Walking through the streets of Mexico City, I was enamoured by how nature and concrete duel for dominance. Canopies lace the streets, roots push through cracks, concrete resists but bows under pressure. And yet, it feels like it’s in harmony. It’s often said that within a decade of human absence, nature would reclaim most cities. In Mexico City, that hypothesis feels close at hand.Through the lens of a pedestrian, as someone who has studied urban planning, works with built form, and obsesses over how humans interface with the world physically, digitally, and spiritually, this balance feels almost utopian. The political discourse around climate change often collapses into noise: slogans, statistics, doom forecasts. It has seemed to become less and less prevalent in a world hell bent on balancing on the brink of destruction, yet here, at street level, the question feels less abstract. It is embodied. Roots cracking concrete, branches filtering light, vines creeping over facades. It reminders that nature is not separate from the city but stitched into its fabric.

And perhaps that is something most of us, regardless of ideology or background, can agree on: that nature, in its persistence, is to be celebrated. We don’t just want it preserved as wilderness at the edge of civilisation; we want it woven into our daily lives. We want to walk under canopies, smell soil after rain, see green press against glass. Our connection to nature is something to be celebrated and preserved.

This presence and feeling of nature calls on something primal. As Holly and I weave between trees and concrete, I find myself pondering how we move through it. In the tourist districts of Condesa and Roma Norte, the city unfolds at a human scale. Streets feel porous, welcoming. Alfresco dining spills into the public realm, food trucks gather near shaded parks, and pedestrians cross without fear. The infrastructure balances the movement of cars, one way streets funnel traffic through cross sections, leaving organic movement layered on top of a uniform grid. There’s a sense of balance.

For once, I sense a city designed for human rhythm rather than mechanical dominance. The pace of walking, the choice to linger, the ability to be distracted by a smell, a sound, a face, all of it feels protected here. We move across space with grace. And in that grace lies dignity: the recognition that cities are for people.

Across the border

Contrast this with Dallas, Texas. There the streets widen not for people but for machines, F-150s, Dodge Rams, Cadillac Escalades. Beasts of steel. The scale of the road reflects their bulk, while the footpath narrows to nothing, pedestrians become an afterthought.

This was a choice. A century ago, America stood at a crossroads and Los Angeles became the focal point: A city with one of the most extensive streetcar networks in the world, linking neighbourhoods with rail that made pedestrian life possible. But the automobile industry, Ford, General Motors, oil companies, and tire manufacturers, waged an aggressive campaign. They lobbied governments, dismantled rail infrastructure, and rebranded the car not as transport but as freedom.

This choice was, of course, driven by profit and syndication, but it also unlocked something larger. The freedom of mobility marks our true departure from the age of monarchs. For most of human history, where you were born was where you remained. Geography was destiny. Under feudal systems, peasants were bound to the land, their movement restricted by law, class, or the will of kings. To travel beyond one’s village without permission was unthinkable. Movement was a privilege reserved for the elite, the clergy, or the conqueror.

To interface with the world on your own terms, to choose your path rather than inherit it, is, in my view, one of the most profound shifts in the human story.

Yet, the result was irreversible. With railways torn up, freeways slashed through communities, and the very scale of the city was redrawn around the car. Automobility became infrastructure and ideology. It changed how cities function, how communities cohere, even how we imagine space and time. That logic spread globally, exported as the American dream: wide streets, suburban sprawl, the supremacy of the automobile.

Dallas embodies this inheritance. It is a place where movement is dictated by horsepower, where the pedestrian becomes a trespasser in landscapes engineered for the machine.

What bias masks

Mexico City reveals both sides of the coin. From the courtyard cafés of Condesa or Roma Norte, it feels like a triumph of balance, tree-lined streets, alfresco dining, pedestrians and cars sharing space with a kind of fragile harmony. Yet from the hills, a city of twenty-two million strains under the weight of inequity.

Traffic suffocates daily life. Commuters in outlying districts often spend three to four hours each way getting to work. It was this crisis that led to one of the city’s boldest transport experiments: the Cablebús. Opened in 2021, it reimagined gondolas, technology once associated with ultraski resorts and tourism, playgrounds for ultra wealthy, as social public transit. Line 1 connects Cuautepec, a poor hillside community in the north, to the metro system below. Line 2, the longest urban cable car in the world at over 10 km, links working-class Iztapalapa to the city’s core. Together they serve more than 70,000 daily riders, giving residents an alternative to the suffocating gridlock below.

They are ingenious, even beautiful in their way, floating above chaos, granting commuters views of the volcanoes beyond the valley. But they are also symptomatic: patchwork solutions in a metropolis whose growth has consistently outpaced its infrastructure. The gondolas cannot undo decades of sprawl, inequality, and political inertia.

This is the paradox of cities. At street level, in their most curated districts, they can feel equitable, even utopian. But zoom out, and inequity reveals itself.. What feels like balance in one neighbourhood is bought at the expense of others; beauty is often shadowed by burden, capitalism teaches us to have, some must not.

A city is always psychic mirror. It reflects back the tensions and contradictions of the systems that build them and the human condition

What about at home?

The same is true in my backyard of Melbourne. Billions from the “Big Build” have redefined not only the city’s but the state’s priorities, roads, tolls, rail, metro, bridges. Infrastructure is never neutral. It is politicised and a choices made on our behalf, silently shaping how we live, move, and even relate to one another.

Consider what sits under that banner. The Metro Tunnel, first conceived in the 2000s and now billions over budget, promises faster rail connections across the CBD. The West Gate Tunnel, plagued by delays and blowouts, was sold as congestion relief but has raised questions about air quality and long-term dependence on private toll operators. The North East Link, at $16 billion the state’s most expensive road project, will carve through established suburbs to complete Melbourne’s orbital freeway network. These projects are monuments to a particular vision of mobility: one where time saved on the commute justifies almost any cost.

And yet, much like Mexico City’s gondolas, they are patchwork responses to deeper structural problems. A tunnel here, a bypass there, piecemeal interventions in a city whose growth and sprawl consistently outpace the infrastructure built to support it. They may relieve pressure at the margins, but they do not resolve the underlying question of; what kind of city we are building, and for whom?

Is the commute what we are meant to accept as natural? the daily sacrifice at the altar of efficiency? Or is the true measure of a city the walk through a vibrant laneway: food spilling out of restaurants, the laughter of strangers, the unexpected encounter that makes us pause? Commerce, entertainment, and community bleed into one another, creating the pockets where cities feel alive.

And yet we are offered projects like the $3 billion-over-budget road tunnel that saves six minutes off a commute. Our priorities may differ, but the lesson is clear: these choices that are deeply nuanced, yet without discourse we forgo and they impact how we live. What we inherit as the city is not inevitability, but the outcome of decisions.

Consciousness & Spirit

The decision structures we trust without question shape far more than roads and buildings. Physically, their choices are etched into concrete and steel. Digitally and spiritually, we see the same logic at work: algorithms and media reconfiguring how we perceive, desire, and interact with one another, a loss of spiritual depth.

The UK’s digital-ID push illustrates the trade-off clearly. Since 2021, a government trust framework has standardised digital identity, and in 2025 those rules gained statutory force alongside a certified provider register and audits. This year, ministers proposed a free, universal digital ID, initially for right-to-work checks and access to services, arguing convenience and security, while critics warned of centralised risk, mission creep, and surveillance.

These fears are not abstract. The same logic that underpins the rise of Big Data and AI surveillance. Companies like Palantir have built vast systems that fuse government records, financial data, and behavioural analytics into profiles used for policing, immigration enforcement, even battlefield operations. Once identity, movement, and interaction are digitised, they can be tracked, stored, and predicted. What is framed as efficiency quickly becomes a tool for control.

In Jordan Peterson’s terms, rights rarely vanish overnight; they are eroded by increments. The question is not whether digital identity brings efficiency, it will. But whether each step is bounded by transparent limits, independent oversight, and a genuine right to refuse.

So we must start to ask ourselves: What have we surrendered?

We surrender space when cars dominate over people.

We surrender attention when algorithms engineer our desires.

We surrender identity when the complexity of human agreement is flattened into a binary, left or right, ally or enemy.

We surrender discourse when our airways tear apart the vast ground we share.

We surrender trust when profit dictates reality.

We have become numb in some ways, desensitised to exploitation, distraction, and the slow erosion of public life. In other ways we have become painfully sensitive, anxious, status-driven, locked into games of social acceptance and digital performance. The human condition is changing.

And yet, in moments, there is an awakening. Small ruptures in the noise where clarity emerges: Breaking bread, a mutual ground, a patch of green reclaiming concrete. These flashes remind us that numbness is not permanent.

Surrender is not inevitable. We will always hold the capacity to choose. But choice demands conscious effort. We must confront what has already been surrendered and engage deliberately with the forces that shape our world.

The challenge is larger than a march or protest. It is the slow work of reclaiming what matters. Can what has been lost ever be restored? And perhaps. The more urgent question is: what are we truly willing to stand for?