Yogi Hale Hendlin at Aeon Magazine:
Self-sufficient cities, fostering health through clean air, water and lush botanical features, have appeared in futuristic visions for decades. Visual representations harken back at least a century to futurists sick of black soot, utilitarian architecture and industrialisation’s pollution sapping the beauty from buildings and the people who lived in them. As housing and architecture itself became industrialised and mass-produced, local flavour evaporated, and the patience to evoke beauty was lost. In the postwar period, it wasn’t only the Soviet Union where ugly block buildings took over. As cement and pre-fab became the tools of the global trade, cities became designed for cars, not humans, and buildings reflected this loss of connection to beauty and nature. Urbanisation at the expense of liveability not only harms our health and dampens the idyllic rus in urbe (bringing the charms of the countryside to the city), it also kills the spirit.
more here.
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