Putting the Human Central: Building Cities for the People We Actually Are

For anyone working in city-making, "putting the human central" is a familiar ambition. But do we manage it in practice? Ask the planners and policy makers who have to make it happen, or the residents who live with the results, and the honest answer is usually no. There are plenty of reasons the world can feel less human lately. A political scandal leaves us feeling vulnerable and exposed; our jobs look precarious, now we get competition from machines with something like human intelligence; leaders try to win the Nobel Peace Prize by dehumanizing entire communities and messing around with the world order we thought we knew. There is a sense of distrust all around us, and we get annoyed by the erratic behavior of so many of our fellow citizens. Let’s be honest, what we really want to do is to shout "it’s not me, it’s you!"

The thing is, we are all human. The citizen trapped in yet another fruitless participation evening, the policy worker doing her best to explain something she doesn’t actually believe in, the architect claiming that beauty isn't just in the eye of the beholder - yes, even the Excel-fetishist only focused on quick profits is human. In order to get a step further, we must unpack what we actually mean by putting the human at the center. Whose behavior do we prefer? What is the feeling we are actually referring to?

The Impossible Task of Being Us

To build a world, and a city, that fits us, we first need some idea of what "us" is, and historically we have struggled to agree. We swing between extremes: telling ourselves that most people are fundamentally decent, or retreating into the cynical conviction that we are selfish to the core.

The truth is that being born human means inheriting a paradoxical, nearly impossible task. We are not one fixed thing. We are a shifting landscape of possibility; both good and bad, often depending on the sheer luck of our circumstances. A bad night's sleep, a difficult childhood, a stressful hour in traffic can turn a pretty "good" person into someone barely recognisable. We are capable of real generosity and petty cruelty, sometimes within the same hour. To be human is to hold all of it at once. Good luck to us. 

Etienne Girardet

Reclaiming Our Self-Image

Part of what we are missing is a shared vision of the world, and, beneath it, a mensbeeld: a working picture of what a human being actually is, or can be. Without one, we may have quietly lost trust in ourselves. This is worth saying carefully, because when people question "human-centred" thinking, the warning is usually about arrogance and self-centredness; that we love ourselves too much, and everything else too little. This is valid criticism, but the deeper trouble runs the other way. We may have stopped believing in ourselves at all. And a person who no longer trusts themselves goes looking for the exit. Some hand the responsibility outward, to the river, the forest, the ecosystem, designing ourselves politely off the scene. Others flee inward for protection, the way a frightened child does, curling around a certainty that cannot be questioned. Both are the same move: a way of not having to sit with the difficulty of being human.

The trouble with that second flight is that it rarely turns into reflection. Almost no one curled up in there asks where the fear came from. The opposite happens: the insecurity is dressed up as conviction, and presented to the rest of us as the only truth. So we get people who lead by terrible example and seem to feel no ethical friction at all; others take shelter in cults, into the manosphere, into certainties that offer belonging without understanding. They dig in and never climb out to make sense of things together. A psychiatrist might reach for a word like sociopath. But they are not a different species from us; they are lost in the same weather, only by the opposite route: where some drown in doubt, others have suppressed it.

Doubt is not the disease; it is the sound of a conscience still working, a proof that we have not actually given up. The real danger is that, in a world this loud with certainty, the doubting voices mistake their doubt for weakness and fall silent. The softer positions, the overlooked ones, the people still willing to hold the complexity rather than resolve it - these are exactly the voices a human world cannot afford to lose. The task is not to flee the human, in either direction, but to stay with it.

What we need is not less attention to ourselves but a braver kind. We are complex creatures. That much we can be sure of. But of all the species alive, we are the only one that can pause to reflect, weigh right against wrong, and choose to care - for one another, and for every other creature we share the world with. That is an extraordinary power, and an extraordinary responsibility. It’s precisely the one thing we cannot hand outward to the river or the forest, it’s really up to us.

Fortunately we are not alone trying to make sense of this world. We are most ourselves in the company of others; not despite them, but because of them. We are all a little mad, and it is in each other that we recognise it, and are recognised; that recognition is a kind of relief, and it talks us gently down. A good street does the same at a larger scale: it reaches out to us, coaxing the better version of us to the surface and giving it somewhere to stand.

A Good Life Is Not a Luxury

If we are going to stay with the human, we ought to be clear about what we are staying with it for. In the end, it is a good life. Not a destination we ever quite reach - what "a good life" or "quality of life" means will always be a moving, contested target - but the thing worth building anyway. Only humans can hold that question, feel its weight, and argue over the answer; which is exactly why we belong at the centre of the work.

And yet we have grown strangely suspicious of it. Say the words "quality of life" and something in us bristles, as though the speaker were asking for a spa day while the world burns - as if wanting to live well were faintly shameful, a little bourgeois, a thing to be earned back through penance. We flagellate ourselves for it. But this gets the matter backwards.

A good life is not a reward we permit ourselves once the serious work is done. It is the serious work. And here is what we keep missing: the only way to build a good life for the generations to come is to take the good life seriously now. You cannot bequeath a quality of life you were never willing to create. A future worth inheriting is not made by people who denied themselves the present - it is made by people who learned, here and today, what a human life actually feels like, and then built the streets, the habits and the institutions to hold it.

That is what turns quality of life from a private indulgence into a public responsibility: not something we buy, but something we make - and go on making - for one another, and for those who come after. It is, in the end, the only durable way to build a truly human & kind future.

Translating Our Soul into the Streets

Putting the human central is an ethical stance; one that takes examination, nerve, and translation into the physical business of making cities. It means using the expertise of professionals to carry the technical complexity, while respecting the citizen as the absolute expert on their own experience.

To move toward a more human way of living, here are a few directions to get started - not rules, just places to begin:

• Dare to do good. We have to move past merely collecting "user preferences" and find the courage to make decisions for the greater good - to weigh competing values and hold a position even when the spreadsheet points to a colder path.

• Treat beauty as a human right. Beauty is not an optional extra. It is a form of psychological kindness; it tells a citizen they are valued. And because it says that, it is owed first where it is least often given: not lavished on the neighbourhoods that already have it, but brought to the ones left with blank concrete. The best materials, the most generous planting, the façades that smile at the street belong where they are needed most.

• Create space to imagine. A city should let us find out who we are, and try on versions of ourselves we hadn't planned. This looks inefficient to a mind that wants every square metre to justify itself, but people don't blossom on schedule: they need unprogrammed corners, places to linger without spending, room for the unplanned. Imagination is a collective exercise, creating the new rather than repeating the past. It’s an art, and an important one.

• Let people grieve what changes. Change feels like loss. If we don't give people the space to mourn the neighbourhood they knew, they will never fully inhabit the one we are building. That means respecting emotional history in the way we plan.

• Build for our worst days. We need spaces that hold us at our worst - when we are tired, confused, or vulnerable. That means benches for the weary, warm rather than clinical lighting, and treating a public toilet as a basic right.

• Help us see and be seen. From flow to friction. A city is not only about how fast we get from A to B; it is about how often we get to see and be seen. It calls for wide pavements and squares that invite us to linger and connect.

  
  

If we want a world that feels more human, we must stop trying to 'solve' or escape the human, and stay with it instead. By acknowledging our contradictions and our shared search for the good life, we can finally begin building a world that doesn't just house us, but actually understands us. It's worth a try.