A group of people walking around The Vessel in New York City.
-OpEd-
BOGOTÁ — One of the most fascinating aspects of informalities — if not chaos — in cities, is their peculiar, visual richness. That can come from the orderly disorder of street vendors, ready to run and relocate when the police arrive, or the perennially unfinished constructions in shantytowns or urban sprawl that end up becoming half the city.
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The living city is organic, pulsating and intense. It is also, often, unsafe. But that is possibly because we do not understand it as the habitat of hundreds of thousands of radically different people, each with his or her own needs, dreams or phobias. People connect through numerous networks that may not be universally intelligible. Complexity is intrinsic to the human habitat.
Heavy movement of people at Little Island Park on Pier 55. It is a public artificial island located in the Hudson River, west of Manhattan in the city of New York, adjacent to Hudson River Park.
Leco Viana/TheNEWS2/ZUMA
Traditional evolution
Thomas Heatherwick, the designer behind such works as The Vessel in New York, the Google building in San Diego or London's new double-decker buses (because even bastions of tradition evolve), our works need to recover their complexity if our activities and lives are to be at all meaningful.
Tired and jaded citizens could be the result of living in jaded cities made by jaded people. Or are clever businesses making us believe there is no well-being without boredom, nor peace without inertia?
Culture is a fundamental and essential part of enjoyable and meaningful human existence.
We must, on the contrary, feed our brains and stimulate the senses as we begin to adapt to the climate crisis. But beyond basic survival, we must defend culture as a fundamental and essential part of enjoyable and meaningful human existence.
No other species appears to have this sense of enjoyment, even if American philosopher Martha Nussbaum insists living beings have an equal desire to live, making predation immoral. She might test out her theories trying to feed tofu to a caiman and convincing spider wasps not to eat but to weave webs with spiders.
Reimagining the human habitat
The human habitat must be redesigned to include the nature and biodiversity that we have robbed of its territory — or at least to create new spaces for fauna and flora. One example of people and cities teaming up to protect a territory is in Barranquilla. This city in northern Colombia is starting to understand this and reshaping its ties to the Magdalena river and the sea.
This includes the connections between various actors of urban life — although there is a ways to go before truly chipping away at its class divisions. The idea of "BiodiverCities" is not to surreptitiously reinforce racism, class divisions or female vulnerability, in yet another greenwashing exercise with a faint social tinge. Perhaps the crassest example of segmentation is in the formal stratification of districts in a place like Bogotá, which affects elements ranging from property values to the size of your bills.
The love of beauty will always be our species' most genuine quality.
Humanize is a revivalist call that is both modernist and cyborg! It recognizes that vibrant thought needs passion and vice versa. As the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt suggested, it isn't efficiency (nevermind greed), but beauty that must guide human adventure.
Despite of its subjectivity, the love of beauty will always be our species' most genuine quality. And just as, evidently, there is never a straight line in nature. So let us embrace the crooked line and the shabby kiosk in the cities of this new era we have helped to create.
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