Human Layer

Cover of the book PUERTO RICO'02 EN RUTA by M&M proyectos. Anarchist Gardener marching on the coveer. ISBN: 84-931898-6-3

The attitude of car dominated San Juan is working against human physical existence and supports cruel surroundings reflecting to stress, crime and pollution.

The man on foot is a looser. When the car is no longer dominating the urban planning and urban space, there is room for people and humanism. This leads to no kindness.

No man’s land occupied by cars is taken back and protected. The city will start respecting the psychophysical individual again and the citizen will start respecting the city.

The man on foot needs oxygen, shadow and safe human democratic urban space.

CityZen_Train

A network of tramways is designed to support the forthcoming light rail connection between San Juan and Bayamón. A safe and reliable network taking the people from their homes to the train and again to their work. A clockwork of public transportation giving the people an easy alternative for stress and ignorance.

People shall not wake up in the stress of making strategies to survive to work. Stress leads to accident, ignorance and death. Instead of stress the way to work/home should be a space of relaxation and comfort.

Tramway network in Bayamón and Hato Rey is the solution for getting the air pollution controlled and cityscape human.

REAL REALITY

1. The hacking rhythm of industrial life leaves no space to see the horizon.

2. Consuming without questioning and destroying nature, including human nature, is easy when the nature is not seen. Nature being a looser in economical speculations.

3. Pollution and lack of urban humanity is reality. Economical expectations, speculations are fictive. The responsibility of environmental design is lost to fictive economical speculations in no connection with real human reality. Surroundings shaped by no real values will destroy us.

4. Facing the new urbanism with its chaotic unpredictable energies and orders together with the structures constructed for functions of finance has left the architects powerless or prostituted and compromising humanism. Sensing, not even to mention planning, for real reality has become underground. Design has replaced reality. A bear has hair because it is hairy and not because somebody has decided so.

5. The illusion of temporality and stress is the atmosphere in which pollution and prostitution is created. This atmosphere is closed and paranoid as in malaria. All human existence should be in connection to eternity, nature.

6. City is organic and the human layers are everywhere in small scale. To save San Juan this must be scaled up and the mega structure of human layer must be introduced. It will be easy. People know, what is good, the real reality.

Old people are not shot as they should be according to economical laws. People sense it is not kind to kill the old people and kindness is real reality. Kindness is kindness, concrete. Real reality can not be financially speculated, or otherwise - it is concrete.

7. Architects role in the society is to take responsibility of looking at the horizon as mysticism - being in contact with the realities that are behind the reality that we see. What is real, is valuable. Urban planning must find a way to be connected into real things, not destructive things or design as entertainment. What is not real is not valuable. Horizon needs space to be seen, time is not money. One has to have the possibility to be taken from this place and time 1000 years back to see, things are the same. Forcing oneself out of this time let us go from the illusion of today.

8. Ethical awakening in connection with nature should be religious. San Juan can find his inner peace by admitting his mortality. We must find a strong sense of other layers of reality than material. If so, death is a beautiful end to begin a new life. But if we are stressed by running after money and material, stress for stress’s sake, death is a defeat, bankruptcy.

9. The economical surroundings don’t support kindness. Without kindness there will be no positive results.

Real reality, values and ethics are always finding a way to push back. They are like the air around us, we notice it when we are running out of it. New air always comes in - the corners are windy. Today’s void in the valueless society will be filled with ethics. People are good in the end - that reality is now depressed by material nonsense.

The thinking of Real Reality is partly inspired by comments of professor Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila, who translates medieval Arabic literature and specially Arabic poems and comments on modern society and lifestyle. The italic lines are his.