Our cities could become human once again if and when the industry realises the immense commercial advantages of doing so.
cities built up to the 1920sxxxvi successfulxxxvii élite.
, and their application has made neo-traditional urbanism commercially . But they are disdained by architecture and planning schools, and ridiculed by an entrenched
Public squares and plazas left in traditional city centres attract children, with or without their parents, and older persons with reduced mobility. Organised complexity implies a blend of trees, bushes, and perhaps some lawn in a plaza. Neo-traditional places let pedestrians experience these configurations close upxxxviii
as lifeless abstractions. Contrast this with ‘hard’ contemporary plazas that are emotionally dead, used only by pedestrians taking a shortcut, if at all. Nobody lingers there, because they lack biophilic qualities.
Our society can only survive by abandoning mindless ‘design-as-image’. Ignoring human emotional responses, ‘professionals’ have been erasing beauty from our environment for a century. Dominant architectural culture inflicts inhuman geometries on new urban spaces, guaranteeing that those are perceived as hostile, despite the presence of green.
To see what happens when cities blindly listen to trendsetters, look at the Piazza Verdi in La Spezia, Italy. Drastically reducing its biophilic index killed the life of this urban space. A thriving boulevard full of people, shaded by century-old trees, was destroyed when those trees were cut down and replaced with bizarre abstract ‘sculptures’xxxix
. After its ‘renovation’, the piazza is despised and sits empty.
HUMAN-SCALE URBANISM IS CONNECTED BUT SLOW The flows of a city occur on many networks, which compete on the same ground plane level (separating transportation modes on different heights having proved too problematic). All modes of transport need to connect, with the weaker ones protected from the stronger. This requires special adaptive design to create a safe environment for pedestrians—by not giving in to traffic engineers who gutted our downtowns in order to increase vehicular traffic speed. Again, we are fighting the old top-down approach to city building that ignores human sensibilities.
The public realm consists of pedestrian space. Loved, usable places pay attention to human dimensions. They are made as comfortable and safe as possible using Christopher Alexander’s Patterns and supporting workxl
adjoining traffic. Whenever possible, build arcades and colonnades that enhance the human scales. CONCLUSION
While it is encouraging to offer guidelines for the future of cities, nobody really pays attention to such
things. Our world is shaped by greed tempered by ideology that dominant power finds useful. Positive ideas about changing for the better—towards a more human built environment—invariably turn into empty slogans that are instrumentalised to continue global consumerism and cultural devastation. Even when we see that, surprisingly, a good idea is adopted by the mainstream, it is given over to be implemented by those who have been damaging the world all along.
We need the occurrence of a miracle: where new ideas are adopted; new faces not beholden to the old ideology to replace guilty collaborators; users educate themselves and henceforth demand healing environments. That is highly unlikely, yet in this age of information, major world changes could occur on very short time scales. There is hope!
Acknowledgment: This essay reuses material from an earlier article published in Meeting of the Minds — The Future of Cities Project, 19 June 2019.
References: i
ii iii Christopher Alexander (1979) The Timeless Way of Building, Oxford University Press, New York.
Nikos Salingaros (2019) How Mathematics Will Save the Built World!, Common Edge, 28 January 2019.
https://commonedge.org/how-mathematics-will-save-the-built-world/
Nikos Salingaros (2012) Beauty, Life, and the Geometry of the Environment, Chapter 2 of Agnes Horvath & James B. Cuffe, Editors, Reclaiming Beauty, Volume I, Ficino Press, Cork, Ireland, 2012, pages 63-103.
http://permaculture.org.au/2010/10/14/life-and-the-geometry-of-the-environment/
54 FUTURARC
, not
. Re-introducing old-fashioned bollards protects a pedestrian both physically and psychologically from
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