| New Urban Cowboy: Toward a New Pedestrianism | |
|---|---|
Poster for DVD release | |
| Produced by | Golden Apples Media |
| Starring | Michael E. Arth |
| Music by | B. Bush C. Gear C. Verdeaux M. Ravel V. Thomas Threadneedle |
| Cinematography | Blake Wiers Michael E. Arth |
| Edited by | Blake Wiers |
| Distributed by | Golden Apples Media Inc. |
Release date |
|
Running time | 83 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
New Urban Cowboy: Toward a New Pedestrianism is a 2007 documentary film, and DVD release, about American artist and urban designer Michael E. Arth, his New Pedestrianism movement, and his efforts to rebuild the cities, beginning with "Cracktown," an inner city slum in DeLand, Florida. This 83-minute international edition—with subtitles in Spanish, French, German, Japanese, and Chinese—was re-edited from a 100-minute version that made the film festival circuit in 2007. The earlier version was titled New Urban Cowboy: The Labors of Michael E. Arth. [1] [2]
A documentary film is a nonfictional motion picture intended to document reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education, or maintaining a historical record. "Documentary" has been described as a "filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception" that is continually evolving and is without clear boundaries. Documentary films were originally called 'actuality' films and were only a minute or less in length. Over time documentaries have evolved to be longer in length and to include more categories, such as educational, observational, and even 'docufiction'. Documentaries are also educational and often used in schools to teach various principles. Social media platforms such as YouTube, have allowed documentary films to improve the ways the films are distributed and able to educate and broaden the reach of people who receive the information.
Michael Edward Arth is an American artist, builder, architectural and urban designer, and political scientist.
DeLand is a city in the U.S. state of Florida. It is the county seat of Volusia County. The city sits approximately 34 miles (55 km) north of the central business district of Orlando, and approximately 23 miles (37 km) west of the central business district of Daytona Beach. As of the 2010 U.S. Census, the city had a population of 27,031. It is a part of the Deltona–Daytona Beach–Ormond Beach metropolitan area, which was home to 590,289 people as of the 2010 census.
Modern-day polymath Michael E. Arth and his pregnant wife, Maya, travel on a cross-country trek from Santa Barbara, CA—where they lived in a spacious villa surrounded by waterfalls—to a ruined and dangerous neighborhood in a small town in Florida. Arth buys 32 homes and businesses, and turns the slum into downtown DeLand's "Historic Garden District." With guns that shoot nails and staples instead of bullets, and with gentle persuasion instead of violent confrontation, he pushes out the drug dealers and other criminals, and then creates a retrofitted model for how to build new towns and neighborhoods. Arth also proposes building a Pedestrian Village with work opportunities as a solution to homelessness. The film also follows the development of his urban design philosophy, New Pedestrianism, and ends on an upbeat, optimistic note with a vision for the future. There is also a section, documented with archival footage, which chronicles Arth's early life and struggles as a surfer, artist, builder, and home/urban designer. [1] [3]
Homelessness is defined as living in housing that is below the minimum standard or lacks secure tenure. People can be categorized as homeless if they are: living on the streets ; moving between temporary shelters, including houses of friends, family and emergency accommodation ; living in private boarding houses without a private bathroom and/or security of tenure. The legal definition of homeless varies from country to country, or among different jurisdictions in the same country or region. According to the UK homelessness charity Crisis, a home is not just a physical space: it also provides roots, identity, security, a sense of belonging and a place of emotional wellbeing. United States government homeless enumeration studies also include people who sleep in a public or private place not designed for use as a regular sleeping accommodation for human beings. People who are homeless are most often unable to acquire and maintain regular, safe, secure and adequate housing due to a lack of, or an unsteady income. Homelessness and poverty are interrelated.
New Pedestrianism (NP) is a more pedestrian and ecology-oriented variation of New Urbanism in urban planning theory, founded in 1999 by Michael E. Arth. NP addresses the problems associated with New Urbanism and is an attempt to solve various social, health, energy, economic, aesthetic, and environmental problems, with special focus on reducing the role of the automobile. A neighborhood or new town utilizing NP is called a Pedestrian Village. Pedestrian Villages can range from being nearly car-free to having automobile access behind nearly every house and business, but pedestrian lanes are always in front. [4] [5]
New Urbanism is an urban design movement which promotes environmentally friendly habits by creating walkable neighborhoods containing a wide range of housing and job types. It arose in the United States in the early 1980s, and has gradually influenced many aspects of real estate development, urban planning, and municipal land-use strategies.
Arth's Garden District project was also an attempt to create a living laboratory in order to try out some of the ideas in a two-volume book that he was writing titled, The Labors of Hercules: Modern Solutions to 12 Herculean Problems. [4]
New Urban Cowboy is the first in a series of three documentaries explicating Arth's ideas about problem solving and future trends. The other two films, scheduled for release in 2010, are The Labors of Hercules: Modern Solutions to 12 Herculean Problems and UNICE: Universal Network of Intelligent Conscious Entities. [6]
In general, New Urban Cowboy received highly favorable reviews, even in the earlier, film festival version. According to the official website, the documentary has been featured in twelve film festivals and received the Audience Choice Award at the Real to Reel International Film Festival in 2008. [7] [8] [9] Academic reviews about Arth's urban design philosophy, New Pedestrianism, as expressed in the movie (and elsewhere) were also highly favorable. [2] [10] [11]
The Real to Reel International Film Festival is held annually in Kings Mountain, North Carolina at the Joy Performance Center. It was founded in 2000. According to the official website, the goal is "to showcase thought-provoking films and offer a venue where movie lovers who appreciate independent vision can celebrate this unique art form." The Cleveland County Arts Council presented the 13th Annual “Real to Reel International Film Festival” from July 18–21, 2012 and the 14th annual festival was celebrated on July 24–27, 2013. The 17th Annual festival was celebrated July 27–30, 2016. www.realtoreelfest.com
Walking is one of the main gaits of locomotion among legged animals. Walking is typically slower than running and other gaits. Walking is defined by an 'inverted pendulum' gait in which the body vaults over the stiff limb or limbs with each step. This applies regardless of the unusable number of limbs—even arthropods, with six, eight, or more limbs, walk.
Michael Francis Moore is an American documentary filmmaker and author. He is best known for his work on globalization and capitalism. Moore has been labeled a left-wing documentary filmmaker and left-wing political activist, however, he rejects the label "political activist".
New Pedestrianism (NP) is a more pedestrian and ecology-oriented variation of New Urbanism in urban planning theory, founded in 1999 by Michael E. Arth, an American artist, urban/home/landscape designer, futurist, and author. NP addresses the problems associated with New Urbanism and is an attempt to solve various social, health, energy, economic, aesthetic, and environmental problems, with special focus on reducing the role of the automobile. A neighborhood or new town utilizing NP is called a Pedestrian Village. Pedestrian Villages can range from being nearly car-free to having automobile access behind nearly every house and business, but pedestrian lanes are always in front.
The 11th Hour is a 2007 documentary film on the state of the natural environment created, produced, co-written and narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio. It was directed by Leila Conners Petersen and Nadia Conners and financed by Adam Lewis and Pierre André Senizergues, and distributed by Warner Independent Pictures.
The Monastery: Mr. Vig and the Nun is a 2006 Danish documentary film directed by Pernille Rose Grønkjær.

Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten is a 2007 documentary film directed by Julien Temple about Joe Strummer, the lead singer of the British punk rock band The Clash, that went on to win the British Independent Film Awards as Best British Documentary 2007. The film premiered 20 January 2007 at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. It was also shown at the Dublin Film Festival on 24 February 2007.
A pedestrian village is a compact, pedestrian-oriented neighborhood or town, with a mixed-use village center, that follows the tenets of New Pedestrianism. Shared-use lanes for pedestrians and those using bicycles, Segways, wheelchairs, and other small rolling conveyances that do not use internal combustion engines. Generally, these lanes are in front of the houses and businesses, and streets for motor vehicles are always at the rear. Some pedestrian villages might be nearly car-free with cars either hidden below the buildings or on the periphery of the village. Venice, Italy is essentially a pedestrian village with canals.
Matt McCormick is a Portland, Oregon based video installation artist and filmmaker. His work extends documentary and experimental filmmaking, focusing on the sublime decay of contemporary culture and the landscape both urban and rural.

Scottsboro: An American Tragedy is a 2001 American documentary film directed by Daniel Anker and Barak Goodman. The film is based on one of the longest-running and most controversial courtroom pursuits of racism in American history, which led to nine black teenaged men being wrongly convicted of raping a white woman in Alabama. The film received an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature. It was funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Buddy Giovinazzo is an American independent filmmaker and author who is known for his gritty-low budget debut film, Combat Shock, and his collection of harrowing short stories of low urban life in his 1993 novel, Life is Hot in Cracktown.
A "choice-based, marketable, birth license plan" or "birth credits" for population control has been promoted by urban designer and environmental activist Michael E. Arth since the 1990s. Previous iterations of similar transferable birth licensing schemes can also be traced to economist Kenneth Boulding (1964) and leading ecological economist and steady-state theorist Herman Daly (1991)
In computational complexity theory, a problem is NP-complete when it can be solved by a restricted class of brute force search algorithms and it can be used to simulate any other problem with a similar algorithm. More precisely, each input to the problem should be associated with a set of solutions of polynomial length, whose validity can be tested quickly, such that the output for any input is "yes" if the solution set is non-empty and "no" if it is empty. The complexity class of problems of this form is called NP, an abbreviation for "nondeterministic polynomial time". A problem is said to be NP-hard if everything in NP can be transformed in polynomial time into it, and a problem is NP-complete if it is both in NP and NP-hard. The NP-complete problems represent the hardest problems in NP. If any NP-complete problem has a polynomial time algorithm, all problems in NP do. The set of NP-complete problems is often denoted by NP-C or NPC.
Rakontur is a Miami-based media studio founded by Alfred Spellman and Billy Corben in 2000. The word "Rakontur" comes from French, which means "a person who is skilled in relating stories".
Democracy and the Common Wealth: Breaking the Stranglehold of the Special Interests is a 2010 book by urban designer, policy analyst and artist Michael E. Arth. Arth attempts to expose what he calls the "dirty secrets" of America's electoral system, and provides a list of solutions that he believes will result in a "truly representative democracy." This democracy would be led by effective, trustworthy leaders, who would be elected by a majority, and who would not have to spend their time raising campaign funds, or catering to paid lobbyists.
Escape from Suburbia: Beyond the American Dream is a 2007 Canadian documentary film written and directed by Gregory Greene, as a sequel to Greene's film The End of Suburbia, and set to address what is termed "the upcoming energy crisis". Through interviews with individuals, Gregory Greene outlines potential solutions to the coming energy crisis.
The Hole is a small neighborhood in New York City on the border between Brooklyn and Queens. It is a low-lying area, with a ground level that is 30 feet (9.1 m) lower than the surrounding area. The area is run-down, and suffers from frequent flooding. It has been described as a "lost neighborhood", and as resembling a border town from the Wild West. It is generally bordered by Ruby Street, South Conduit Avenue, and Linden Boulevard. Nearby neighborhoods include East New York, Lindenwood, Howard Beach and Ozone Park.
Out of the Woods: Life and Death in Dirty Dave's Homeless Camp is a 2012 feature documentary film by Michael E. Arth. It follows the life and death struggles of homeless people living in a camp in the woods for four years. Arth single-handely directed, shot and edited Out of the Woods after meeting one of the subjects, Dean "Dino the Dinosaur" Bieber, in a former drug slum Arth had rebuilt and turned into "The Garden District" in DeLand some years before. The backstory of Out of the Woods is told in Arth's previous documentary, New Urban Cowboy: Toward a New Pedestrianism.