In these series of blogposts, I will be focusing on city design issues and everyday challenges in our cities and I will attempt to present simple solutions to overcome these challenges in our living environment.
The aim of the blog is to simplify and communicate urban design issues in a way that it is easy for everyone to read, get involved and hopefully take action. It is very usual to see problems such as heavy traffic, air and noise pollution and lack of green spaces, only being discussed at academic levels and decided by politicians and city authorities. But our cities are full of people from all ages, economic and educational background. After all, young and old, poor or wealthy, we all live in these populated cities and the problems and opportunities within this living environment affect all of us.
I am an architect and urban designer and I worked and lived in Tabriz, Dubai, Manchester, London and now in Düsseldorf, Germany. Living in these large and international cities, I realised that people face very similar challenges in their living environment. Everyday problems such as road safety for families and children, lack of functioning and accessible public transport, air and noise pollution, separated life from natural environment exist in almost all cities.
Unlike recent discussion and solutions presented on media as smart cities, my aim is to explore and share practical ideas which have been tried and tested for many years and sometimes centuries by people who lived in harmony with their natural environment and instead of trying to control and conquer their natural habitat, they learned how to live and adjust to their surroundings.
Here are some of the topics that we will be exploring in this blog in near future:
- Urban transport systems or moving from A to B
- Vehicles in cities: Traffic or friends
- Why we live in cities but we love to be outside of them?
- 15 minutes city
- Trees in cities