We definitely know more about good habitats for mountain gorillas, Siberian tigers, or panda bears than we do know about a good urban habitat for Homo sapiens. I sum up that in 50 years nobody has systematically looked after a good urban habitat for Homo sapiens. We have written very few books about it. There's been very little research done. They are the ones who mostly shaped our environments in our cities. There's a general pursuit of form in the area of architecture and also in the profession of landscape architecture. So, what really happened was that the eye level stuff were handled by the traffic engineers. You would think that the landscape architects were the ones. At least they were down at eye level and were moving around. But as far as I'm concerned, some landscape architects have done great jobs for people, but most of the work is not great, just silly benches. They're more occupied with plans and form. Nobody was responsible for looking after the people who were to move in these new structures. With modernism, they were free of the context of the city. They placed it on open lands surrounded by grass. That was typical - planners were to look after the plan, the architects were to look after the buildings. It's interesting for a bird or eagle. From the helicopter view, it has got wonderful districts with sharp and precise government buildings and residential buildings. However, nobody spent three minutes to think about what Brasilia would look like at the eye level. Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, is a great example. From the air it's very interesting. They took off in airplane so they could organize the new optics of the big city. Typically on a big model, you push around with the optics until bingo you had something that looks like some wonderful composition. The big change in paradigms happened around 1960. At that time, we had a modernist ideology but we didn't use it very much because we were still adding small units to existing cities. It's only when cities took off and planning really went up in scale and there was a rapid expansion of cities did the modernist principles become applied in practice. That meant that we were able to mass produce big buildings that could fill the whole landscape.Īt the same time, planning took off as a profession.
What happened to many cities? What went wrong?
In your new book Cities for People, you say that the way cities have been planned and developed dramatically changed over the past few years, much for the worse.
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