sped up urban planners dream, but suggests the frailty of that dream, however concrete it may feel on the ground today. Ultimately the video continues the city development into an imagined hubristic future, of more and more skyscrapers and sports arenas and into a bleak environmental future. It is an extreme representation of the already serious water shortages that face many expanding American cities today; but this is less a warning, as much as a statement of our paper thin significance no matter how many monuments of steel, glass and concrete we build.

The results are quirky and distinct, offering a powerful sense of the seeming-inevitability, if not always efficiency, of progress in American urban development — all in a style that reminiscent of Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python shorts.

Here’s a clip of the final three minutes.  To watch the full video, visit Carter’s Web site.