THE FUTURE OF CITIES: SUSTAINABILITY’S DECEPTIVE DREAM Where do we go from here? Well, that would depend upon whether we have actually learned something from the COVID-19 pandemic. But it seems we have not. The powers-to-be are poised, waiting for improved conditions so as to continue their unsustainable business as usual. Humankind never learns, not even from major catastrophes. Complacent with money and power, the building industry simply assumes that the practice of architecture will continue in a straight line, and that this emergency was nothing but an annoying pause.


A SCHIZOPHRENIC APPROACH TO BUILDING CITIES Two currents—so far, irreconcilable and mutually exclusive—are shaping our cities. On the one hand, we have vast construction projects churning profits for multinationals, local firms, and indirectly, for stockholders. The media is inundated with their exciting images, and the developing world appears as a testing ground for the more ambitious (and pharaonic) among those schemes. But are they good for humankind?


The other design alternative is small-scale, and focuses on human responses to the built environmenti . .


It uses proven methods to elicit mental well-being and bodily healing responses. Its products look very old- fashioned, not because its practitioners blatantly copy traditional forms, but because the healing responses rely upon a specific complex geometry that is common to all historical buildings and citiesii


The visual contradiction arises because, ever since the great schism of the 1920s, the architectural and planning professions pursued a narrow ‘industrial’ set of rules and images. What is ‘approved’—gets built at great expense and proclaimed with great fanfare as the ‘image of the future’—is gigantic, and utilises glass, steel and sometimes raw concrete, and privileges the automobile in both spatial and temporal scales. Fast speed implies the elimination of detail, ornament and all components of the pedestrian urban fabric.


My friends and I would instead like to see a world made for human beings, fit for children and older persons, where every place is healing and makes us well just to be thereiii


. Is this dream possible? Our


only hope is through the marketplace: our cities could become human once again if and when the industry realises the immense commercial advantages of doing so.


1 What is ‘approved’—gets built at great expense and proclaimed with great fanfare as the ‘image of the future’—is gigantic 2 The PARKROYAL on Pickering: green terraces can thrive in a wet climate


46 FUTURARC


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