A city structure is a lot like a human body. It´s composed of systems and organs that work together in order to keep everything flowing in the right track.

And much like the human body, a proper diagnosis starts by understanding that everything is connected to everything, and every change or disruption can and will possibly have an effect on other places that don’t necessarily seem to have a connection.

Over the years, urban planners started to see cities as living breathing things with a life of their own that cannot be tamed by forcing policies and changes that ignore the life flow that surrounds the environment in which changes ought to be made.

The growing numbers of abandoned parks, empty recreation areas or low cost buildings turned into slums stand as proof that good intentions combined with bad ideas can turn into projects that serve neither the community nor the city itself.

Perhaps the biggest battle of them all is, and has always been, the role of private transportation and pedestrians in heavily populated areas. I say private transportation and not “Cars” because the problem outdates the existence of motor vehicles. The late architect H.B. Creswell complained in the year 1890 about the horse traffic in London that polluted otherwise wonderful streets and beautiful market areas, wishing with all his heart someday cities would not need such beasts to move people around.

With a growing number of cars due to a worldwide access to private means of transportation, the contemporary metropolis has been facing a seemingly impossible challenge, balancing a finite space between two antagonizing actors.

Fuel efficient cars and solar technology don´t address the real problem; we have too many cars and too many people in a single finite space. It becomes a question of choice not for a city, but for city citizens everywhere how their living environment should be structured.

As Jane Jacobs used to say, change must come from the people, not from the governments. It’s the body that must reject things it does not want and embrace things that help the system grow.

I believe taking part of the pedestrian revolution is not a passive state, but a true form of activism. For too long cities have shaped their structure thinking how to fit a Volvo instead of how to fit a synergized society of people, and so, we have grown apart.

From New York to Buenos Aires, cities are starting to address the elephant in the room with public policies and actions that quietly whisper we may actually have a big problem on our hands. Bicycle lanes, bus lanes and subway expansions root for a future where private transportation can exist only when and if it´s needed. But is this really enough? Can we project a near future in which pedestrians win the battle? Or are we simply giving people an underdog to root for while we build a super highway across everything we have been trying to archive?