Designing cities for people

I have spent a lot of time contemplating sustainable homes and communities recently. The monotony and wastefulness of suburban neighborhoods filled with single-family box homes has always weighed on me. I dream of a different future where people live in unique structures that reflect their needs and encourage interaction with others.

I was delighted to come across a short article in Worldchanging called “De-Industrializing the City” which focuses on how we have been sold a future full of complex machines that do ecologically stupid things to solve problems in our cities that should instead be solved by better planning.

I recommend you read the article in full because it gets right to the point, but I’d like to share the opening quote from Bjarke Ingels:

Engineering without engines. We should use contemporary technology and computation capacity to make our buildings independent of machinery. Building services today are essentially mechanical compensations for the fact that buildings are bad for what they are designed for—human life. Therefore we pump air around, illuminate dark spaces with electric lights, and heat and cool the spaces in order to make them livable. The result is boring boxes with big energy bills. If we moved the qualities out of the machine room and back into architecture’s inherent attributes, we’d make more interesting buildings and more sustainable cities.