In the interwar years, the first visionary modern urban planners and theorists began to design and write about the cities of the future.
Some of them, the more technocratic ones, spoke of the functional city, organised around transport, housing, work and leisure zones.
Others, mainly from Germany, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union – among them Martin Wagner, Ernst May and Ioannis Despotopoulos from Greece – saw the city as a living organism, like a human being, which, apart from its practical functions, also carries a „soul“, memory and senses.
For them, the city was not a field for the exercise of functional design, but a space of social life and collective experience.
History, memory and, more broadly, time itself are visible on almost every corner in cities like Athens, Rome or Istanbul.
In the cities of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, with the sea and their strong culinary and musical traditions, smell, taste and sound shape everyday experience.
Further north, where nature is present within the city, the experience becomes visual and introspective. Therefore, the change of seasons becomes part of urban life.
A characteristic moment is autumn in Berlin, when the tree leaves turn yellow and fall, covering the pavements and the streets, creating for a few weeks an extraordinary, almost poetic atmosphere.
For a few days, the city becomes a living canvas, dominated by the yellow colour against the grey of the sky and the streets.
This sense calms the gaze and slowly prepares us for introspection and the coming winter.