Cities with a human sense

Let's think for a moment about the city where we live.

• How long does it take us to get to work?
• What do we have nearby?
• How much do we walk?
• How much time do we spend each day just getting from one place to another?

We've grown so used to certain situations that we often stop questioning them. Until we visit another city, walk through another neighborhood, or discover that our daily life could work differently.

And then a question comes up that I find myself asking more and more often:

How much of our day do we actually use to live, and how much do we lose trying to get from one place to another?

Our cities are different, but many share a similar contradiction. For decades we separated housing, work, retail and services; we spread our cities out, and then we built infrastructure to reconnect what we had pushed apart.

That's why today we can cover greater distances than ever and, paradoxically, in many cities we need to cover them just to do almost everything.

But a city also needs to produce, create jobs, attract investment, build housing, move people, supply homes and businesses, and remain competitive.

The real challenge is achieving both things at once:

productive cities that, at the same time, make our everyday life simpler.

That's where, for me, a city with a human sense begins.

Not as another urban-planning label, but as a different way of looking at our cities. And when I start looking at them from that perspective, I find five shifts in perspective that can help us understand their problems better, but also anticipate opportunities.

1. FROM THE LOT TO THE SURROUNDINGS

When we evaluate a plot of land, we usually ask ourselves how many square meters we can build, what uses it allows, or what its returns could be.

But we should also look a few blocks around it:

• Who passes by, and why?
• How is it connected to transportation?
• What activities and services exist?
• What's starting to change?

A station, a university, a new development or a regulatory change can alter flows and transform the dynamics of a place.

Then we stop looking only at what a location is today and start asking what it could become tomorrow.

And this way of reading a place shouldn't matter to us only when we're evaluating a plot of land. It can also help us decide where to invest, where to develop, where to open a store, where to locate an operation, or where to prioritize infrastructure.

Because to truly understand a place's potential, it's not enough to know where it is. We need to know what it lets us access.

2. FROM MOBILITY TO ACCESSIBILITY

Let's imagine two people. One needs to travel 25 kilometers every day to work, shop and access services. The other can meet a good part of those needs close to home.

Who has the better city?

Maybe it's not whoever can move faster, but whoever has more opportunities within reach.

A good city shouldn't just try to reduce our travel time. It should also bring housing, jobs, retail, education, health and services closer together.

When that happens, proximity stops being just a matter of quality of life. It also starts to influence where we want to live, where new demand appears, where it makes sense to invest, and where certain activities can thrive.

Especially around public transportation.

3. FROM STATIONS TO PLACES

A station can move thousands of people every day and generate very little activity around it.

Many of us have walked out of a station at some point to find ourselves facing large avenues, parking lots, or spaces we simply want to cross through.

Transportation worked, but the urban opportunity remained incomplete.

That's why, beyond how many people pass through a station, I care about knowing what they do once they step outside.

• Do they continue their trip right away?
• Do they walk around and stay?
• Do they shop?
• Do they work or live nearby?

When housing, retail, services and public space start meeting around transportation, flow can turn into activity.

And understanding that transformation before it becomes evident can help us anticipate new centers of activity, new demand and new opportunities.

But to achieve that, we need something more than people passing through.

4. FROM FLOW TO PERMANENCE

There are places where thousands of people pass through daily without stopping, and others where we walk more slowly, look at a shop window, walk into a store, or decide to stay.

The difference isn't necessarily the number of people, but what the place gets them to do.

Flow → permanence → activity → consumption → value.

Good sidewalks, shade, safe crossings, active façades, mixed uses, retail and places to stay can change that relationship.

And then urban quality also takes on an economic dimension:

• For retail, demand.
• For a developer, appeal.
• For an investor, value.
• For the city, activity.
• For those of us who live there, a better urban experience.

But if we want more active places, with housing, retail, restaurants and services, we also need to think about what allows all of that activity to function every day, and which almost never shows up in the renderings:

How do we supply it?

5. FROM A CITY THAT CONSUMES TO A CITY THAT KNOWS HOW TO SUPPLY ITSELF

Everything we use in a city had to arrive: food, medicine, products, materials and packages. And afterward, waste, packaging and returns will also have to leave.

And yet, we often design housing, retail, streets and public space first, and only afterward think about how to supply them.

While we want less congestion, fewer vehicles and better spaces to walk, we also buy more online and expect faster and faster deliveries.

How do we make both things compatible?

Urban microhubs, consolidated deliveries, pickup points, reverse logistics, staggered schedules and proper systems for the last stretch can be part of the answer.

But before that, we need something more important: bringing logistics into the conversation from the moment we start thinking about the city.

Because if we know that a development will generate housing, restaurants, retail, services and deliveries, we can also plan how it will be supplied before the problem shows up on the street.

And here the five shifts end up meeting:

Surroundings → accessibility → transportation → permanence → supply.

These aren't separate conversations. They're parts of the same urban system.

And maybe that's one of our biggest challenges: learning to make decisions by understanding what happens before and after each one of them.

We'll keep needing to measure square meters, density, riders, traffic, investment and returns. But we should also ask ourselves how much everyday time we're getting back, what opportunities we're bringing closer, what activity we're generating, and how we manage to supply it without harming the city we want to build.

Because behind those indicators, opportunities that aren't yet obvious can also appear.

A piece of infrastructure can change flows. Flows can generate permanence. Permanence can attract activity. And that activity can transform the value of a location.

To see it, we have to learn to read the city before everything becomes obvious.

That's why, when I talk about cities with a human sense, I'm not thinking about copying any particular city. I'm thinking about getting urban development, economic activity and quality of life to stop moving down separate paths.

We can be architects, urban planners, developers, investors, retailers, logistics professionals or people responsible for public decisions. We can observe the city from different places, but our decisions end up meeting on the same streets and affecting the same people.

Maybe then we should add a question that rarely shows up in a spreadsheet:

Will this decision make life a little better for the people who will use that place?

Because regardless of our profession or where in the world we're reading this from, we're all residents of some city.