This is the place where I lived until I was 18. Red arrow shows the building where our apartment was. On the fifth floor. Apartment number twenty one. School was only two blocks away, up and left from the arrow. We used to play soccer in the school yard every afternoon. Funny I remember that. High school was a bit further away. Maybe a twenty minutes walk.

This gets me to think about how really sustainable and efficient this urban model is. Population density is probably one of the most important parameters that we should be working with in our new urban studies and designs. Even if a new, clean energy source is discovered soon, and travel becomes cheap, for no other reason than of social interaction, socal sanity, so to speak, we should be going back to this model of a community living. More compact means less energy use, less heating bills, and at the same time more interaction and communication, which of course leads to less depression and loneliness. On the other hand, it is never all one sided, there is also less privacy and more noise too. Now, the actual numbers of the population density vary tremendously accross the globe, as do the overall sizes of the cities, and that has to be carefully balanced in order for the model to perform optimally. Not a new idea at all: read much more on this at http://www.newurbanism.org/density.html

Coming back to here and now, hundreds of images come alive from just seeing this one one picture. And memories of sounds and aromas, and wettness and cold, and sunshine and dust. But, I guess, you had to be there…