Maybe we can’t wholly agree on what beauty is, but we all know ugly when we see it. And the world’s cities, plagued with developer-led building and a lack of government oversight and public exigence, are becoming increasingly soulless and unlivable, even as the world’s population becomes more urban. Good cities are compact, de Botton says. Through the later decades of the 20th century, the assumptions that humans don’t like living around one another and that making it means having your own plot of land in the suburbs led to isolation, soulless sprawl, and wasted resources.
