Status Updates From City, Civility and Capitali...

While the Berlin Wall may have fallen, other cities remain divided, and growth constrained by urban motorways, elevated freeways and concrete coolers. The environmental, health and wellbeing consequences of this are dire. By creating an urbanism that can only be negotiated by car, fuel use rockets, exercise levels plummet, and isolation and loneliness increase.

Roman poet Juvenal’s image of Ancient Rome was hardly one of marble classicism and Ciceronian rhetoric. He complained that sleep was impossible for ‘the movement of heavy wagons through constricted streets and the oaths of stalled cattle drovers would break the sleep of a deaf man or a lazy walrus… most sick men die here of insomnia.’

Erica Benner’s positioning of Arthur Koestler Neanderthal vs ape - one person’s fight for human progress is another’s Armageddon.