Why ‘Casablanca’ Is the Quintessential City Movie
The classic film reminds us that cities are built to serve people, not the other way around
The 1942 film “Casablanca” is one of the most lauded movies in history—and for good reason. The tale of lost love, heroism and sacrifice is gripping from start to finish and features career-highlight performances from Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid and Claude Rains. Nominated for eight Academy Awards, “Casablanca” won three, including Best Picture and Best Director for Michael Curtiz. Its iconic lines—“Here’s looking at you, kid,” “Play it again, Sam” and “Round up the usual suspects”—are still so commonly used that it’s easy to forget where they came from.
But there’s another distinction for “Casablanca” that I would add: It’s the quintessential “city movie”—and by that I mean it exemplifies what’s most important about cities: people rather than buildings or boulevards.
Everybody Comes to Rick’s
For anyone who knows anything about the movie, “Casablanca” may at first seem like an odd choice for an urban planner’s admiration. Unlike “Roman Holiday” or “Manhattan,” “Casablanca” is not a love letter to the city it’s named for. In fact, the movie was not filmed on location in Morocco but in Los Angeles, on a Warner Brothers sound stage. What’s more, throughout the movie you see remarkably little of the city of Casablanca, even a Hollywood-set version of Casablanca. That’s because the vast majority of the film takes place within the confines of one relatively small space, Rick’s Café, a “gin joint” owned and operated by Bogart’s character.
The film centers around the different people who have come to Casablanca, mostly from all over war-torn Europe and for very different reasons. Some are Nazis and some are resistance heroes. Some are bastards and some are noble and decent. Nearly all are flawed in one way or another, but some are redeemable. At Rick’s, all these different people meet and confront each other, and it’s from this very human contact that the stories of the film emerge, both large and small. That is also what a city is all about—stories happen because of contact, collaboration and even confrontation within a set area.
Let me use another movie—a more recent one—to show you what I mean. In “The Truman Show,” the main character (played by Jim Carrey) is the unwitting star of a reality TV show, where his entire world has been constructed for him. Everything about his life, down to the weather, is completely controlled. It sounds like hell to me—and it is the very opposite of what life is really all about. But if “The Truman Show” is like hell, then “Casablanca” is like purgatory: Everybody’s waiting to go to the next place. That’s the reality of life.
It's also the reality of what it means to truly live in a city. There’s nothing worse to dream of or strive for in planning a city than the idea of utopia. Utopia means that everybody has to follow a set of rules. The story of “Casablanca” is interesting because you have the shock of very different people in the same place, and they haven’t ended up there because they were obedient, well-behaved or even nice. Likewise, it’s not some conference of nurses or literature teachers, where everybody is gathered for the same reason.
Rather, there are people with political motives—Nazis and members of the resistance—and there are gamblers of all sorts who aren’t interested in anything other than surviving. But this amalgam of folks with different backgrounds and varying motivations—that’s the sort of thing that makes a city interesting, and it’s what makes “Casablanca” a truly urban movie.
Here’s Looking at You
How did I come to this point of view? I’ve lived in many cities throughout my career as an urban planner—from Paris to New York, from Bangkok to San Salvador, from Sana’a to Chandigarh—and so I’ve had ample opportunity to see what does and doesn’t work in terms of city design. And what I’ve found is that a city works when its design serves the people who live there—not the other way around.
It's not too difficult to see the ways in which the overplanning of cities can result in problems. First, the very location of a city should ideally come about organically. Architects dream of building new cities, but if you build a new city in the middle of nowhere, and there’s no one currently living there, who wants to be the first resident?
University towns often offer good examples of the pitfalls of overplanning. The city of Champaign, Illinois, for example, sprung up largely because what is now the University of Illinois was established there in the 1860s. Today, the university is by far the largest employer in the city, and much of its population disappears at the end of each academic year. That’s not to say that the university isn’t a vibrant community, but it’s largely one of transients who are not as invested in the success of the city itself.
Diversity is also an important aspect of any city. I use the word diversity not in a political or identity sense, but in the rich variety of characters humanity offers up. It’s not very desirable to move to a company town where everyone is only doing one thing, because you won’t have a mix of people with different life experiences. This, again, can be a problem with university towns like Champaign, as well as cities built around one industry.
For a city to really thrive, it is necessary for it to have different kinds of people interacting in different ways, making the city a more creative, innovative and interesting place. That’s what Rick’s Café provided in “Casablanca.” For example, refugees knew that they could come there to work and even to try to seek letters of transit to the U.S. In short, it was a place to come and solve problems.
The Casablanca in the movie may provide a perfect example of how a city should work, but there also are some real-world parallels. Many cities throughout history, such as 19th-century Vienna, for example, had strong café cultures. But they’ve existed in our own lifetimes too. When I lived in Paris in the mid-20th century, most people didn’t have telephones, so when you wanted to get a message to someone, you’d leave that message for your friend at the café with a waiter. Passing along these messages was a normal part of a waiter’s job. In that way, then, a café was really a community’s communications hub.
Our lives today are much more atomized than they were in those days, though. That’s a big reason why I think the fostering of “third places”—like what Starbucks has started to do recently—is a great thing. Some cities are going further. When I visited Porto Alegre in Brazil last year, I was delighted to see that some old factories had been converted into facilities with lots of communal spaces: office space, classrooms, bars, restaurants—all in the same building.
This multiplies the power of what a meeting place can be because it’s giving people the spaces they want, the spaces they need to more effectively meet, converse and collaborate with others. Even though many people said that the COVID pandemic would be the end of cities, we all quickly realized that nothing could take the place of meeting people and random in-person contact.
Zoom meetings are simply too structured and too planned: If you want to find new ideas, connecting with others on a computer screen is not the vehicle for that. A Zoom meeting room could never take the place of the dealmaking that happened in Rick’s Café. We need the informality and randomness of being in person—and these are inherent aspects of successful cities.
“Casablanca” is not just a wonderful story; it’s a lesson that a city is about people and that everything you build around them—subways, sewer systems, skyscrapers—is there to serve them, not the other way around. City planners should take this lesson from the film and not try to shoehorn people into some abstract vision of what a city should be. Because when city planners put people and their needs first, well, that could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
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