Enrique Penalosa spoke here in Brisbane last week and opened my eyes to new ways of seeing cities.
Mayor of Bogotá, Columbia, for three years until 2001, Penalosa made major improvements in the city’s transportation system, put in 300 kilometres (more than 180 miles) of bicycle and walking trails, and left behind a network of 1,200 parks and public spaces.
What are cities for, he asked a packed auditorium at Griffith University, cars or children?
A highway through a city is like a fence in a pasture, he said, separating people from each other. Highways also give special privileges to some people (car owners) and not others.
And, “A city is a collective work of art.”
His fundamental beliefs include at least these two: human beings should come first (“humans are sacred”) and democracy depends on providing both equality before the law and the chance for the poor to move as freely outdoors as the wealthy usually can.
Sidewalks, bike paths, parks, other open public spaces, and mass transportation can further democracy and make cities great. When precedence is given to cars and highways, democracy suffers and cities fall short of their potential.
“Every great city has at least one great public space where even rich people can not avoid going, where the rich and the poor are together,” he said, citing as an example Central Park in New York City.
“Nobody ever returned from France talking about what great highways Paris has,” he said. And yet, the 20th Century was “disastrous in urban history” because, “We built cities for cars. People came second.”
Now, more than 200,000 children in the world are killed by cars every year, Penalosa claims, and the word “car” triggers in children nearly everywhere the instinctively fearful reaction the word “wolf” called up for Medieval children.
Planners of Australian cities in the 18th and 19th Centuries seem to have grasped well the importance of public parks, given the squares and botanical gardens we’ve seen in Brisbane, in Melbourne, in Perth, in Sydney, and in other urban areas here.
Australia does well something else Penalosa urges nations to do: keep shorelines open to all. Vast stretches of ocean and lake frontage here are lined with parks, with trees, grass, and pathways for bikes and pedestrians.
Coming from a country where private ownership of land most often reaches to the high tide or high water mark and access to the remaining public space is limited to occasional access points, the Australian practice seems to us to be wonderfully far-sighted and egalitarian.
The wealthy owners of homes, condo units, and businesses still have ocean or lake views, but they just have to look, usually, over a roadway and then a park space that is open to the use of everyone.
Penalosa suggests one up-grade. He would have the roadway be on the back side of those buildings, moving cars a block farther away from the shoreline parks and their children at play.
More on his view next time, including five characteristics of a city that might deserve to be thought of as a work of art.
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