What have we done?

Some time ago, we decided it was best to settle in one place and live closer together. The village was born.



And it worked.



It worked so well, it was repeated.



Again.



And again.



And again.




The villages grew.



And grew.



Streets were the lifeblood of the town. We worked, talked, traded, faught, watched and laughed on them. The streets were for the people. They were scaled for people.



As were the buildings.



As were the towns.



You lived cheek by jowl in the village and worked on the nearby farm.



Or in the nearby forest.



Some towns were walled for protection.



Some spilled over the sides and grew organically.



Some grew according to the topography of the land.



Some were quite ordered.



And it all worked.

It all worked because it was built for people. It all worked because it was scaled for people. It all worked because the early Mesopotamians imparted their experience and knowledge of town planning to their children, who passed it on to theirs, and thiers to theirs, and so on, until the body of knowledge was so refined you could build a burgeoning village anywhere in no time. And that's exactly what we did. Over and over again, the world over.

Because we could.

Because we knew how.

But it won't be long now before those that hold thousands of years of this built up knowledge - the knowledge of building cities for people - die off. A whole philosophy, a whole art, a whole science will snuff out like the lost manuscripts of the Ancient Library of Alexandria.

And we will be the poorer for it.

When they do die off, the loss of their knowledge will go unnoticed. We haven't been listening to them for quite a while, anyway. Three or four generations, it has been. That's when we stopped building cities for people. That's when we started ruining existing cities that were built for people and turned them into cities that were built for machines.

And we are the poorer for it. Look at obsesity levels. Look at the growing rate of mental illnesses, like depression. We now build places that are inhospitable. So much so, that we spend more time indoors than ever before. So much so, we try and get away from these inhospitable places by holidaying in the very places you see photos of above, and used to be able to live in before we destroyed it all.

And yet, that was our choice. We continue to choose to live in these inhospitable places, over the types of places you see in the photos above.

We rejected this:



For this:



I have to ask.

What have we done?

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