Urbanism: Why Your City Makes No Sense and You Love It Anyway

Urbanism is the strange lovechild of concrete, idealism, and unintended consequences. It’s what happens when humans stop wandering and start building places to put their coffee shops. And parking. And artisanal dog grooming studios. It’s also what turns a clearing in the woods into a metropolis with nine kinds of hummus available at 3am and a dedicated Instagram account for pigeons. Urbanism is how we shape cities, and in turn, how cities shape us. And yes, that shaping occasionally involves potholes, pigeons, and a man inexplicably playing jazz on a tuba in your underpass.

Way back—like, 2600 BCE back—the people of Mohenjo-daro were already doing the urbanism thing. They had straight roads, grid layouts, centralised drainage systems, and suspiciously perfect right angles. All very civilised, and a bit too ahead of their time. Urbanism, it turns out, is not modern. We’ve just added more coffee and glass towers. And now we’ve got zoning disputes, digital twins of buildings, and a disturbing obsession with something called placemaking.

Urbanism isn’t just about buildings—it’s about people moving through space like ants with Spotify. It’s the weird choreography of commuting, loitering, shopping, protesting, and occasionally salsa dancing in parks. It’s the science of where we place benches, and the art of not putting them where people actually want to sit. It’s about negotiating who gets to stand in the shade and who ends up squinting at a traffic light that’s stuck on amber.

In the 19th century, Baron Haussmann redesigned Paris with grand boulevards that doubled as anti-revolutionary measures. The idea? Make it impossible to barricade the streets. Urbanism: now with added political paranoia. The wide boulevards are gorgeous, of course. But they’re also like architectural eye-rolls at civil unrest. They transformed the city into a postcard and a policing strategy all at once.

Let’s talk sidewalks. Jane Jacobs, the urbanism guru who could out-argue a traffic engineer with a single eyebrow raise, saw sidewalks as the lifeblood of city safety. Not police, not CCTV. Just nosy neighbours, shopkeepers, and dog walkers keeping an eye on things. Her idea of urban vibrancy was closer to a village fair than a fortress. Sidewalks, she said, were where democracy happened—spontaneous, messy, and essential.

And then there’s the green belt. Originally invented to keep cities from spilling into the countryside like jam over toast, it ended up being the urban planning version of a boomerang. Yes, it protected fields. But it also helped push up house prices inside the cities and gave the term “commuter belt” a whole new meaning. Thanks for the nature. And the three-hour train ride. Some places now argue that green belts should be flexible, but good luck saying that aloud in a room full of heritage conservationists.

In cold-climate cities like Montreal and Minneapolis, they built skywalks and underground networks to escape the frostbite. Clever, yes. But they also vacuumed up all the street life and dumped it under fluorescent lighting. It’s a bit like choosing to live in an airport terminal. Urbanism versus winter: the war continues. And somewhere along the way, someone suggested heated pavements, which sound lovely until you see the electricity bill.

Urban heat islands are another perk of urban design. All that concrete and asphalt? It soaks up heat during the day and releases it at night like a grudge. Cities are often several degrees hotter than nearby rural areas, which makes sleeping in summer an exercise in existential despair. Trees are now not just decorative, but strategic. Urban foresters are the new climate warriors, wielding shade and canopy data.

Urbanism asks: who is the city for? Cars or people? In places where walkability wins, the city feels like a giant living room—chatty, accessible, spontaneous. Where cars dominate, it’s more like an anxiety dream involving roundabouts and horn honking. Every metre of pavement becomes a battleground between prams, wheelchairs, scooters, and cyclists with questionable brakes.

Speaking of design experiments, Brasília in Brazil was built from scratch in the 1960s to be the capital of the future. Viewed from above, it looks like an aeroplane. On the ground, residents complain that it feels like a geometry assignment with no shade. Urban idealism collided with Brazilian sunlight. The sunlight won. The pedestrian crossings are so vast they should come with a hydration plan.

Now enter the 15-minute city—an idea that’s gained traction in recent years. Everything you need—work, school, croissants—within a 15-minute walk or cycle. It’s urbanism meets lifestyle Pinterest board. Except when critics shout about it being a covert plot to control movement. As if mayors have the time for that. Paris is championing it, Melbourne is flirting with it, and some American cities are nodding politely while clinging to their SUVs.

Urban sprawl is when cities ooze outward like melted cheese. Sounds delicious. But it’s financially and environmentally exhausting. More roads to pave, more bins to empty, more fire hydrants to maintain. And your neighbour is now five miles away with nothing but tumbleweed and a dog in between. Public transport becomes a myth told in sad waiting rooms, and the town centre is a roundabout with dreams.

Suburbia didn’t just happen. It was planned, subsidised, and marketed. In post-war America, government policies and mortgage guarantees made cul-de-sacs and strip malls the dream. And cars. So many cars. It wasn’t just about choice—it was structural urban engineering with a side of backyard BBQ. And now we’ve inherited the commute, the traffic jams, and the creeping horror of realising the high street has five tanning salons and zero grocery shops.

Names on street signs are a subtle form of power. Colonial legacies, revolutions, corporate sponsorships—every city has its own flavour of awkward. Renaming roads is the urban version of editing Wikipedia: politically fraught and always under revision. Welcome to “Freedom Avenue”, formerly “Colonial Administrator Drive”, previously “Main Street”.

Zoning laws were first cooked up in 1916 New York to keep factories away from posh flats. Fair enough. But these days, zoning is like playing SimCity while blindfolded—full of unintended consequences. Want more housing? Sorry, that area is zoned for boutiques that never open. And don’t even ask about mixed-use. That’s the Voldemort of urban planning in some circles.

Some cities go vertical. Hong Kong doesn’t have space, so it builds upwards like it’s climbing out of a very deep well. Skyscrapers, skybridges, rooftop football pitches. Vertical urbanism means learning to love lifts, and fearing power cuts. It also means your local shop might be on the 13th floor, next to a kindergarten and a karaoke bar.

Slums are often dismissed, but many are examples of urban innovation under pressure. They may lack basic services, but they optimise space, recycling, and logistics like nobody’s business. When urbanism fails from above, it reboots from below. They’re not informal—they’re just planning without planners, and yes, often better than whatever the city council attempted last year.

The buzzword of the hour is “smart city.” Sensors, AI, automated traffic control. Sounds cool. Often ends up as bins that send emails and lampposts that talk back. Very Jetsons. Slightly Orwell. Occasionally Kafka. And always slightly broken when you need it most.

Gentrification is the urban version of a plot twist. First, artists move in. Then come cafés. Then come rising rents. Finally, the artists leave. The cycle spins faster than a warehouse loft espresso machine. The new residents talk about “vibrancy” while asking the local community centre to keep it down after 9pm.

Bikes lanes are simple, right? Add some paint and protection. But to some, they’re Satan’s roadworks. To others, they’re divine intervention. The divide is existential, the Twitter wars eternal. Cities without bike lanes feel old. Cities with them feel contested. And cities that get them right feel smug—and usually Dutch.

Third places—those not home, not work—are essential to city soul. Libraries, cafés, parks, pubs. These spaces foster community and accidental conversation. Remove them, and a city feels like a waiting room with no exit. Add them, and suddenly strangers chat, dogs meet, and democracy sneezes politely over a flat white.

Fun fact: Tokyo has more Michelin-starred restaurants than Paris. Why? It’s dense, walkable, and obsessed with quality. Proof that good urban form can also mean excellent sushi. Also: the food is often tucked into metro stations, proving that you can eat like royalty next to a vending machine and nobody blinks.

Urban farms are blooming—on rooftops, in containers, along old train tracks. They’re partly ecological and partly a reaction to the existential despair of supermarket lighting. They also make for fantastic Instagram backdrops and help reduce food miles one sprig of basil at a time.

Transit maps lie. They’re designed for clarity, not honesty. That straight blue line on the Tube? In reality, it corkscrews like a drunk octopus. Urbanism is equal parts navigation and narrative. And anyone who’s ever transferred at a mega-station knows the pain of spatial betrayal.

Today, over 55% of the world’s population lives in cities. That’s more than four billion people negotiating lifts, bus stops, rents, and kebab shops. Urbanism isn’t a niche—it’s where we live, work, love, argue, and try to park. It’s everything and everywhere and sometimes way too much all at once.

So next time you walk through a square, or curse a bus stop, or praise a public loo—remember, someone planned that. Or didn’t. Urbanism is our accidental masterpiece. A collective jigsaw of logic, chaos, dreamers, and people who think roundabouts are romantic. And if you’re lucky, there’s a good falafel place just around the corner.