Enrique Peñalosa—A Lens for Inventing a Better City
Enrique Peñalosa Keynote Speaker (Bogotá, Colombia)
Opening address, Day ONE
A Lens for Inventing a Better Cit y
I am extremely thankful to you, to FORM, to Perth for inviting me, it’s extremely generous that such an advanced, successful city invites somebody from a developing country such as Colombia. I have thought of presenting a lot of things relative to our experience in Bogotá but after a couple of days here, I think my function is also to present things that are relevant to here: debatable, controversial, different. One of the things that makes us different from other beings is that we do not have to accept our world as it is. We can dream and we can change it. But why would we change our city? I would say it’s not because we want to make it more sustainable; it’s basically because we want to be happier. And happiness of course is very difficult to define, but clearly is the only thing that really matters. And a city can be a very powerful means to provide happiness.
ENRIQUE PEŃALOSA—EDITED PRESENTATION
Many studies say beyond a certain point more income will not make us happier. But at any income, a good city can make people happier. A great city creates wellbeing, creates happiness, inclusion.
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[How] can we propose transport solutions if we do not know what kind of city we want? Do we want Houston or do we want Amsterdam? Even before we know what kind of city model we want we need to know how we want to live, because a city is only a means to a way of life. Even if we are going to talk about something apparently technical such as transport it really has more to do with psychology or with religion than with engineering. How do we get new ideas for our cities? We get new ideas, themes, if we look through a lens. If we look through the lens of equity, of ideology. Ideology is axiomatic, it springs from our heart, our primordial being, it’s not something that can be discussed. It’s something we believe: that there should be more equality in society. As Jan Gehl says, a good city is one where we want to be outside, in the street, in public space, not inside homes or in a shopping mall. One where walking is not only safe, but it’s a pleasure to walk or to ride a bicycle (which is only a more efficient way of walking).
We are pedestrians, we are walking animals, we need to walk, not in order to survive; we could survive all our lives in an apartment, but we would feel different. In the same way we cannot measure how wide a footpath should be, it’s something we feel in our heart. We need to be with people, we need to walk to be happy just as birds need to fly or deer need to run. So a good city is a great city for walking, for seeing people. In a good city people do not feel inferior, rich and poor meet in public spaces. A good city’s good for the most vulnerable citizens, for the elderly, for children, for people with wheelchairs. If it’s good for them it tends to be good for everybody else. In a good city we have contact with nature—you have such amazing contact with nature in Perth—a good city is one where we tend to know our neighbours. But all of these are ideological objectives, this is not something that can be measured, or learned with technology. It’s not something legal, it’s something that simply reaches our heart and soul.
If we do not have our ideological lens it is very difficult to find what is wrong with cities, we tend to get used to things the way they are. I would say our cities are not just a little wrong. They are totally wrong, all our cities. And why are they wrong? Basically because we are in fear of getting killed, if we tell any three year old child anywhere in the world ‘Watch out! A car!’ the child will jump in fright and with good reason, because tens of thousands of children are killed by cars every year in the world. But what is amazing is that we think this is normal, that this is progress. I think we need a totally radical change of paradigm. Hopefully in 200 years, people will say how could people live in those horrible 2015 cities? The same way we think London in 1800 was horrible and yet at that time it was the most admired city on the planet. Let’s look at a city through the lens of equality. We cannot have income equality today, the whole world has accepted that the best way to manage most societies’ resources is private property and the market. But that necessarily generates inequality for
the market to work, some people make more money, others less, some companies succeed, others fail, so what kind of equality can we have today? I think it has a lot to do with cities.
We can have democratic equality. This means the first article of all constitutions say ‘all citizens are equal before the law’. If this is true, this is not just poetry. If this is true then it’s clear that a bus with 80 passengers has a right to 80 times more road space than a car with one. Or somebody on a bicycle has the same right to road space as somebody in a Rolls Royce. Also, if all citizens are equal then public good prevails over private interest. And so if something needs to be done which benefits the majority, even though it affects a few. Another kind of equality we can have is ‘quality of life’ equality. Especially for children, [so they] have access, beyond health or education, to green [spaces], to sports facilities, to swimming pools, music lessons. Much of this can be achieved by a great city. A good city can construct these new kinds of income equality. Out of the whole universe, the whole planet, the only microscopic piece of the world to which we have right of access is public pedestrian space in our city. This is an extremely important part of our world, and when we are talking about great cities, the most important thing we are talking about is public pedestrian space, how to make [it] better: safe, pleasant, comfortable, fun. But there is a big political debate about this, because [you] try to get more space for pedestrians and take some space away for cars and see if it’s easy. When shopping malls replace public pedestrian space as a meeting place for people, I would say it is a symptom that a city is ill. And unfortunately this is what is happening in many places all over the world, especially the developing world. People go to the mall not even to buy, they just go to walk, to have a coffee, to have an ice cream, because they are safe spaces with no risk of getting killed by a car. But even now, if you come to a new city and you ask the concierge of a hotel, ‘tell me, what is a nice place to go to’, the