“It’s A Nice Place To Visit . . .But I Wouldn’t Want To Live There” 1970/2026 – Past Daily Reference Room

It’s A Nice Place To Visit, But I Wouldn’t Want To Live There -Episode 1 and 2 – CBC Radio International – circa 1970 – Gordon Skene Sound Collection

It’s a Nice Place to Visit: The Urban Landscape, Then and Now
There is something almost timeless about the title of the CBC Radio documentary series It’s a Nice Place to Visit But I Wouldn’t Want to Live There. Produced in the late 1960s or early 1970s, the thirteen-part series arrived at a moment when the modern city had become a subject of alarm, debate and, increasingly, experimentation. Cities were crowded, polluted and divided. Downtowns were losing residents and businesses to the suburbs. Housing was deteriorating. Highways were carving through established neighborhoods. Crime, poverty and civil unrest had become symbols of an urban crisis that seemed to be getting worse by the year.
Listen to those programs from the perspective of 2026, and the most remarkable thing is not simply how much has changed. It is how much of the conversation remains familiar.
The city of the 1970s was frequently described as a place in decline. Manufacturing jobs were disappearing from older industrial centers. Middle-class residents were moving to the suburbs. Businesses and tax revenue followed them. Older housing stock deteriorated, neighborhoods became increasingly impoverished and the automobile reshaped the metropolitan landscape. The postwar dream of a house in the suburbs had come with an enormous price: the hollowing out of many central cities. Urban planners had an answer. Or, at least, they had many answers.
The 1960s and early 1970s produced an extraordinary burst of experimentation in urban policy. In the United States, the federal government created programs such as Model Cities, based on the increasingly apparent idea that urban problems could not be treated independently. Housing was connected to employment. Employment was connected to transportation. Transportation was connected to neighborhood development. Education, health, sanitation, recreation and environmental conditions were all part of the same urban ecosystem.
The assumption was that government could deliberately rebuild the city. But rebuilding was itself becoming controversial. Earlier urban renewal programs had frequently
approached deteriorated neighborhoods with a remarkably simple formula: clear the buildings and start again. Highways were driven through communities. Older housing was demolished. Large projects replaced smaller neighborhoods. The language was modernization; for many residents, however, modernization meant displacement.
By the late 1960s, a different idea was beginning to emerge: perhaps the people who lived in a neighborhood should have some say in what happened to it.
Model Cities attempted, at least in theory, to combine physical redevelopment with social and economic programs and greater community participation. The objective was no longer simply to remove the visible symptoms of urban decay. The hope was to address the conditions that produced them. It was an ambitious idea. It was also a difficult one.

Bureaucracy, inadequate funding, competing political interests and conflicts between federal, state and local authorities frustrated many of the programs. The lesson gradually emerging was that cities could not simply be redesigned from above. By the middle of the 1970s, federal policy was moving toward block grants and greater local control. And here is where the comparison with 2026 becomes particularly interesting. Some of the things that frightened urban observers in the 1970s really have improved. The industrial city was visibly dirty. Smog hung over metropolitan areas. Rivers could be polluted with industrial waste. Automobile exhaust was an accepted fact of urban life. Environmental regulation was considerably weaker. Today, conventional air and water pollution are generally far better controlled than they were in the middle of the twentieth century. That is an actual victory. But environmental problems have not disappeared. They have changed scale and character. The city of 2026 confronts extreme heat, wildfire smoke, flooding, drought, sea-level rise and the broader consequences of climate change. The polluted river of 1970 was something people could see. Climate change is often a more diffuse threat, spread across decades, geography and infrastructure. We solved some urban environmental problems and inherited others. Transportation tells a similar story. The 1960s and 1970s were dominated by the automobile. Freeways were symbols of progress, even when they cut through established neighborhoods. The assumption was that more roads would solve congestion. By 2026, many planners have reached a very different conclusion. Public transportation, walking, cycling, mixed-use neighborhoods and transit-oriented development have returned to the urban vocabulary. Yet the automobile remains deeply embedded in metropolitan life, and congestion remains a familiar complaint. The city has changed its philosophy without completely changing its habits. Housing provides perhaps the clearest example of the transformation.
In the 1970s, the problem was often described in terms of bad housing: deteriorating buildings, abandoned properties, overcrowded apartments and neighborhoods suffering from disinvestment. In 2026, the problem in many cities is increasingly access to housing itself. The question is no longer simply, How do we repair this neighborhood? It is, How do we keep people from being priced out of it? That is a profound change.

A neighborhood can now be considered a success precisely because it has become attractive, walkable, safe and desirable—and that success can make it unaffordable to the people who lived there before the transformation. Historic preservation, restaurants, parks, waterfront redevelopment and new transit can improve the physical and social environment while simultaneously increasing property values and rents. In other words, we have sometimes learned how to make a city better without learning how to make that improvement equally accessible.
The 1970s had “urban renewal.” The twenty-first century has gentrification and displacement. They are not identical phenomena, but they raise a related question: who gets to remain in the improved city? Even downtown has gone through this cycle. In the 1970s, the downtown was frequently portrayed as dying. Stores were closing. Office buildings emptied after business hours. Manufacturing and residential life had moved outward. The central city seemed to be losing its purpose. Many downtowns were subsequently reborn. Old industrial buildings became lofts. Waterfronts became parks and entertainment districts. Historic buildings were restored rather than demolished. Restaurants, cultural institutions and residential development brought people back. But even that success has proved complicated. The pandemic accelerated changes in office work and downtown economies. Some central business districts have struggled with vacancies, homelessness and the disappearance of the predictable weekday population. Once again, the urban problem has changed form rather than disappeared. Perhaps the most visible symbol of this transformation is homelessness. In the 1970s, the visual representation of urban failure might have been the abandoned factory, the decaying tenement or the neighborhood slated for demolition. In 2026, it may be the tent encampment beneath an elevated freeway or along a city sidewalk.

The underlying circumstances are different, but the symbolism is remarkably similar: the city is displaying, in public, the people and conditions that its economic and political systems have been unable to accommodate. And this brings us to perhaps the greatest continuity between the two periods: inequality. The city of the 1970s was deeply divided by income, race and geography. Poverty was concentrated in particular neighborhoods. Suburban prosperity existed alongside inner-city deprivation. The physical boundaries separating communities could be remarkably stark. In 2026, inequality has not disappeared. Its geography and mechanisms have changed. Housing costs can determine who is able to live near employment, transportation, good schools and cultural institutions.

Neighborhood revitalization can create displacement. Wealth can increasingly determine access to the very improvements that cities have spent decades trying to create. The vocabulary has changed. The architecture has changed. The technology has certainly changed. But the fundamental question has hardly changed at all: Who is the city for?
That may ultimately be the most important question raised by revisiting a documentary such as It’s a Nice Place to Visit But I Wouldn’t Want to Live There. The programs were produced at a moment when people believed the city was in crisis and were searching for ways to save it. More than half a century later, we can see that some of their fears were justified, some of their solutions failed, and some of their ideas eventually became conventional wisdom. We also discover something more complicated. The city of 2026 is not simply the city of 1970, only better or worse. It is the product of the decisions made during the intervening years. Some problems were solved. Some were displaced. Some returned in different forms. And some of the solutions produced consequences that nobody quite anticipated. The great urban lesson of the past half-century may therefore be less about architecture than about
humility. The planners of the 1960s and 1970s often believed that if they could redesign the physical city, they could solve the social problems within it. We have become considerably more cautious about that proposition. A city is not a machine that can be repaired by replacing its defective parts. It is a living collection of people, communities, memories, ambitions, economies and conflicts. And that makes the title of the CBC documentary even more appropriate after all these years. A city can be beautiful enough to visit. It can be revitalized, modernized, cleaned up and made more attractive. It can have parks, museums, restaurants, restored buildings, bike lanes and gleaming new towers.
But those things do not necessarily make it a place where everyone can afford to live. The real measure of an urban landscape is therefore not simply how it looks from the outside. It is whether
the people who make the city function—workers, families, artists, shopkeepers, teachers, service employees, retirees and newcomers—can actually find a place within it. The city of 1970 asked whether it could survive. The city of 2026 is asking something subtly different:
Can it remain livable? And perhaps that is the question that has been sitting underneath the entire urban experiment all along.

Here are episodes 1 and 2 of It’s A Nice Place To Visit, But I Wouldn’t Want To Live There from CBC Radio International.