We should try hard to get them right.

So few cities are nice; very, very few out of many thousands are really beautiful.

Embarrassingly, the more appealing ones tend to be old,

which is weird because we're mostly much better at making things now: cars, planes, or phones.

Why not, then, cities?

It's crazy to settle for this and to leave something so important to chance.

We need to get more scientific and identify the principles that determine how a city gets to be pretty or ugly.

It's not a mystery why we like some cities so much better than others.

This is a manifesto about how to make attractive cities.

There are six fundamental things a city needs to get right.

1. Not too chaotic; Not too ordered

One of the things we really love in cities is order.

Order means balance, symmetry and repetition;

it means the same thing happening again and again, and the left side matching the right side.

Order is one of the reasons so many people love Paris.

But most cities are a complete mess.

When it's a mess, it seems like no one is in charge.

And that's worrying.

It's horrible when everything is jumbled up.

A pitched roof next to a flat roof,

a stark geometrical box next to a muddled car park,

high rise towers that look as if they've been placed at random, like teeth in a gaping mouth.

We generally have an itch to straighten things out,

and when we can't, it's frustrating.

The same urge is there when we look at cities.

Often, it's not skyscrapers that we mind in the city,

it's skyscrapers that have been dumped without planning,

like they are increasingly in London,

whereas New York or Chicago shows the ordered way that we love.

However, you have to keep something else in mind:

excessive order can be just as much of a problem.

Too much regularity can be soul destroying.

Too much order feels rigid and alien.

It can be bleak, relentless, and harsh.

So the ideal we're seeking is variety and order.

This is the idea in a square in Telč in the Czech Republic:

where every house is the same width and height

but within that ordered pattern,

every house has been allowed freedom at the level of form and colour

or in Java-eiland in Amsterdam where the pattern is quite strict:

each house has the same height and width,

the color range is restricted,

but within this grid, each unit is completely individual.

We're perfectly in the middle between chaos and boringness here.

And that's what humans adore.

That's what more and more cities should have:

order and variety.

So as a general rule:

too much mess, and it's off putting,

but too much simple order, and it's boring.

What we crave it's organized complexity

which you can see as much here:

as here:

Now, for the second thing that makes cities beautiful:

they have to have visible life.

There are streets that are dead and streets that are alive

and in general, we crave the live ones.

This is a live street in Hong Kong.

This is a live scene in Venice.

In the 18th century, the painter Canaletto

specialized in pictures of cities everyone loved

because they're full of life.

There's always plenty going on.

In this painting we can see a stonemason's yard.

The work sheds are rough, but they're charming.

It's fascinating to see what people are up to.

How do they load those huge blocks onto the gondolas?

The life of the city is on display,

and we're primed to love this.

Contrast this with dead streets of many modern cities.

Today, the places where a lot of the work gets done

look dull and dead.

They're spaced out along huge highways,

and you never go there unless you happen to work there yourself

because there's nothing to see.

And most office buildings are brutally anonymous;

the people inside might be working in all sorts of fascinating stuff,

but we just don't know, and it's disorienting and cold.

The street levels are dead.

Contrast this with the streets we all love,

where you can see things going on: a bakery,

a cobbler's shop, and markets selling carpets, a burger bar, a bookshop;

these are streets we love because they're full of life.

More and more, in modern cities, we've hidden life away.

We have lots of dead sheds, and dead towers,

connected up by dead motorways where you can barely glimpse your fellow humans.

Rather than the old alleyways where you can see people at work,

look them in the eye as they walk down the road

and feel connected to others.

Modern planners have become obsessed by

hiding technology

rather than trying to make it nice to look at.

Today we'de be outraged if we heard a huge pipeline

was gonna be slapped across a lovely river;

we'd be up in arms!

But we book trips to go and see the Roman Pont du Gard in southern France.

That's because it's built for beauty and practicality.

We think it's the pipe we hate. It's not.

It's just the ugliness.

So let's make sure our streets are full of life,

full of people doing stuff you can see through the windows.

That's what make certain cities so attractive to walk along:

the work is on show,

the people are proud of what they're doing

and happy to let the world notice and appreciate

the practical side of things.

There's a third principle of good cities:

They are compact.

In the past, being able to be alone

or just with your partner or family, was at first, a huge achievement.

Only the largest class, the poor, lived huddled together

and it was horrid.

As soon as people had money, they wanted to move out,

and have their own plots.

Through the later decades of 20th century,

more and more people tucked themselves away in a private realm.

And it's been a disaster.

It's become deadly, cold, and boring,

and very, very wasteful on the environment.

A compact city like Barcelona

swallows a fraction of the energy

of a sprawling one like Phoenix, in Arizona.

We've built a world of endless dead dormitory suburbs

connected by sterile wide motorways

all because we labor under the false impression

that we want to be far away from other people.

But in fact it's wonderful to have the balancing moderating influence of living close to other people in uplifting surroundings.

That's why we need tightly packed, well-ordered cities

with lots of squares in public places in which we can hang out.

All the most beautiful compact cities have squares.

Yet, the art of the square has gone into terrible decline.

We keep promoting the invention of mobile phones,

but no one's built a good square anywhere on this planet for decades.

It's not rocket science though.

Look at the Piazza di Santa Maria in Trastevere, Rome.

It's a public place, but intimate and closed enough to feel like an extension of your home.

Lounging about here, having a coffee or a beer, reading a paper,

you get to be around other people,

their moderating, cheering affect is restoring.

It takes you away from the over intense, couple obsessed atmosphere of the home.

There's an art to a good square:

it should be neither too big nor too small,

anything over 30 meters in diameter starts become too large

by which we mean: the individual become overly small relative to the space around them,

creating a sense of alienation and dislocation.

In a good square you should be able to see the face of a person across the square,

You could if need be hail someone walking on the other side.

The ideal square must offer a feeling of containment, but not claustrophobia.

There's another principle of good cities to do with orientation and mystery.

By definition, cities are huge,

but the cities that a lot of people love also have lots of little back streets

and small lanes where you can feel cozy and get a bit lost.

We're drawn to the sense of mystery and enclosure that these streets offer.

It's actually lovely to get a bit lost.

A warren of alleyways can feel homely and intimate.

At Cartagena, in Colombia,

the balconies nearly touch across the street-

you can see your neighbors having breakfast, you know when they've gone to bed,

what time the children do their homework on a Sunday evening.

The fact that everyone is little bit on display a lot of the time tends to make people nicer.

They don't shout at each other quite so much.

They put flowers on the table more often.

We like it, but we forget that we do, and we don't quite know how to ask for it.

Modern planners and developers give us maximum privacy

because they suppose that's what we all want,

and because they insist that cars and lorries, which like a lot more space than people,

are the most important things in the world.

Of course we need balance between small streets and big ones.

Necessarily, cities are large.

We love small streets, but they're a nightmare when you have to go any distance.

So the ideal is to have big boulevards, grand, wide straight places, and also little warrens of streets.

We need cities that offer us two important pleasures:

the pleasures of mystery and the pleasures of orientation.

Let's think about scale now.

Modern cities are all about big things.

Joseph Campbell once wrote:

"If you want to see what a society really believes in,

look at what the biggest buildings on the horizon are dedicated to".

The biggest most prominent things tell us about the actual, rather than admitted priorities of a society.

We don't collectively say we worship sports shoe corporations, tax specialists,

the oil industry, and pharmaceuticals.

Our cities, however, tell another story.

They're full of enormous towers devoted to just these things.

That is a bit depressing.

As humans, we don't mind things being big, per se,

we don't mind being humbled,

so long as the things we are bowing to deserve homage,

like a beautiful mosque, or a cathedral, or a museum.

But we've allowed our cities to be hijacked by aggressive commercial interests,

by towers that honor not God, or love, or humanity,

but pizza corporations and hedge funds.

They exist because we've made a big dumb collective mistake:

we focused on who owns land, but we don't think about who owns space, who has air rights.

And in the end, who has air rights

determines what you can see from your window.

We suggest that the ideal height for any city block

is five stories high.

No more. Above that people start to feel small, insignificant, and trivial.

So we say: cut down those towers and pack everything into five stories.

Make it dense, compact, and tight,

like they do in some parts of Berlin, Amsterdam,

London, and Paris, the bits we love.

Of course, occasionally there can be a huge building,

but let's keep it for something really special,

something all of humanity can love.

Towers have to be worthy of their prominence,

they must be aligned with our best ambitions and long-term needs.

Finally, make it local.

Somethings should be the same everywhere.

We don't expect there to be a uniquely Venezuelan telephone

or a distinctively Icelandic bicycle.

But, we don't want buildings to look the same everywhere.

It's hugely disappointing when you fly somewhere for hours, land, and feel you could be anywhere.

The problem isn't just that we like a bit of variation for it's own sake;

because of climate, history and social traditions,

each society really does have different needs,

different strengths and weaknesses.

There are many distinct styles of happiness;

many good and varied ways of conductive and collective life.

The sameness of cities is a problem

because it reveals how far each of us must be from engaging with an specific character of it's own place.