Do you live in a ‘soft city’? Here’s why you probably want to

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Rather than thinking about cities as a collection of buildings and impressive developments, designers like Sim thinks about them as a series of relationships: between people and place, people and planet, and people and other people.
“The starting point is not a big, architectural urban idea—it’s about being a little human being, and how can you connect that human being to as many experiences as possible,” he says.
Good cities, from Sim’s perspective, are ones that make these connections possible.
They can look different and exist in different contexts, but they share an overarching and essential quality, which Sim calls “softness”—a stark contrast to the rhetoric of “grind” and “harshness” that’s often applied to urban life.
In his new book, called Soft City, Sim delves into this idea of softness in the urban context and what it means and looks like.
But the easiest way to think about it is to consider the idea of the boundaries that you feel as you move about the city, and how they can start to come down.
“For decades, so much urban planning has been focused on devising ways to reorganize human activity into distinct silos, to separate people and things, and, by doing so, reduce the risk of conflict,” Sim writes.
“I would like, instead, to focus on how potentially conflicting aspects of everyday existence can be brought together and connected to deliver quality of life.”
One way to do so that stands out: creating what Sim calls “layered” buildings.
A “layered” building is the architectural version of the latter.
In Soft City, Sim cites the Spektrum building in Gothenburg, Sweden, which has a bowling alley in the basement, a restaurant and shops on the ground floor, a school on a few of the middle floors, and and coworking and office spaces scattered throughout

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