“For years we have been told that we have to choose: either greenery and peace or living in the city. This alternative is false, because only the combination of these apparent contradictions creates the quality we want - a well-functioning friendly city. So what we should demand is: greenery, silence, peace and security, and all this in the city, close to the services we need every day,” Joanna Erbel wrote in her foreword to the Polish reader.
High quality of life and dense development in Poland sound like a pair of opposites. Most of the new investments that have sprung up in recent years are unfriendly blocks of flats deprived of neighbourly proximity, access to greenery, full-scale recreational spaces and essential services. At the same time we know that urban space is extremely valuable and urban sprawl is a negative phenomenon. So we seem to be torn between the need for a good life and absorbing more land for development. But it could be otherwise. David Sim - a Scottish architect, for years associated with Gehl Architects, gives us a ready-made manual on how to build friendly high-density cities. The author leads us through European cities that can serve as models for us to follow. These are not abstract, academic musings, but working solutions that the author gives us in the form of simple nine principles. This book makes us look to the future of our cities with hope.
