How can anyone design a city without first learning to read it?

I don't mean reading blueprints.

Or indicators.

Or renderings.

I mean something far more important: learning to read the city that emerges when people go out and live it.

For many years I thought understanding a city meant analyzing its infrastructure, its buildings, or its major projects.

Until I started walking it.

That's when I discovered cities tell a completely different story when you observe them from the street.

From that moment on, walking stopped being just a way of getting around a city.

It became a way of understanding it.

The city that never appears on the blueprints

Blueprints are indispensable.

They show us a city's structure, its streets, its buildings, its connections and its growth.

But there's a city that never appears drawn.

The city...

  • Where people decide to stay.

  • Where they prefer to walk.

  • Where spontaneous encounters happen.

  • Where they shop, work, or simply enjoy public space.

And that city can only be discovered by walking it.

Over time I understood that every city leaves clues.

The good news is that anyone can learn to read a city.

You don't need to be an urbanist, an architect, a real estate developer, or an urban planner.

You just need to learn to notice what most people overlook.

The five questions I use to start reading a city

They're not meant to be a universal formula.

They're simply the first questions I always ask myself when I walk a city for the first time.

1. Where do people decide to stay?

A packed square.

A café where it's hard to find a table.

A street where people linger longer than they need to.

That's rarely a coincidence.

When people decide to stay, there's usually a combination of factors the city has gotten right: accessibility, comfort, safety, activity, identity, or simply a good urban experience.

Dwell time is probably one of the best indicators of urban quality.

2. How do people actually move?

Plans show intended routes.

People create real ones.

Often we find improvised paths cut across the grass, spontaneous crossings, or streets with unexpected levels of activity.

Those everyday decisions reveal how a city actually functions.

And, above all, how people adapt it to their own needs.

3. What places does it avoid?

Cities can also be read through their silences.

There are streets nobody wants to walk down.

Public spaces where almost no one lingers.

Empty storefronts.

Squares that never quite become gathering places.

Observing those voids can be just as revealing as studying the places that succeed.

Because often the problem isn't the architecture.

It's how that space relates to the city.

4. Where do spontaneous encounters happen?

One of the best indicators of a good city is its ability to generate encounters that were never planned.

A conversation in a café.

Two neighbors crossing paths in a square.

Kids playing while the adults talk.

People staying in a space with no rush to leave.

When that happens naturally, the city is usually doing its job well.

5. What decisions made all of that possible?

This is probably the most important question.

Because behind every appealing neighborhood...

Behind every successful public space...

And every street full of life...

There were always decisions made years earlier.

For example:

  • Mobility.

  • Public space.

  • Mixed use.

  • Retail.

  • Housing.

  • Connectivity between people and opportunity.

When we understand those decisions, we stop looking only at the outcome.

We start understanding the process that made that city possible.

Reading a city changes the way you design it

Since I started walking cities this way, I stopped looking only at the buildings.

I started watching the people.

And once you understand how they live, how they move, and how they use the city...

You start understanding things no blueprint can show you.

Every trip reinforces that idea.

Because no city can be understood from behind a desk alone.

Cities speak.

They just don't do it with words.

They speak through the people who live them every day.

An invitation to look at cities differently

I believe that for many years we've poured enormous effort into learning how to design cities.

Perhaps it's time to devote the same effort to learning how to read them.

Anyone who learns to read a city starts noticing things that once went unseen.

  • Opportunities others don't see yet.

  • Neighborhoods with potential before the market discovers them.

  • Urban decisions that explain why a city works... or why it stops working.

  • The relationship between physical space and the way people live.

So, before designing a city...

We first have to learn to read it.

Because a city doesn't reveal its true story on a blueprint.

It reveals it when people go out and live it.