How to Build a Better City in Mordern Society?（Ⅰ）

To explore a method for building better homeland

Yihan He (Jason)

I watched a video from YouTube which was about a discussion for building better cities. The speaker Mr. Peter Calthorpe told us a fact that the current solutions for climates can’t save all the people who live in Earth, our homeland. Because it is not only depending on shaping environment when we want to shape our city, but also our social wellbeing, economic energy, and community with connection and consciousness. About this opinion, I totally agree. And I think Humanity decides the nature of city, including the unique development because we are the main users in a city. However, in the several decades, people ignored the law of natural development, our daily requirements for economy, science and technology are increasing drastically. The affordability of the environment is overloaded. We need to think about some methods to let it breathe.

Figure1: Youtube Video,TED Speech by Peter Calthorpe, published by 31th of August,2017(162) 7 principles for building better cities | Peter Calthorpe – YouTube

Peter Calthorpe told us seven principles which is Preserve, Mix, Walk, Bike, Connect, Ride, and Focus respectively.

The first example for improving our city environment is China, Chongqin. There is a map indicating that the several circles are walking radius. It means every circle promises a principle that people can walk to working place within 15minutes by BRT and Metro. It is very similar to Jacob’s article “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” which I read last semester when Professor Ali Madanipour recommended for us. As I know, transiting system needs large-scale investment and energy. Meanwhile, we need to think about the nature. For instance, greening infrastructure and landscape and keeping the ecological characteristics. Chongqin, this city has achieved to this goal gradually. In conclusion, combination with building and ecology is quite important.

Figure 2: Map information, TED Speech by Peter Calthorpe, published by 31th of August,2017(162) 7 principles for building better cities | Peter Calthorpe – YouTube

When Peter said, think of the logic: if one third people who live in the city have cars, why we need to give 100 per cent of our streets to cars? Why not 30 percent?” To be honest, People don’t want to give up driving cars because of status, reputations and many external things. And I think it is a normal phenomenon for current society. We need to give city more opportunities to create some breathing and relaxing urban space. If we do this, city will be run better.

This is the half part of this article, the next chapter I will continuing discussing this topic.