The National Film Board of Canada (NFB), one of the partner organizations participating in the "Global Suburbanisms" MCRI, has launched a new interactive documentary, One Millionth Tower, to critical acclaim. It features examples of tower revitalization from around the world, and lets you visit highrise neighbourhoods in more than 200 countries.

One Millionth Tower re-imagines a universal thread of our global urban fabric — the dilapidated highrise neighbourhood. More than one billion of us live in vertical homes, most of which are falling into disrepair. Highrise residents, together with architects, re-envision their vertical neighbourhood, and animators and web programmers bring their sketches to life in this documentary for the contemporary web browser.

The result of this unique collaboration is a lush visual story unfolding in a 3D virtual environment. Visitors explore how participatory urban design can transform spaces, places and minds.

One Millionth Tower is “hyper-local” documentary. It's hyper-local because it’s grounded in a particular community — a highrise on Kipling Avenue in suburban Toronto, Canada — where the HIGHRISE team has worked with residents for over two years. The project is a concrete result of a community collaboration between residents, architects, documentarians and animators to re-imagine the particular spaces around these particular highrises.

Yet it's hyper-lobal, because so many of the hallmark problems that these residents face are found in highrise communities around the globe: deteriorating buildings; physical and cultural separation from the downtown core; poor access to social services and commerce; poor public transit and long-distance commutes, resulting in a reliance on cars and long travel times; little or no community play space for children; as well as no community space and fabric between the residential buildings themselves. One Millionth Tower suggests these problems can be solved — it just takes some imagination.

One Millionth Tower is a story with global implications about how, with the power of imagination, we can transform the urban and virtual spaces that belong to all of us.