I was a child in a neighborhood of a big city. Around my house, in a mysterious perimeter, in a bubble delimited by the roar of the avenues, life had the makings of a town. Children’s flocks chasing each other. Little and slow traffic, streets under our entire sovereignty. An abandoned house, with its jungle garden, where we went hunting for ghosts or mysterious noises for the pure pleasure of sharing fear. A river the color of mud with neglected and lush banks, where you can climb trees. I remember the tedium, the impatience and the camaraderie, sitting on the backs of the benches in the squares. That crazy way of spending time during those summers in which we were eternal. The learning of desire, the first crazy crushes. We went out into the street, without money, to walk through thirst and confusion, to talk and sing under the privets while the sun set.
Today, despite green proclamations, cities cut down trees, parks decrease, and concrete squares proliferate. The benches disappear where you can sit and let the hours pass for free, where you can feel the welcome of an improvised coexistence. Its absence pushes us to pay the bill for comfort in terraces, restaurants or stores. Uncomfortable urbanism triumphs, cement deserts, the outdoors without plant canopies: harsh hostility in the face of hospitality. Public space looks less and less like a collective extension of the home, and more and more like the cold corridors of a shopping center. He who does not want or cannot spend, exiled from consumption, can only circulate, like a wandering pedestrian.
We already have the word “bank” associated with money more than with the seat where we can rest and meet with other people, without the urge to buy. In reality, the first meaning derives from the second. At the end of the Middle Ages, the banker appeared, a character who sat there receiving and lending money. It was a way of offering himself to his clients, clearly visible, in the busiest squares. Some dictionaries and commercial treatises from the 17th century date back to the term “bankruptcy”: when the lender lost his solvency or deceived his fellow citizens, he was forced to publicly destroy his bank as a sign of infamy. Others took his place, displacing them.
Although they may seem inconsequential, urban planning decisions have immense consequences because they shape the patterns of our movements and define the links between people. In Death and life of big cities, the writer and activist Jane Jacobs reflected on the streets as territories of encounter between diverse people. In an era dominated by opposing currents, Jacobs defended neighborhoods where people from different origins coexist, mingle, collide, play and do mutual favors. She defended the organized complexity of cities, the ballet of people who cross paths and discover each other in their daily itineraries.
The benches – for sitting – and the vegetal latticework of the trees favor meetings: they relieve, temper, make the days’ routes habitable and welcoming. Conversations are more likely in attractive places to stop. Sick or elderly people need seats where they can rest on their walks. Urban vitality hangs by a very thin thread that no one should cut. In 1923, the Zaragoza anarchist Amparo Poch, one of the first women to graduate in Medicine, wrote in the newspaper The Voice of the Region, after a felling in the surroundings of his house: “I have seen the trees that were the necklace and the life of this poor street disappear. “I have mourned the deaths of my fellow trees.”
Our Greek ancestors invented the agora as an urban space to be together. Originally it was not the market, as it is often translated, but a meeting place where citizens born in freedom could gather – in a primitive Congress – to listen to civic announcements and talk about politics. Later it would also house the merchants’ stalls. The first performances of classical tragedies and comedies took place in or around Athens Square. The sophist Protagoras taught in public buildings; Parmenides, Anaxagoras and others visited the agora, where they shared their ideas with the public; There Socrates bluntly questioned his fellow citizens about their values. Fountains, architecture, porches and gardens offered protection from the sun and rain. From the Athenian porticoes—theseas— derives the name from Stoicism, since the philosopher Zeno of Citium taught his teachings there. The wise Diogenes found in his shadow a good solution for the life of an exile with a minimal economy. “Look at the portico of Zeus and the avenue of parades,” said the philosopher, “it would seem that the Athenians have decorated them so that I can have my home here.”
The agora of Athens was a first experiment in citizenship in the incipient democracy. There you could hear the continuous hum of conversations, the resounding voices of speakers, the music of symposia, the constant polyphony of opinions, controversies and conflicts. The agora was not only a daily exhibition of agricultural products and fresh fish; It was a daily market of ideas, the place where citizens created an improvised newspaper every day, effervescent with bold headlines, breaking news, columns and loud editorials.
Today the discourse becomes—along with the streets—hard and unpleasant. Common life needs to expand through friendly spaces, squares that nourish rest and pause, with tree domes, refreshing fountains, benches to rest and discover others. With shadows that protect children’s play, outdoor reading, anxious waiting, a date, a quick meal, an ocean of time. Open to everyone, without the need to spend. There, in the conviction that together we think better, the public conversation that nourishes democracy is built. If we lose that trust and those places of confluence; Yes, as Jorge Dioni warns in The unrest of the cities, our territories of socialization are private and based on consumption, we run the risk of thinking of ourselves only in the first person, without context: self-help, self-promotion and self-exploitation. By opting for the primacy of the individual, we would travel the opposite journey: from the agora to the ego.
The way of understanding streets, squares and buildings does not only pursue functionality or beauty. It exerts a powerful influence on our way of feeling and thinking; builds our perception of security; It inclines us to undertake certain activities rather than others. If collective spaces are not welcoming, they lead to lack of communication. The absence of trees and the helplessness of traffic jams can trigger a dull feeling of anguish and loneliness. Non-places, the ones we pass through when walking through a shopping center, driving on the highway or waiting for our flight at an airport, are allied with fleeting human relationships. Thus we end up in a more individualistic, less communal thinking. Without parks or benches, separated and hurried, instead of sitting and chatting, we see our neighbors as a hindrance to walking quickly, or even as an adversary. Politics, science of cop, is an art that invites us to imagine squares—cities, continents, worlds—where we can live, converse and reach consensus together. An arid, harsh and isolated public landscape would lead us to bankruptcy.
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