The debate on densification and how the sustainable city is conceived is becoming relevant as a result of coronavirus and these days the concept of a healthy city or post-pandemic has begun to be coined. It is mistakenly thought that driving people away from the city centre will achieve quality of life and the health emergency has proven just the opposite. In the most peripheral sectors, the lack of access to health facilities, commercial equipment and services, has forced people to travel large to meet basic needs, a dependence on public transport, which results in a worse quality of life and in this emergency, risk to health.
Territorial inequity has always existed and it is time to address it, with a look that aims to bring services closer to people and connect areas where there is inequality. Adapting the city means changing the focus and understanding that when it densifies itself with balance, it gives more access to what people need for their daily life and that when they do not densifi, the cities are spreading and the authorities fail to respond in a timely or efficient manner to health, education, safety and transport needs in the farthest areas of the city.
Densification also allows to develop cities more benevolent to the environment, walking neighborhoods, outdoor life and use of public space in which linkage with estrangement can be favored.
It is worth looking at the international experience and looking for evidence of cities that have been able to drive healthy urban growth. In Vancouver and New York, densification improved the quality of life of people, who left cars at home, began to move on foot and occupy public green areas. Singapore, meanwhile, understood something essential about the advantages of urban density: that it could only keep green spaces growing upwards.
Therefore, the challenge of bringing the city closer to people is huge for both the authorities, those responsible for housing policies and developers. Today more than ever it becomes essential not to re-enable any kind of planning of a functional mono set. We must start promoting mixed buildings: commercial premises, offices and housing; and densify with diversity, integrating different social strata into all kinds of planning, preventing the jobs from being far from the points of residence.
Densification is the basis, and social and use diversity are a from the road to avoiding the great journeys that many are forced to take daily. We need denser, more diverse and compact cities, not only for a health issue, but also to improve the quality of life of all and reduce the ecological impact of cities on the environment. Believing that opposing densification is the way to care for people seems politically correct, but it is a terrible urban policy that in most cases has worse consequences than the evil it seeks to avoid. The pandemic has been tasked with demonstrating this.
The content poured into this opinion column is the sole responsibility of its author, and does not necessarily reflect the editorial line or position of El Mostrador.
