Malgorzata TOMCZAK

Fighting for the city.
A healthy city

With increasing urbanization and urban densification, we are facing more and more challenges. The most important are transportation, ecology with a major air pollution problem, and the price of housing and services. By 2050, seventy percent of the world's total human population will live in cities, such are the projections. We are most likely to live in the big cities of the richest countries of the global North. This is due to the ongoing scientific and technological revolution, the spread of urban lifestyles, and the change in socio--economic relations that we have seen in recent years. At the same time, there is also a different trend - some cities are becoming depopulated. In Poland, CSO data show that Warsaw and Cracow do not have such a problem, but already Łódź and Poznań do. The decline in demographic indicators in these cities and deepening suburbanization are resulting in residents moving out of city centers to the outskirts or satellite towns. There they seek cleaner air, proximity to nature, lower prices for goods and services, and cheaper housing.

So we need alternatives to the traditional urban body. Will they be zero-emission eco-cities with residential oxygen towers instead of concrete blocks? Plus compact, low-cost, with good public transportation and public spaces? That would be the best way. If only it were that simple!