Paris is known as “the capital of the 19th century”, and day to day, it feels like it. I live on a 19th-century Haussmannian street. I travel around on a late 19th-century invention, a bicycle with two equally sized wheels, when I’m not using the prehistoric technology of walking. Living here has helped me realise: the 20th century was rubbish for cities. All over Europe, in particular, cities are now peeling off the century’s imprint like a bad wallpapering job in ways that go beyond pushing out cars. The post-pandemic urban ideal is a cleaned-up version of the 19th-century city with 21st-century enhancements.
Early last century, cities made some fateful bad choices. Offered two new rival vehicles, they chose the gasoline-powered car over the clean, cheap and compact safety bicycle. Then in 1903, the first reinforced concrete skyscraper went up in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Concrete helps answer the vexed question of why modern cities are ugly. Before the 20th century, local, low-carbon, organic building materials, such as Parisian limestone, helped houses blend with the landscape. And before developers acquired the technology to build high, buildings were on a human scale, small enough for a pedestrian to take in: think of Haussmann’s six storeys, often with fine individual details. But the 20th century brought concrete and glass towers with undifferentiated flat surfaces. A woman I know who grew up in an English new town says she realised only later that living amid ugliness had made her childhood unhappier.
Cars and subway systems allowed cities to sprawl, so commuting was invented. Especially in the US, zoning laws sanctified the separation of home, work and entertainment. City centres stood empty at night and on weekends.
Now, we’re ditching bad modernity for 18th-century homeworking. In the US, about 30 per cent of paid full days are currently worked from home, and even more in high-tech cities. As commutes decline, banning cars becomes easier. Even the private electric car won’t be welcome in many European cities because it takes up too much space, and its production creates too much CO₂. Driverless cars are probably a long way off. However, cities should soon have driverless buses programmed to ride set routes, says Ross Douglas, founder of Autonomy, which stages urban sustainable mobility trade shows.
Subway use was falling in booming London, Paris and Washington even before the pandemic. Subways remain useful for moving people from suburbs to downtown. But these systems were built underground because the dogma of last century was that streets were for cars — and nobody likes travelling underground. When it comes to moving people within a city centre, subways are now being outcompeted by bikes, which let riders enjoy today’s ever more liveable, and lived-in, city centres. The current €36bn extension to the Paris metro may be the western world’s last ever great subway project. The next city will just give everyone an e-bike.
In the two regions with the most advanced transport infrastructure, western Europe and China, even intercity travel is returning to the 19th century, as trains displace planes. More international high-speed train routes are scheduled to open around Europe, most spectacularly, one from Paris to Berlin, though sadly, new passport controls are reducing London to the status of branch station.
The new carless urban ideal should work best in European cities, which were built before the car and have few of the New York-style office towers that are now becoming redundant. Most cities outside Europe remain stuck in 20th-century mode, only even more car-ridden. A decade ago, at the peak of Brazil’s boom, I asked a civic leader in São Paulo: surely rising wealth had improved city life? No, he said. It simply meant more traffic jams, pollution and children not being able to play outside.
I spent the football World Cup in Qatar, which has just finished building a 20th-century-style city of motorways and office towers. I reckon that even Qatar’s royal palaces are less beautiful than my perfectly ordinary Haussmannian building.
When done well, the 21st century enhances cities. WiFi has turned cafés, parks, even beaches into workspaces. Tinder and LinkedIn introduce you to people, and Google Maps helps you find them. But the best physical bits of today’s best cities were built by our ancestors. Some 19th-century working-class neighbourhoods are now coveted by multimillionaires. Modernity often just makes cities worse. That should be a humbling thought for innovators.
Follow Simon on Twitter @KuperSimon and email him at simon.kuper@ft.com
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