Three Perspectives on the City

The city is perhaps the most complex social system humankind has created, and a stage that stays with us throughout our lives. It is a text we read every day and, at the same time, the environment in which most of our professional and private activities take place. The experience of the urban environment and the uniqueness of the emotion that urban space can convey and sustain are irreplaceable experiences in every person’s life. The city socialises us, inspires us, helps us grow, and it can often disappoint or even betray us. It is our everyday companion on the journey through life. We can remember even a few hours spent in a foreign city for the rest of our lives. And yet we never uncover every secret of our home town, even after living there for forty years…

This is what our book Three Perspectives on the City is about. It was published in June 2026 by Salónik s.r.o. with the support of the STICS project. It is not a conventional urban planning textbook. It is at once a philosophical essay, a cultural guide and a reflection on how cities shape our relationships, values, identities and visions of the future. It reads as a map of cities, but also as a map of the society we live in. We look at the city in three ways: through the eyes of an architect, a spatial planner and a psychologist. At the same time, we trace the three forms that urbanity takes: the historical, the modern and the hypermodern city.

We understand urbanity as the fundamental quality of the city. We trace its genesis: where, how and why it emerges, which factors decisively shape its final form, how we interpret it today and how it was interpreted in the past. Urbanity is not only a unique quality of the urban environment, its capacity to mediate communication and social ties. It is also a reflection of history, of present and past hegemonies and conflicts of power and politics, and of our ideas of justice, equality, democracy and other values that we project onto it. It is a collective work, the outcome of compromise between competing lines of influence. It changes every day, and yet we often fail to notice these changes. It is often the first warning sign that a society is not developing in the right direction. The city is a complex symbolic text that will probably tell future generations more about us than any literature, music or other art. Above all, urbanity is a creative and unique expression of the city.

The first of its three forms is the historical city, the result of a gradual layering of influences, unique artistic achievements and practical solutions of the past. The horizon of religion and sovereign power as the only timeless authority in traditional society is perhaps the factor that has most influenced the form of our historical cities. The beauty of Piran, Český Krumlov and Istanbul, however, is not only the beauty of the historical heritage of the great narratives of Christian or Ottoman culture. It is also a tribute to the anonymous everyday interventions of lay people, which form part of the whole. It is a unity of vernacular and “grand” architecture, free of regulations and building codes. The modern city is the legacy of the 20th century, the century of the greatest emancipatory project in human history, with all its triumphs and catastrophes. The story of Brasília, a city in the middle of the endless cerrado, is like a dream that keeps returning throughout one’s life. The Plano Piloto is like the simplest reflection of Cabral’s cross… the only link with home, set in an environment without memory, without roots and without continuity. All of this is told in the brilliant architectural language of Costa and Niemeyer. Next comes New Belgrade, Tito’s great dream, as if from another space-time. It is a chronicle of the third way, a colourful psychedelic mix of socialism and capitalism. It dates from a time when utopia was still primarily artistic and political rather than technological and informational, as it is today. All that remains are the hallucinatory remnants of the old world and the abandoned offices of Genex Tower, that “hitchhiker from hell” on the edge of Belgrade. And our own Petržalka, the monstrous attempt to build a second Bratislava on the right bank of the Danube, did not ultimately collapse in on itself. It offers us a surprisingly rich, multidimensional present, and sometimes we learn more about ourselves there than in the polished city centre.

We live in times when the great modernist projects have acquired the patina of the past, and many people are overcome by nostalgia and sentiment when they look at geometric functionalist housing estates and buildings. Hypermodern cities are emerging that are the complete opposite of the Athens Charter. They are cities made of “flows and networks” rather than “places”, cities where everything intertwines and changes, and cities where virtual space is the fourth dimension of the real one. Our case studies of this form of urbanity are three cities. Hamburg is a city of cutting-edge technologies and practices, whose development was guided for years by our compatriot Peter Gero as chief architect. Dubai is the city as a generic illusion projected onto the global screen of the world. Shanghai is an ambitious attempt to tame enormous economic growth and an ocean of millions of people into the form of a sustainable smart city, so far with all the attendant birth pangs, disappointments and misunderstandings.

Writing this book was also a deeply personal experience for us. The perspectives of the architect, the spatial planner and the psychologist clashed in our endless debates in Hamburg’s harbour pubs, behind the wheel on drives through the canyons of wild Bosnia, and on rainy winter afternoons in our cramped offices. We would now like to share this formative experience with you.

Matej Jaššo, Milan Husár, Michal Hajduk (Spectra Centre of Excellence)

We presented the book at Design Week (25 October 2026) and Design Talks Bratislava (5 November 2026), both events accompanied by a panel discussion on the book and the cities it explores. The events attracted considerable interest, particularly from academia and professionals in the field.