Human Scale Cities
How urban design affects the psychology and social fabric of a society
As the exodus of friends from London to Dubai continues, I seem to have the same debate over and over: what a city’s design does to its people? This post is about how car-centric cities reshape our psychology and tear at the social fabric.
BUBBLE LIVING
What is the best model for a city, if we had to design it from the ground up? It would be a place where we’d step outside the door and have most amenities within walking distance - the doctor, school, grocery store, gym, retail & restaurants. We’d have green spaces where kids could play and strangers could meet. A place that encourages play and makes room for art, both of which are underrated but powerful tools for connecting with others. Not through forced conversation, but through shared curiosity. We’d build places we want to seek out to feel part of a community. Places that make us feel connected to the people around us.
What we have instead is this: wake up, elevator to parking, drive car to work, parking at work, elevator to office, finish work, elevator to parking, drive home, parking at home, elevator to apartment. Throw in a few more - elevator to parking, drive to X, parking at X, elevator to X - for the mall, gym, restaurant etc and you have the life of the inhabitants of most suburbs and badly designed cities. At no point in our day do we walk through a town square, bump into a stranger, or pass through a space we don’t control.
Friction that is created by the chaos of a city where people have to compromise, share, and connect is crucial for a coherent society. It is important for us to not live in constructed bubbles, whether they are online or offline. To be grounded to the “average” human experience is important for us to develop empathy. If we are “well off” then this can create a sense of gratitude for our situation, rather than distractedly chasing nonsense games our out of touch peer group is pursuing. Connectivity can create civic responsibility for fixing problems in our shared neighbourhood. When we eliminate public space, we lose that civic muscle. Chaos can create cross-pollination of ideas between people with very different backgrounds. It can teach tolerance for other people’s view points.
We often talk about climate change, housing shortages, mental health, or polarisation as separate problems. But many of them share a common root: the way we design our cities. If you design for cars, you get traffic. If you design for people, you get life.
WHERE MODERNISM WENT WRONG
In the early 20th century, the world was enchanted by machines. Assembly lines, electricity, and engines promised a new era of efficiency and control. That mechanistic and industrial mindset didn’t just transform factories. It also transformed cities. Architects like Le Corbusier envisioned a total break from the past. The messy, organic, street-level chaos of pre-industrial cities was seen as backwards. Instead, cities were to be designed from above, like blueprints, with rigid grids, and highways slicing through the old fabric. But what looks great from above isn’t necessarily practical for human living. The “Radiant City” was Le Corbusier’s dream: high-rise apartments spaced apart like silos, surrounded by highways and green lawns, where the mess of street life was eliminated in favour of function and clarity. Function, it turns out, is not the same as life.
This vision had enormous influence. In cities from Brasilia to Boston, from Paris to Lagos, the modernist ethos took root. Roads were widened, neighbourhoods flattened, pedestrians pushed to the margins. City planning became a top-down, abstract exercise. Robert Moses (he’s the “evil” guy in “Who framed Roger Rabbit”), perhaps the most famous American urban planner, wielded this power in New York like a general laying out a battlefield. In his world, traffic efficiency reigned supreme - even if it meant demolishing entire communities to make way for expressways. But the cost wasn’t just aesthetic, it was human.
Modernist design, in its obsession with order, stripped cities of their most vital elements: proximity, unpredictability, and intimacy. Neighbourhood shops disappeared into malls. Street corners turned into intersections. Parks were isolated rather than integrated. Buildings were designed as objects, not experiences. As Jan Gehl put it, “If you wanted to kill urban life, you couldn’t have done it better.”
What’s crucial to understand is that modernism didn’t just build differently - it thought differently. It treated people like components to be managed. It saw chaos as a flaw, not a feature. It imagined that if you could just separate uses (living here, working there, shopping somewhere else) everything would work better. Yes, the chaotic city comes with having to sometimes smell the sweat of another human on the subway. But it also comes with a grounding in reality and a sense of belonging that is healthy. Cities don’t function like machines they are ecosystems.
When we separate everything into zones and connect them by car, we destroy the small, serendipitous encounters that make a place feel alive. We also create deep social consequences. The suburbs become islands of sameness, while the inner city becomes a zone of disinvestment. Children stop playing in the street. Elderly people become isolated. Teenagers drift between parking lots. Public space disappears and with it, public life.
We see this legacy in countless cities today. In The Human Scale documentary, Chinese planners reflect on how they eagerly mimicked the West, stacking skylines higher and pushing people further apart. Only now do they realise the cost: the loss of “hutongs” (narrow alleys), street vendors, neighbourhood life. In Dhaka, banning rickshaws was framed as modernisation but it mainly punished the poor, increased congestion, and erased one of the most human-scaled transport systems in the world.
Modernism assumed that efficiency was enough - that if everyone had a place to sleep, a road to drive, and a place to work, the city had done its job. But a city isn’t a spreadsheet. It’s a social contract and a public performance. When you build only for efficiency, you forget to build for experience. The irony? Many of these car-first, zone-based cities now spend billions trying to fix the very problems they created. They build pedestrian plazas, reintroduce mixed-use zoning, and retrofit bike lanes into streets that were once designed to move cars as fast as possible. These are not cosmetic changes, they are corrections. Because now we understand what Le Corbusier didn’t: humans don’t thrive in cities designed like filing cabinets. We need friction, surprise, and scale. We need to see each other and that doesn’t happen at 60 kilometres an hour.
One of my many favourite spots in London is the digital experience right outside of Tottenham Court Station. People of all walks of life take a break and observe an artistic visual experience. It’s just as fun to look at the people there as it see the visuals.
5KM Per Hour
Human beings evolved to move at a walking pace - about 5 kilometres per hour. When a city is built at that pace, it gives us what we’re wired for: faces to read, gestures to interpret, smells and sounds to process. A human-scale city engages our senses and demands our presence. But most cities today aren’t built for humans. They’re built for cars.
In car-scale environments, the world blurs. Distances stretch, sidewalks vanish, and public life withers. We become a unit of traffic. We pass others in steel boxes. We don’t make eye contact because we can’t. The city no longer asks us to adapt, wait, notice, or yield. It becomes frictionless - and in doing so, becomes emotionally flat. We may prefer not dealing with all those tourists blocking our way in Times Square or Piccadilly Circus but it’s to our detriment long-term. These spaces where we can’t fully control our environment; where we have to navigate around a stroller; where we overhear snippets of conversation; where we share space with people we didn’t choose; this mild inconvenience and friction isn’t a flaw, it’s a feature. Because it teaches us something no app or algorithm can: how to live with other people.
Sociologist Richard Sennett calls public space the “civic gym” - a place where you practice tolerance, empathy, negotiation. You get used to difference. You’re reminded that the world isn’t built just for you. Philosopher Hannah Arendt saw the public square as the foundation of political life itself - the space where we appear before one another not as consumers or commuters, but as citizens. When a city invites us to walk, to sit, to gather, it’s inviting us to participate in society. This is why public space matters so much. It’s not just about leisure. It’s about identity and reality. If our daily life takes us only through private spheres (our car, our apartment, our office) we lose the calibration of being around strangers. We lose the habits of civility. We become a bubble in a city of bubbles. Public space pops those bubbles.
As The Human Scale documentary shows so clearly, when cities reclaim space from cars and give it back to people, something beautiful happens: life returns. People sit, flirt, read, perform. We build a shared atmosphere. We stop being data points in a planner’s spreadsheet and start being neighbours again. Urban scale shapes more than movement - it shapes morality. Every compromise we make on a sidewalk, every moment we yield to another’s presence, is a tiny act of civilisation. And every city that makes room for those acts is building something far more important than infrastructure. It’s building a culture.
REDESIGNING FOR HUMANS
The good news is that around the world, cities are quietly correcting course. Thankfully, city admins and planners have started to realise that reclaiming space from cars isn’t anti-progress but progress redefined.
Copenhagen was once just as car-centric as any modern capital. But over decades, Jan Gehl and others helped turn roads into walking streets. As cars disappeared, people came back. The city didn’t just become more pleasant but it’s become more “hyggelit”.
Melbourne revitalised its forgotten laneways. What were once boring alleys behind buildings are now full of life: cafés, murals, jazz trios, first dates, late-night debates. The change didn’t come from mega-projects, just a rethinking of how space could serve people instead of waste management.
New York shut down parts of Broadway and Times Square to traffic, initially with nothing more than paint and some cheap folding chairs. People immediately filled the space, because it turns out, they’d always wanted it.
Christchurch, after its devastating earthquake, didn’t simply rebuild the old skeleton. The people collectively reimagined their city: low-rise, walkable, communal. The tragedy became a catalyst for something better. More grounded and more liveable.
Dhaka has seen its citizens push back against the erasure of human-scale life. Rickshaws and pedestrians - villains in the eyes of car-centric planning - are being recognised as essential parts of the ecosystem, not relics of the past.
And now, London is finally reimagining Oxford Street - one of the busiest commercial streets in Europe - into a pedestrian-first zone. It's more than a traffic decision. It’s a cultural one. Do we build for speed and throughput, or do we build for conversation, pause, and community?
CONCLUSION
It’s tempting to believe the future will be sleek, seamless, and fully controlled. But life doesn’t happen in controlled environments - it happens in messy, surprising, shared ones - more Bladerunner rather than Jetsons. Stepping out of my apartment in West London I can walk for hours without feeling like the city isn’t created for me. I feel empowered by that freedom. I feel connected to my city. The serendipity I experience on the way grounds me in a reality that is not mediated by screens and algorithms but by the actual life in my locality.
We need friction. We need overheard arguments, impromptu performances, too many kids in a square chasing pigeons. We need a place to sit and look at people looking at things. If we want cities that feel alive - and people who feel connected - we have to stop designing them like transport hubs and start designing them like communities. I live in an area that has been redeveloped and can seem soulless from the outset. But by creating many green areas and seating arrangements throughout, life seeps into the concrete and connections are made between strangers.
We don’t need utopia. We need places that teach us how to live with others. And that starts with something as simple as a bench, a plaza, a walking path, or a moment where the city reminds us: you’re not alone.