Soft City: Soft is Hard to Break

What makes human settlements last? How could Rome survive the fall of the Empire and thousands of years later be capital of modern Italy? Dresden and Hiroshima were bombed to the ground, yet were reborn, from only dust and memories. Meanwhile, why do many new planned cities fail to thrive? Will Brasilia ever become a Rio or will Canberra ever become a Sydney?

At the same time, there are favelas, which demonstrate resilience and have much more life than heavily subsidized, planned housing projects. Arguably, some informal settlements, without architects or designers or subsidies, built on the least valuable land, have created surprisingly sustainable, inclusive, and close-knit communities, responsive to the evolving needs of their residents.

To make a better habitat for ourselves, we need to deal with challenges around us, and to deal with those challenges we need to embrace them. We need to be better connected to world around us. Building walls doesn’t solve the challenge of what is on the other side. In many ways it only accentuates the problem. Instead we need to build relationships. As we face climate change, segregation, congestion, and rapid urbanization, we need to build better relationships with the planet, with people, and with place. Building stand-alone, air-conditioned buildings up in the sky or in gated communities, building more roads and having autonomous cars won’t connect us to the global challenges or to each other, in order to ultimately deal with them together.

The town or city is a system of relationships, a place where multiple overlapping systems of different relationships are co-located—public and private, common and individual, formal and informal. Like the layers of nature in the forest, it is the multiple and interconnected relationships that connect different phenomena to each other and increase resilience of the whole.

We know from life that a strong relationship is not rigid one. Sensitivity and responsiveness are vital components of a good relationship and being in control doesn’t mean never changing your position, in fact quite the opposite. Being in control means being able to respond appropriately at a particular moment and in a particular situation, and that response is not always going to be the same. There is give and take, there is time for opening up and time for shutting up. Soft relationships, because of their sensitivity and responsiveness, can do much more and last longer than hard ones. In this way, we might say that soft is hard to break.

Knowing that life is constantly changing, we need a physical framework that adapts and changes with us—something living, something organic, something soft.

The soft city is not just built form. Every town or city is a complex combination of hardware and software. Hardware is the physical form, the structure, the streets and buildings, everything that is designed and built. The software is made up of all the invisible structures of legislation and finance, planning and education, democracy and customs and culture, behavior and trust. This book has been mostly about the hardware of how towns and cities are built, but the software deserve just as much attention.

You can see glimpses of the soft city everywhere; low-cost, low-tech, larger and smaller phenomena, explicit or subtle tolerances and tendencies, all of which somehow, in the short term make your everyday life more enjoyable. In the longer term the soft city can help tackle some of the great challenges facing human beings on this planet. What they have in common is accommodating the density and diversity of everyday life, bringing the opportunity to experience a better life closer.

While the connection of people to nature and people to place are important, I believe the connection of people to other people is the most important. Only when people come together can they truly understand what they have in common, and then together explore how much is actually possible.

Winston Churchill famously said “We shape our buildings, and afterwards, our buildings shape us”. From the work of Jan Gehl, Jane Jacobs, and others, we know that the physical form of environment influences our behavior. But before we decide what to build, we need to decide how we want to live our lives and what sort of world we want to live in.

And as Jan Gehl says, first life, then spaces, and buildings last.

This is an excerpt from the book ‘Soft City: Building Density for Everyday Life,’ written by former Creative Director and Partner David Sim with support from Gehl and Realdania.