It is the second-most consumed material on Earth, trailing only water, yet it functions as an escalating environmental disaster that is literally falling apart all around us. Concrete, the foundational gray glue of the modern built environment, is the subject of a new feature-length documentary by John Wilson, a filmmaker renowned for his distinct knack for finding laugh-out-loud absurdity in the mundane corners of everyday life.
The History of Concrete stitches together rapid-fire cuts of handheld footage and deadpan narration, mirroring the signature aesthetic of How To with John Wilson, the acclaimed HBO docuseries that propelled the filmmaker to prominence. Much like previous television episodes centered on topics such as how to make small talk or how to properly install scaffolding, the titular subject of the film is not really the point. Instead, Wilson leverages concrete as a thematic connective tissue, taking viewers on a sprawling, unexpected exploration of the overlooked and neglected corners of our world.
Because concrete is so thoroughly pervasive, its presence allows the film to venture into wildly disparate locations. The documentary drifts from a family-run mortuary specializing in tattoo preservation to a patriotic brick-laying competition in Las Vegas, and onward to a grueling 3,100-mile spiritual race where dedicated runners circle a single block in Queens, New York, for weeks on end.
It would be a stretch to classify the documentary strictly as a climate film—indeed, it is explicitly styled with the comforting tropes of a Hallmark movie. Yet with each turn of the camera lens, Wilson quietly sheds light on an unfolding environmental crisis. After all, he notes, concrete is the third-largest contributor to global carbon dioxide emissions warming the planet. And although the material remains an indispensable part of modern infrastructure, its relatively short and increasingly crumbling lifespan transforms it into a ticking hazard on an increasingly disaster-prone planet.
Wilson’s personal fascination with concrete began close to home, sparked when the basement of his apartment building in Queens began intermittently flooding. When he attempted a temporary patch job using a store-bought concrete mix, the leak inevitably returned. His domestic frustration is widely shared across the metropolis. As climate change intensifies severe storms and steadily raises sea levels, New Yorkers are dealing with more extreme rainfall and coastal flooding than ever before. The sheer abundance of concrete exacerbates urban flooding by sealing the ground, preventing stormwater from naturally seeping into the soil. Furthermore, when the aged material inevitably cracks, it fails to block rushing water, leaving subway stations and residential buildings inundated for days at a time.
As Wilson delves deeper into his subject, he discovers that our concrete-smothered world is fraught with structural hazards stemming from the material’s surprisingly brief durability. Infrastructure such as the historic Brooklyn Promenade, which forms the uppermost deck of a complex four-layered expressway, was never engineered to last longer than 40 years, according to Sam Schwartz, a former New York City traffic commissioner interviewed in the film. Today, that 1,800-foot-long artery is heavily covered in superficial patch jobs. Schwartz warns Wilson that a major structural catastrophe could be just a few years away if comprehensive action is not taken.
Armed with these stark facts, any major city quickly begins to look like a morass of potential disasters. It comes as little surprise that Wilson spent at least a full year documenting the spreading cracks across New York City. Some locations, such as a public swimming pool sanitation facility perpetually inundated with leaks, are granted a few minutes of contemplative screen time. Others, including the architecturally celebrated Spring Street Salt Shed—which is humorously patched together with packing tape—and a ten-year-old skyscraper in midtown Manhattan that may already face premature demolition, are presented in a quick, jaw-dropping montage. As Wilson observes in his characteristic deadpan, it begins to feel as though we are all in danger somehow.
Perversely, climate change is accelerating this deterioration. Numerous studies show that extreme weather hastens the structural decay of concrete assets worldwide. And while Wilson does not explicitly dwell on the point in the film, even structurally sound concrete poses distinct hazards as the planet warms. The dense material creates an urban heat island effect that can cause local ambient air temperatures to surge by as much as 7 degrees Fahrenheit. This turns urban pavement into a scalding 140-degree griddle during summer months, contributing to hundreds of heat-related fatalities each year in places like Arizona.
Yet, as a local contractor bluntly tells Wilson, society would be entirely lost without it. “We’d be up a creek without concrete. It is used for everything.” Metropolises like New York require vast quantities of the material to construct new housing, expand transit systems, and maintain aging urban areas. Unfortunately, sand—the fundamental ingredient required to manufacture concrete—is rapidly vanishing as coastlines erode and humanity consumes roughly 50 billion tons of the resource every year. While the general public remains largely unaware, industry experts have spent years attempting to warn the public of an impending global sand shortage.
Toward the end of the documentary, Wilson visits a concrete recycling plant, highlighting one of the few existing industrial solutions to these compounding problems. These facilities are designed to divert demolition debris away from overcrowded landfills and, ideally, produce usable aggregate material with lower greenhouse gas emissions. However, the recycling facility Wilson located near a marine terminal in Brooklyn was simultaneously blanketing surrounding residential neighborhoods in dangerous clouds of airborne dust, prompting widespread community protests and the plant’s eventual closure in 2025.
For now, our societal dependency on concrete remains as intractable as its physical and environmental pitfalls. As Wilson remarks, once people grow accustomed to a certain way of building and living, it becomes exceedingly difficult to change lifestyles without external pressure.
As an early-career climate reporter who moved to New York City already acutely aware of concrete’s heavy environmental costs, the reality of being physically surrounded by so much of it proved overwhelming. It forces a critical reassessment of the commonly cited statistic that urban lifestyles inherently carry a smaller carbon footprint than suburban ones. Most academic studies account primarily for the energy and materials residents consume directly, frequently omitting the vast embodied emissions locked inside the buildings, subterranean sewers, and structural frameworks that make high-density city life possible in the first place.
Although back-of-the-envelope calculations still support the notion that living in a dense city is likely the greener choice, navigating the urban environment often feels chaotic. Yet, walking out of the Manhattan theater after viewing The History of Concrete, the surrounding gray landscape came into sharper, more deliberate focus, as if the documentary had never truly ended. There is an underlying poetry to Wilson’s cinematic work: the banal becomes deeply beautiful, the bizarre turns delightful, and everyday heartbreaks become unguardedly funny. His relentless curiosity, bordering at times on voyeurism, serves as a gentle invitation to join him in the simple act of paying attention.
Stepping back onto the pavement, those small human details stood out clearly—a toddler lying on her belly outside a subway station entrance plastered with old gum, a dumpling food truck seemingly trapped in a deep street pothole, and groups of evening-gown-clad women rushing past as their long dresses dragged into street puddles. It all forms part of a concrete-bound world that, for all its flaws, remains profoundly worth noticing.