Our horizontal Babel

Already more than half of humanity lives in cities, and the urbanisation process advances at so vertiginous a rate that we will soon be able to describe the planet as a built globe, with its population agglomerated in metropolises and the surrounding environment transformed into an artificial landscape. From the city’s mesh of relationships comes its potential and lure, manifested in the territory like a magnetic field that is irresistible to rural populations, a multitude of iron filings dragged beyond remedy towards the metropolitan magnet.

- Luis Fernández-Galiano

These centripetal forces responsible for the migrations from country side to city are expressed in the exponential growth of both the urban dimension and the pathologies associated with scale, provoking the contradictory emergence of other centrifugal forces that push large sectors of the population to remote suburban peripheries, where the qualities of civic life are denatured or weakened. At the same time, the dispersal of constructions degrades the natural environment, altering its morphology by modifying its uses, and colonising the landscape by filling it with irreversible works of engineering and architecture. What elsewhere I have called horizontal Babel, formed by sprawl, is thus neither real city nor countryside, and yet the contemporary exuberance of energy has allowed it to spread through the five continents, driven by metropolitan malaise and the nostalgia for nature while undermining civic virtues and pastoral beauty. The tension between the urban gravitation that brings us together and the centrifugal urge that pulls us towards the peripheries produces a vibration of the essential fibre of the debate on territory and landscape, which has its ominous protagonist in that boundless and characterless city, and the most visible cause of our environmental crisis in its planetary metastasis.