City of Tomorrow: The Human Environment
- William Ti Jr.
- Jul 15, 2021
- 5 min read
This piece was originally written by Ar. William Ti Jr. for Inquirer.net in two parts in April and May 2021.
Climate change continues to be the single, most important long term global concern, even as we all face the current pandemic. This week, world leaders convened a climate summit to pledge new targets and reinforce existing ones to reduce their emissions. This was in preparation for the next world summit in November [2021].
Our roles as architects and planners to provide system-wide and comprehensive solutions to not just mitigate but also improve our built environment become increasingly important in the world we live in. How do we develop our human environment? How can we make this world we live in a more suitable and beneficial habitat for homo sapiens and our web of interrelated species?
Beyond my personal musings and internal hypothesizing, we’re currently exploring some of these ideas in the work we’re doing. They range from the immediate to the societal, from human to environmental concerns.
A sense of belonging
While we constantly strive to design for our five senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch, we also need to design spaces that enhance our sense of belonging. It is a sense that we have developed over hundreds of thousands of years even before the first extant member of our species. This is the sense that has allowed us to develop our culture and civilization and spread to almost all regions of the world.
Our sense of belonging constantly makes us search for channels to connect with one another. We require communal experiences that bond us together and look for the presence of other people in our living spaces. We congregate and mingle even for no reason, and we fear or avoid empty and bare spaces. We feel anxious in empty halls and corridors, empty and dead streets.
As we strive for the development of 15-minute cities, we must be aware of how we can make pocket neighborhoods communal and conducive to personal movement and exploration. Expand points of gathering beyond nodes and centralities towards corridors of activity that spread out and activate our streetscapes. Our streets are not just channels for movement but part of a web that can be stimulated and livened by human activity.
We need to build community spaces that emphasize inclusion. The community builds for the community. Building is not just an activity that stops when construction ends but can continue as the broader community contributes to its development. Architecture is only the scaffold upon which we build our communities.
Urban habitats
Our cities in many ways are deserts—concreted barren land that is warmer than surrounding areas that radiate heat and continuously drain our aquifers. Large concentrations of dust and surface runoff contribute to growing areas of polluted and infertile land. Poor biodiversity mean that fewer species are existing in habitats that would otherwise be home to so many more species of plant and wildlife.
Humans evolved to settle near bodies of freshwater—in river deltas and plains, in valleys and plateaus. For much of history, our cities required adjacency to fields and pastures, spaces that would provide access to nature and our life-giving earth. We are organic creatures made to live in our own habitat.
Green spaces in our cities are almost like oases in a desert. They are few and far between, and where they exist, they are disconnected and isolated. We need more tree-lined streets, but we also need ground space for public activity. The further development and acceptance of green streets can help re-naturalize our cities. They allow for not just permeable surfaces to build up groundwater and reduce runoff, but also more ecologically diverse streetscapes that can better accommodate wildlife.
We need environments in which we can thrive. The 21st century will see Homo sapiens become a predominantly urban species. Development will push almost 70 percent of the population to live in urban areas by 2050. More and more of humanity will need to find space in bigger and denser cities. The built environment that we build for ourselves will dictate how we develop and evolve as a society.
Nurture, preserve, expand
Our human environments must serve to nurture us. We must develop spaces and facilities that nurture our mind, body and spirit. We need space to grow, open fields to run in and an abundance of nature to immerse ourselves in. Our minds need to be stimulated and fed. We need access to libraries and places of learning—facilities that allow us to explore new interests and satiate our curiosity. Learning must be facilitated and become a lifelong activity.
Our health and well-being are of paramount importance. The calculus that weighs economic and social development must sway towards providing an environment that is beneficial to human life. Limited resources, primary of which is space, must not be hoarded to benefit the few but expended to serve our communities. It is almost criminal how a city with so few public parks can have such an abundance of golf courses, how each building devotes so much more space to parking for cars than for gardens and greens.
Our urban lifestyles must expand beyond a torturous cycle of working just to survive. Subsistence living traps too many urbanites into concrete cages linked by steel carriages running on barren paved roads. Our cities must serve to expand the human experience. It must enrich our lives by providing greater diversity and freedom. Personal mobility and freedom must be prioritized. We must develop spaces and urban amenities that can allow for a depth and diversity of cultural and recreational activities. The digital realm has allowed us to expand our reach exponentially. We must not allow our physical realm to shrink and limit us in turn.
The people
Politics divides us. Government limits us. National agendas disregard us. Yet politics can also bring us together; government can lead the way; and the country can be the home that shelters us.
“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”—Jane Jacobs
Essentials
Our human environments are often planned to be efficient and functional. They are designed to address function and durability. If function is the rational and structure, the framework of how we build our environment, then purpose is the essence of why we build.
We must build an environment that delights us, communities that serve to enrich us. Perhaps the most important shift in modern times is the value we have placed upon design. From Apple to Tesla, the world has shown how ideas can change the world.
We need to revolutionize how we build our cities. We must redefine what are its essential components. Veer away from zoning mandates that champion the value of commercial and industrial interests. The coming decades will see increasing automation and digitalization of our work environments. We must instead focus on our living environment to ensure that our cities continue to thrive.
“What is essential is invisible to the eye.”—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
