Where Our Cities Come From — and What They Reveal About Us

If you want to understand what a society truly values, don’t start with its slogans. Start with its streets.

Cities are not accidental. They are arguments, built in concrete and wood and brick and asphalt. Every plan — whether carefully drawn or loosely evolved — reveals what people feared, worshipped, prioritized, or tried to control.

Across history, urban form has been used to express spiritual ideals, defend territory, display power, organize trade, and manage populations. Medieval towns curled inward, walls hugging markets and cathedrals, life arranged around faith and defense. Renaissance and Enlightenment cities turned to symmetry and proportion, streets becoming geometry lessons in reason and order. Colonial grids marched across continents, carving unfamiliar land into administrable units. Industrial cities bent themselves around rail lines and factories, while 20th-century modernists imagined towers in open space, efficiency (and freedom by motor vehicle!) replacing intimacy across the urban landscape.

You can read these places like textbooks. The boulevards of Paris speak of imperial authority and surveillance as much as beauty. The superblocks of Brasília proclaim faith in technocracy and the future. The tight, mixed streets celebrated by Jane Jacobs whisper a different belief: that cities thrive on “the small, the various, and the personal.”

And yet, beneath these wildly different city forms, something universal persists. Humans gather. We cluster, trade, argue, celebrate, mourn, flirt, protest, and invent — all within shared space. Cities are our most elaborate attempt to turn proximity into meaning. Cities and neighbourhoods are how we make belonging and inclusion visible to the human eye.

This longing for connection led to the earliest human settlements. But the profession of planning, as we know it today, was born from crisis. It’s a disturbing tale.

By the late 19th century, industrial cities were lethal. Toxic air choked residents. Drinking water carried disease. Tenements packed families into airless rooms. Fire moved faster than escape. Entire neighbourhoods were erased by epidemics. Reformers — many of them engineers, doctors, and early planners — and writers! reporters! — fought back with tools that now feel ordinary: building codes, sewer systems, clean water infrastructure, public health oversight, street standards, maps showing green belts, public squares and parks.

Their work saved lives. Modern planning’s roots are, at heart, humanitarian.

But here is the hard truth: the same tools that protected the public also carried power — and power is never neutral.

Zoning, one of planning’s defining inventions, drew invisible lines with very visible consequences. It separated homes from factories, yes — but also people from people. It protected “desirable” districts and pushed others elsewhere. It legalized a geography of exclusion, often aligning with race, class, and colonial hierarchies. Whole communities were displaced in the name of progress, efficiency, or renewal.

The landscapes that followed — tidy, single-use, car-dominated, meticulously regulated — often erased the very urban complexity that earlier reformers had hoped to make healthier, not eliminate. Diversity of use, improvisation, informal economies, layered social life — the messy ingredients of vitality — were smoothed away.

This is the planning profession’s main paradox. The profession arose to reduce suffering, yet it also helped institutionalize inequality, racism, environmental injustice. It built safety and segregation, health and hierarchy, access and exclusion — sometimes on the same street, in the same block.

So what do our cities reveal today?

They show what we are still afraid of: disorder, congestion, uncertainty. They show what we prize: property values, mobility, private space. But they also reveal a reawakening. Around the world, people are pushing for walkability, mixed uses, public life, climate resilience, and housing equity. We are, slowly, rediscovering that cities work best when they are not machines to be optimized, but habitats to be shared.

Urban form is never just design. It is ethics, embodied in physical form.

The question for our time is not only how to plan better cities, but how to plan in a way that heals the wounds embedded in the cities and settlements we’ve inherited — while still honoring that ancient human desire to gather, to connect, and to belong somewhere, together.