For a hundred years, we have judged our cities by their toughness: counting kilometres of road, tonnes of concrete, bridge spans and tunnel bores. These figures dominate asset registers and budget papers, and they do have their place. Yet perhaps we have been tallying the wrong things, or at least missing what truly makes a city thrive.
The Danish-based urbanist David Sim, whom I had the pleasure of listening to in Finland at the International Federation of Municipal Engineering World Congress, would say we've been counting the skeleton while ignoring the life. Sim, author of the celebrated Soft City, has built an international reputation arguing that liveability is not a by-product of good engineering but a design objective in its own right, one shaped less by the hard science of architecture and engineering than by the everyday encounters and infrastructure for public life, which in turn help improve public health, increase security, build democracy and equity.
That last idea is worth lingering on. Democracy and equity, shaped by footpaths and doorsteps? It may sound lofty, but Sim’s insight is simple: cities are where people from all walks of life cross paths. Only when people meet as equals, he says, can we start to tackle society’s biggest challenges. A wider footpath, a shaded bench, a corner shop nearby, these are not just add-ons to infrastructure. They are the places where strangers turn into neighbours, and neighbours grow into a community ready to solve problems together.
Picture this in real life. When Copenhagen chose bikes over cars, it was less about transport and more about society: on a bike lane, the CEO and the cleaner ride side by side, sharing the same weather and the same journey. In Barcelona, superblocks transform busy streets into playgrounds for children, gathering spots for the elderly, and bustling café terraces, leading to safer, cleaner, and more vibrant neighbourhoods. Melbourne’s laneways, once forgotten alleys, have become the city’s favourite gathering places. None of these changes demanded feats of engineering. They simply required a new question: not how do we move things through this place, but how do we help people truly live here?
For those working in infrastructure, this realisation can be quietly unsettling. Our systems excel at valuing what wears out, but stumble when it comes to valuing what brings people together. A footpath is listed as a maintenance cost, while the spontaneous meetings it enables - the very moments Sim says build health, safety, and trust - are invisible on any ledger. We perfect what we can measure, and so we end up with cities that are easy to cross but hard to call home.
The fix isn't to abandon the hard disciplines; it's to remember what they're for. A city is a theatre - build the stage, level, lit, structurally sound, but nobody buys a ticket for the stage. The play is the point: the entrances and exits, the chance meetings, the small dramas of everyday life. A magnificent stage with no performance is just a warehouse; a modest one alive with players is unforgettable. We have spent a century perfecting the set. Sim's invitation is to start designing for the ensemble, and to remember that in a city, nobody gets to sit in the audience.
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