It all begins with a line. A short line that becomes longer and longer, and longer, and longer. It is the simplest thing we humans can come up with. It is a skillles skill that can be achieved by everyone. Just this simple shape is the basis for all the complex things. It can turn into a bridge, a road, a building.
Lines build cities. The organised and simple geometries that make up our modern world are easy to comprehend and easy to make. The scale to which we have pushed lines is mind-boggling. There are 81 cities in the world with a population exceeding five million people. Bogotá has 10 million people. São Paulo has 21 million people. Shanghai, 25 million people. Delhi, 28 million people. Tokyo a whopping 37 million people. So sexy that we are capable of accomodating so many beings in such a small space with straightforward tools.
The majority of the world lives in an environment that has been thought up, designed and build by humans. It represents a world totally consisting of effortless shapes, forming the bases for billions of lives.
The infrastructure to keep a city functioning is also designed around lines. Highways move people and goods at high speeds. While roads allow slower travel for vehicles, helping people to get from A to B. Sidewalks and bike paths afford the same movement for pedestrians and cyclists. For longer distances and more convenience we utilise trains and subways all running on lines. These are just the visible parts of a city’s infrastructure. Beneath the ground we have water mains supplying live giving water. In reverse we have the sewers that take away the waste and help keep cities clean and free of disease. Underground we also have electricity, gas and internet providing all the comforts and essentials of life. Connecting each household to the world at large, these simple, mostly taken for granted parts raise the living standard. We come “online”, allowing not just the movement of physical goods but also the flow of information. This network that is hidden to us during our daily lives is so vast in its complexity and reach that only few comprehend it. It almost becomes its own root network, a living, breathing and constantly changing organism.
If lines are infrastructure, the veins to give a city its pulse. What are our buildings and places that we inhabit most of the time? Our apartments, our offices, our schools, our universities, our malls, our gyms, our cafes and restaurants. Simple! They are a squared or rectangled. Most buildings are, they are made up of squared components. Look around your apartment, it is made up of lines, of millions of lines turned into three dimensional shapes. While most of our infrastructure is flat and can be summarised as two dimensional plane, buildings protrude into the third dimension. They raise, because space is scares in dense environments. They stack into the sky allowing us humans to live high and space efficient. Through an increase in density, life becomes less wasteful. It is basically the ancient tradition of huddling around a camp fire translated into our modern, fire free world.
Looking deeper, all buildings have the same lines of infrastructure as a city, just in a microcosm of its own.
Everything needs to be mixed together. Small corner shops, restaurants, apartments, town houses, night clubs, offices, malls, schools, universities, parks and all other kinds of activities. This makes possible the flow of all different kinds of people that will bump into each other and interact with one-another. They form new relationships and create new ideas that will push humanity forward. Even now, in a world where we like to adapt the newest and shiniest ideas without giving them proper scrutiny first, we have to keep in mind that everything that came before, has build what we have now, and it makes up part of our heritage and culture. It might not be interesting anymore, but the things that have been around for decades or centuries have earned their place in our world. This is why we cannot have solely modern cities. We need to remember the past and allow the old to exist besides the new. In most cases, the old will outlive the new anyway. There need to be old small cosy buildings and grand, red brick houses next to modern polished and smooth skyscrapers, there need to be parks and green spaces next to hyper modern freeway concrete slaps. We have to live and experience the contradictions of human life on a daily basis.
Because all of this, is what makes life worth living, what makes it interesting. It is the density and ever increasing complexity that surrounds us and provides us with randomness, chance encounters and spontaneous relationships we could have never planned for. Cities are just here to foster the interaction with other people, to grow the human connection. They are complex, uncontrollable social machines, here to push humanity ahead by exposing us to the diversity and peculiarities of our world. The extremes and limits are what inspires and pushes the mind and initiates a flow of creativity, to change the status quo and invent alternatives. New ideas that shape all of us for eternity. Such progress can only happen in random chance encounters fostered by the organised chaos of a city, where all walks of life are present and express their opinions, the rich and the poor alike. It is a vast physical and social network of interconnection!
But, where do we go from here? Cities are already among the most amazing places in the world. What now? Currently we are bound to the simple shapes that can be accomplished with just lines and squares. This is Kindergarten. The organic world does not work like this. It is infinitely complex and never follows a perfectly straight line. It goes in rounded shapes up and down, left and right, and subconsciously we can feel that this simple geometry is boring us, becoming more boring the more we see it. One way to counteract it, is the occasional escape into nature, into the quiet and natural world that does not offer simple shapes.
With increasing complexity and progress we can design better cities. Bring back the feeling of an organic environment by incorporating these complex movements into our world. Cities should not be drawn by a ruler. They should be rounded, squared and made from all available shapes, regardless of how complex. They should fold and bend, go up and down and imitate nature in all its wonder, colour and vibrancy. With the stated goal of creating places we all feel at home in, without the need for escape. Many places already have included parks, but this is just the beginning. Parks and nature need to be implemented into every aspect of a city, they need to be ever present. Walkable cities that have an abundance of trees and green spaces or large parts that are completely wild are a good way to start. Nature needs to come back into our build environment, be it through architecture or nature itself. We need to form a symbiosis with it, not try to distance ourselves.
Organic cities cannot rely on the simple two dimensional grid anymore, they need to expand into three dimensions. Infrastructure and transport going up and down on multiple levels, high up into the sky and deep down into the ground. Put the traffic below and the people above. Buildings and spaces will need to follow the same principles, more layers and more complexity to foster inspiration and engagement. Let’s have a 200 year old wooden dainty hotel on what used to be the ground floor, while on the level above a magnificent mighty mother tree towers. When space is limited the only way is up, and if done in sensible inclusive ways, with public spaces and a large public domain that is not owned by private interests, but is accessible by anyone, with non commercialised building facades, we can reclaim some of our identity and create a city that keeps us mentally and physically fit. A city that breeds creativity and cooperation, that grows human relationships and builds a more equitable future for everyone taking part in this great amazing social adventure that is a city. That is life. That is nature.
Wouldn’t that be sexy?