Blog

Philip B. Stafford highlights the imbalanced priorities of spending and care for elders: while significant funds are spent on aging- related health costs, many countries, including the US,  rank inadequately in terms of aging support. This data supports the notion that this is “not a personal problem, but a community challenge!”

Michael Mehaffy, Executive Director of the Sustasis Foundation spoke about the urgency to find a better way of building our cities than we are doing at present because in the next 50 years we will produce more urban fabric than in the last 5,000 years.

“What have we learned?” asks Michael. We have learned that to create a truly livable, healthy city is all about facilitating connective relationships at different levels. We need to think about urbanism as a “place network”. The way the built environment is designed facilitates interaction in many subtle ways between the public realm, people in the street, and the private realm, people in the surrounding buildings.

“I am glad Suzanne proposed this title for my talk because what we are talking about today as the dysfunctional city is nothing more than what used to be called the ‘Functional’ city.”

In 1921, Corbusier, who, Ettore reminds us, was sponsored by the automobile manufacturer, Voisin, created a vision of a utopian city of 3 million inhabitants, based on the automobile. In 1925 he drew up plans for the destruction of what he considered the ‘dysfunctional’ Marais district of Paris, replacing it with a ‘Functional’ grid plan arrangement of tower blocks and highways, shopping malls and office blocks designed on the ‘car scale’ called ‘Plan Voisin’. In 1931, CIAM, with Corbusier a dominant voice in that group, proposed a vision of the Functional City, based on the idea of zoning.

We urban planners need to stop creating a built environment that is making people sick and causing premature deaths. I am not talking here about the dangers of traffic or pollution, lack of healthy food, or damage to the eco-system. I am talking about how some of the most common forms of urban development – suburban sprawl and vertical high-rise sprawl - cause loneliness, which can lead to depression, chronic inflammation, and life-threatening diseases, including increased risk of cancer. “Loneliness”, says Steve Cole, a genomics researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, “really is one of the most threatening experiences we can have.”