The City That Forgot How to Dream: Notes on Contemporary Urbanism

There was a time when cities were built to embody ideas. Haussmann’s Paris was not merely a network of boulevards; it was a proposition about modernity, about the relationship between the state and the citizen, about the kind of life that becomes possible when streets are wide enough for both commerce and revolution. Cerda’s Barcelona was not merely a grid; it was a theory of equality, each block identical in dimension, each corner chamfered to admit light and air in equal measure to rich and poor alike.

These cities were arguments. They took positions. They expressed, in stone and iron and the arrangement of public space, a vision of human flourishing that their builders considered worth defending. One could disagree with the vision — Haussmann’s boulevards were also designed to prevent barricades, and Cerda’s egalitarian grid was quickly subverted by market forces — but one could not ignore it. The city itself was the argument, and merely to walk through it was to engage.

The Administered City

Contemporary urbanism has largely abandoned this ambition. The city of the twenty-first century is not built to embody ideas but to manage flows — of capital, of traffic, of data, of people. Its governing logic is not vision but optimisation. The smart city, that ubiquitous aspiration of municipal governments and technology companies, does not propose a theory of the good life; it proposes a more efficient version of the existing life, with shorter commute times and better parking.

The language of contemporary urban planning betrays this poverty of ambition. We speak of “liveability indices” and “walkability scores,” reducing the experience of inhabiting a city to a set of quantifiable metrics. A city scores well on liveability when its residents can access services efficiently, when its streets are safe, when its air is clean. These are not trivial achievements. But they are achievements of administration, not of imagination.

The Disappearance of Public Space

The most visible symptom of the city’s lost capacity for dreaming is the degradation of public space. The great public spaces of the past — the agora, the forum, the piazza, the commons — were designed for encounter, for the unplanned meeting between strangers that is the essential experience of urban life. They were spaces of friction, of argument, of the productive discomfort that comes from sharing territory with people unlike yourself.

The public spaces of the contemporary city are designed for the opposite: for the smooth, frictionless movement of bodies from one private space to another. The shopping mall, the airport terminal, the corporate plaza — these are spaces of transit, not of dwelling. They are engineered to discourage lingering, to prevent the kind of unproductive gathering that might lead to conversation, to protest, to the spontaneous formation of community.

The Privatisation of the Street

Even the street itself — that most fundamental unit of public space — has been progressively privatised. Business Improvement Districts, gated communities, and the quiet enclosure of formerly public land by private developers have created a city in which access to space is increasingly conditional upon economic status. The right to loiter, to sit without purchasing, to exist in public without a legible purpose — these rights, never formally codified, are being silently withdrawn.

The consequence is a city that functions but does not inspire. A city in which everything works but nothing surprises. A city that has solved the problem of congestion but not the problem of meaning.

Toward a City That Dreams

What would it mean to recover the city’s capacity for dreaming? Not to return to the grand plans of the nineteenth century, which were often imposed upon populations who had no voice in their creation, but to develop new forms of collective imagination adequate to the complexities of the present.

It would mean, first, recognising that a city is not a machine to be optimised but a conversation to be sustained. It would mean designing spaces that invite disagreement rather than preventing it. It would mean accepting that the most important functions of a city — the formation of identity, the cultivation of solidarity, the encounter with the unknown — cannot be measured by any index.

The city that remembers how to dream is not a utopia. It is simply a city that has not yet decided what it wants to become, and that understands this uncertainty as a form of vitality rather than a problem to be solved.