moving places

About Moving Places

Moving Places is a project of Blue Heron Productions, a media and story-telling enterprise based in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

Film Director Brad Masi brings a wealth of experience to his documentary process, drawing from experiences as a founder of several social enterprises addressing food and sustainable agriculture, a writer on issues addressing regional sustainability, an avid photographer, and a prolific hiker.

The Moving Places film series actually grew out of one of Masi’s favorite hikes- the Shaker Lakes parklands near his home in Cleveland Heights. As Masi explored these urban wilds and photographed the incredible diversity of bird-life that passes through them, he became fixated on how close this oasis came to being destroyed. The Moving Places project initially focused on telling the story of the Freeway Fights of 1960’s Cleveland which preserved the Shaker Lakes and several iconic east-side neighborhoods from destruction. The film project quickly grew to a much broader effort to understand how transit choices have a dramatic impact on the quality of life in Cleveland.

The highways proposed on Cleveland’s east-side were an organized attempt to leap-frog the central city and its inner-ring suburbs- all legacies of an age when electric rail provided the primary means of transport. Highway development was predicated on the notion that the street car city and its suburbs had grown obsolete and needed to be replaced by modern highways connected to suburban development. This had an enormous impact on the economic, social, and environmental issues facing the city.

Masi produced the Moving Places series to look at how important transportation is to shaping city life and how we need to think about our decisions today on the basis of what legacy they will leave 50 years from now. Will the city be a better place to live, love, and work? Will it do its part to reduce its contribution to global climate change? Will it continue to be an oasis for migrating birds?

Everything that we choose today will determine the answer to these questions.

The Moving Places film series was supported by Ohio Humanities- the Ohio affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Additional support was provided by Joe and JoAnne Masi.