Good city planning in the 21st century is a difficult task. We know something has to change and yet most of western society continues in the path that was paved by the modernists. As a result, our cities are alien-like and alienating.
To name a beautiful city today is to name an old city. Jan Gehl confronts this issue in his book Life Between Buildings. Only one third into reading this book, the word that has consistently come to my mind is balance. We need a balance of all the worlds; all our ideas; all possibilities. And yet what happens over time, is we steer towards extreme ends, first towards one and then naturally towards the other. This can be seen with periods in architecture: Romanesque to Gothic, Renaissance to Baroque, Modern to Postmodern; each one denied by the next. We has a tendency to believe that when something goes wrong, the opposite is the solution.
So how do we know when we have accomplished balance? Shakespeare asks: "what is a city but the people?" We have achieved balanced when our cities are lively; when people go outside not only often, but for long periods of time. To achieve this isn't an easy task. Smaller cities, particularly in North America, should take notes from successful other small cities such as Siena, Italy. The issue here is cultural differences and acclimation to the suburb. Many argue that they like their large and private houses, away from the stresses that others bring. They may defend their homes and their decision to live there. But it is only out of lack of option. It doesn't take long to note how similar are your surrounding cities, and out of this comparison with nearby cities that remain "comfortable" and not too large of a change if one were to move to them, we quickly find that our homes aren't all that bad.
New metropolitan cities face an equally great but different issue. Take Toronto as an example. With a population of nearly 3 million, we would expect more people on the streets than what is typically seen, even in the summer months. The issue here is not with the density of people but with the length of time each person takes for activities around the city. If everyone spent simply not 5 but 10 minutes outside at some point in their day, the amount of life between buildings would be DOUBLED. And as Gehl puts it, something happens because something happens. With more activity in the city, more people become interested in joining themselves. We are attracted to places with people.
It wasn't until recently that it became this normal for thousands of people to live in one neighborhood. We can’t rely on instinct or past experience to solve this one. And as technology and infrastructure becomes more advanced, we need more and more people working together to help control the city’s development. But simultaneously, never before have we had such a diversity of people in one place. With so much information available and everyone absorbing different things, working in large groups on such major decisions such as a big city's development becomes extremely hard. I think it inevitably comes down to breaking things into smaller parts. This is already is done in Toronto with is 6 boroughs and 140 neighbourhoods, which is good, but who is paying for the buildings in those divisions? Well, people with a lot of money who may not even be from Toronto, and very likely are not from that neighbourhood. And so it is strangers who are building our homes and cities; strangers who we don’t trust, building cities that strengthen our mistrust.
Both in the case of suburbia and a big city's skyscrapers, our human desires for balance and transition between our public and private worlds is ripped away from us. It's become so overpowering that we see no other way but to normalize this detached life from life itself. It’s a cycling trap that we have created for ourselves. The worse we build our cities, the harder it is to make better ones.
Okay, to take a step back. Taking a closer look at the city of Toronto I’ve come to some conclusions of what I think works, or at least, is unavoidable. For one, dividing the land and restricting building appearance through zoning by-laws works well. If we restricted architects more, they would not want to do their job. If we reduced restrictions, our cities would be total disorder. I agree that with highly populated cities we need to give control to a group of people, that is the city planners and city council, so that a balance is maintained. Although tempting, we cannot build organically and sporadically as we did a long ago. Unless a dictator comes into power, or we all become super selfless and empathetic with others and drastically smarter overall as a species, we are going to keep building lot of land by lot of land. That's settled. However, that being said, I believe it is the responsibility of the city planners to encourage the projects on these lots of land to interact with the surrounding lots of land, as well as help fund more public projects such as the currently lacking !! Public !! Square !
Now how I see it, what really does not work in Toronto is its grid system. I really don’t know where one neighbourhood ends and another begins! The transition from totally private to totally public space is distorted. The streets become endless paths of circulation. Circulation is necessary but deeper interactions cannot occur once inside. And what’s to blame? Cars. To navigate far distances we prefer simple routes, thus we created these ultra long and wide grids. Grids are ordered and logical and seem to makes sense for organizing large complex cities, but although logical thinking is in our natural, logical acting is not always. We like to have freedom from control and to explore. We want spontaneity and the irrational. Toronto, as many modern cities being developed today, is appealing to just one half our brains.
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