人的尺度

Urban life, people and city

What’s modernity?

As Giddens put, modernity is vastly more dynamic than any previous type of social order. It is a society—more technically, a complex of institutions—which, unlike any preceding culture, lives in the future, rather than the past (Giddens 1998, 94).

What’s beyond modernity?

One big problem shared by many big modern cities is that in the near future the population of city will increase to an amount that we don’t know if the current urban design will be able to handle. What will urban life become by then?

It seems to be somehow more worrying than promising. Since the last decades, we have already experienced this gap between the ideal urban life and the problematic reality caused by the huge increase of urban population within very short time. And in some places they are still experiencing it right now.

For example, China went through the same modernization process as the western world but in less than one generation. Sometimes when I look out from the metro in Beijing, I see those tall buildings with sharp straight lines and tiny windows, which always remind me of the movie Metropolis. We are already living in the future.

People are locked in the same small rooms in the same tall buildings without chances to socialize with their neighbors. The only space where you can socialize a bit with the people who live in the same building as you is in the elevator, unless you want to be the one who talk in the corridor disturbing all the neighbors.

Maybe people just feel more comfortable talking in the street in the open air with their neighbors when they live in the flat houses like the Hutong area. They definitely come across with each other much more often than living in a vertically distributed space.

Along with the wrong idea of urban housing designing, the urban public space was also focused on the wrong side — streets for cars instead of people. Traffic has always been the focus of the urban design, the traffic planners only measure cars and the truth is you only care about what you measure. When you only care about machine, you make the urban life like a machine. As Jan said in the beginning of the documentary, the city was conceived as a machine for living during the early age of urbanization. And this value is so well internalized by the people who live under such social reality. As the taxi driver in New York City complains, American life is like a machine, people don’t have time to ride bikes.

In the case of Daca, cars stands for something bigger. Behind this city designing’s focus on cars, it is the interest of economy of big companies, neglecting the needs of people. Same thing happens in Christchurch. The city planners had to fight with the political power which is more interested in the short term economic benefits. There is and always will be this struggle, since it’s rooted in the characteristic of modernity. When we are planning the city, we are planning the city life, and sometimes it does not include everyone. Therefore appears ghetto, as the fruit of social isolation and exclusion which can lead to very dangerous consequences for the society which does include everyone that lives in it.

But there can be something even quicker and so destructive that the seemingly long- lasting city that we build with concrete and steels can be destroyed in just one day. When disasters like earthquake comes, when the whole infrastructure that urban life relies so much on disappears, maybe that’s when we realize what kind of city we actually want and what is the essence of an urban life that is appealing to people.

What is interesting is that when people of Christchurch were asked in what kind of city they want to live, all the answers pointed towards the European city model. Also in New York City, what they did is to reclaim space for pedestrians, as in Copenhagen. As to Copenhagen, Jan took the idea from Italian cities, where people have their social life in the streets.

I didn’t realized that street is actually a very important part of our daily life where social life happens. Since I came from China, we don’t have this culture of hanging out in the street. People who stay in the street are usually reckoned as workless since they don’t have anywhere else to go nor anything else to do. Parks and plazas are places where people take their walks or do sports etc.

It’s interesting that maybe I have this impression that streets are not where people’s social life takes place, because I lived my life this way. Cultural differences play a role in it but maybe things were different before I was born. So how cities are designed is actually transforming people’s way of living.

In the case of Melbourne, the city planners successfully brought people back to the city. They convinced people to share their life closely in the narrow alleys instead of isolated in their big houses outside the city. This public space where the borders of social classes are not that firmly separated. Streets have become a social living room for everyone.

First in Copenhagen, then in New York City, space for pedestrians is reclaimed, thus public life is brought back.

In the end, what drives a person to the city life? What’s so charming about the urban life? Isn’t it the diversity that you can find in a big modern city, where infinite possibilities are generated each day spontaneously by the innumerable encounters of different individuals, groups, minds and souls. And the key of bringing life to the city is to offer an invitation for this fusion, to create spaces where it can happen. I think this is what makes a city fantastic.