This research traces the intersection of two areas of innovation during John Lindsay's mayoral tenure in New York (1966–73): his policies regarding film production and urban planning. In 1966, as New York was stricken with urban blight, social unrest, and insufficient revenues with which to stem the city's problems, Mayor Lindsay initiated unprecedented incentives to attract the film industry to the city. Major film productions soon followed, adding millions to the city's economy. Simultaneously, Lindsay's planning commission was tasked with producing a master plan within an environment of public skepticism of top-down government. Attempting to communicate to their audience, the commission produced a series of policies in which the relationship between the city and the urban subject is implicitly analogized to that of cinema and its spectator. This project traces the complex interrelationships between these policies, speculating on their effects on the contemporary city and urban subject.

McLain Clutter is an architect, writer, assistant professor at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, and principal of the design and research practice mclainclutter. Clutter's essays on contemporary urbanism have appeared in Grey Room, MONU, 306090 and the edited volume Formerly Urban: Projecting Rustbelt Futures. Clutter has lectured and exhibited design work internationally. He received a BArch from Syracuse University and an MED from the Yale School of Architecture.