The City is a pioneering short documentary film from 1939 that contrasts the problems of the contemporary urban environment with the superior social and physical conditions that can be provided in a planned community.
"[6] In The Los Angeles Times, Mark Swed has called The City's score "an astonishing missing link not only in the genesis of Copland’s Americana style but in American music and cinema."
In 1942, he assembled a five-song suite for small orchestra, consisting of excerpts from his first three film scores, entitled "Music for Movies," which included the compositions "New England Countryside" and "Sunday Traffic" from The City.
One study of the fair summarized the film's reception:[9] The documentary was idealistic, framed with a Ruskinian tragic view of technological modernity in which the early 20th-century industrial city became a wasteland of dehumanizing machines, environmental pollution, and anonymous masses.
Critics interpreted the film as a panacea for the unhygenic growth of the modern city, as well as the small but influential Regional Planners of America's promotion of a pastoralist greenbelt idea.