We walk at about 3 miles per hour, and most people are prepared to walk half a mile for routine tasks. These characteristics can determine the size of a neighbourhood. And yet urban space in the latter half of the twentieth century has increasingly been designed with reference to the characteristics of development mechanisms or free-flow traffic movement. This is not to say that we can naively ignore these aspects, quite the opposite. We have to get rather good at them so that we can design them in support of mankind rather than in domination.
Public spaces are thus our common ground in both a geographic and a spiritual sense.
The idea of a town or city is really indistinguishable from the idea of society. If we lack a consensus on an organising structure for the city, it is mainly because we lack an organising structure for society as a whole. Jan Gehl changed my life in 1976 when I read his book Livet Mellum Huserna . It demonstrated that towns and cities were not primarily for looking at but living in. To non-architects, this may seem unremarkable, but believe me, to an architect who had studied the visual world for five years this was a painful realisation, the urban design equivalent of a bright light on the road to Damascus.