Attractive and Efficient Cities

A city is a densely populated urban region. It generally comprises of a

mix of residential, industrial, and commercial districts. The city is the most
effective means of connecting social and economic activities for the benefit of
everyone. Furthermore, the city's physical characteristics include its
circulations, landscaping, public areas, zoning, and so on. If we combine all of
those ideas, we can say that the city is an autonomous entity that houses public
services and administrative agencies, provides security, backup, and order to
its residents, and allows for the development of human activities such as work,
spirituality, leisure, and entertainment in their daily lives. Urban areas
expanded rapidly during the industrial revolution, and the expansion of cities
has exploded in the last 50 years. Urban violence and poverty, homelessness,
overcrowding and health issues, pollution, and waste have all been worsened
by rapid expansion.

A city’s attractiveness for people and businesses is related to the quality

of life, security, stability, and business opportunities, which are guaranteed by
social inclusiveness. So, few cities are nice; very few out of many thousands
are really beautiful. Embarrassingly, the more appealing ones tend to be old,
which is weird because people are mostly better at making things nowadays
than in previous times.

There
are
fundamental things a city must get right; first of all, it can’t be too chaotic nor
too ordered to be attractive. It needs to have balance, symmetry, and
repetition. Order is one of the reasons many people love Paris. But most cities
are a complete mess, Dubai for example. When it’s a mess, it seems like no one
is in charge. Its horrible when everything is jumbled up.

Paris-France

Dubai-UAE
Often, it’s not skyscrapers that we mind when we look at cities, its
skyscrapers that’ve been dumped without planning like they are increasingly
in London, whereas New York and Chicago show the ordered way.

London-U. K Chicago-U. S. A
Excessive order can be just as much of a problem too. It may feel too
rigid that’s why an attractive city must seek variety and order. This is the idea
in a square in Telc in Czech Republic where every house is the same in width
and height but within that ordered pattern, every house has been allowed
freedom at the level of form and color or in Java-Eiland in Amsterdam where
the pattern is strict; each house has the same height and width, the color
range is restricted, but within this grid, each unit is completely individual.
Attractive cities crave organized complexity.

Telc-Czech Republic
The second thing that makes a city attractive is the visible life that it
offers. There are streets that are dead and streets that are alive such as the
live streets in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong-China
Contrast this with dead streets of many modern cities. Dead streets are
such that the ones where we have office buildings for example on both sides
and one would go there for work only as there isn’t anything else to see.
 Contrast this with a live street, where we can see things going on: a
bakery, market, restaurant, library; we love these streets because they are
filled with life and such streets make an attractive and efficient city that can
sustain itself. Attractive cities have streets that are full of life and people doing
stuff you can see through the windows.
The third point is that good cities are compact. A compact city like
Barcelona swallows a fraction of the energy of a sprawling one like Phoenix,
in Arizona. Its actually wonderful to have the balancing moderating influence
of living close to other people in uplifting surroundings. That’s why we need
tightly packed, well-ordered cities with lots of squares and public spaces in
which we can hang out.

Barcelona-Spain Phoenix-Arizona
All the most beautiful compact cities have squares. The Piazza di Santa
Maria in Trastevere, Rome is a public space, but intimate and closed enough
to feel like an extension of the homes around.
 Piazza di Santa Maria-Italy
Next comes the scale, modern cities are all about big things. In an
attractive city a person should maintain a certain scale with his surrounding
and adjacent buildings.
The city should be local and has its own identity. Cities need to have
strong characters connected to the use of distinctive local materials and forms.
The pale sandstone, of Millbrae Crescent in Glasgow’s south side, is local
material. The law should be that: don’t make your city from buildings that
could be just anywhere; find a style of architecture that reflects what makes
your location specific.

Glasgow- U. K
The efficient city uses available resources at their optimum to create a
city that has low congestion, yet high mobility for work and leisure. It has
high efficiency in using energy and space, and also ensures the greatest social,
economic and environmental benefits are realized from its financial
investments. These cities are usually sustainable such as Masdar city in Abu
Dhabi.
 Abu Dhabi- U.A.E
In my opinion the obstacles of building beautiful cities are not
economic; but are 2 mainly. Firstly, an intellectual confusion around beauty,
and secondly, lack of political will. The intellectual confusion is: we think no
one has a right to say what’s beautiful and what’s ugly.
There is beauty in cities such as Sydney, San Francisco and Bath and
Bordeaux and most other places don’t. proof lies in tourist statistics I assume.

Thinking of Edinburgh’s amazing New Town, which only got off the
ground because the government established clear rules to keep developers in
check. There must’ve been specific legislations for heights, quality of finish,
width of pavements, and character of skyline. I think I was able to analyze
what I researched by applying them in this city.