Recently, media reported that in early August Tallinn's deputy mayors and representatives of the Architects' Association sat down together to discuss the reconstruction of Pärnu maantee. They left the meeting with differing views.

At first glance, the points of contention seem technical: may tram stops be spaced more than 600 meters apart, or should they follow the European city‑center model of 200–400 meters? Should each direction have two traffic lanes, or would one suffice so that the freed‑up space could be used for couriers, taxis and delivery vehicles to stop briefly — and for benches and trees to fit along the street?

But behind these small questions lies a much bigger one: what is a street? A tube whose value is measured in throughput, or a place whose value lies in the encounters that happen there? And behind that, an even bigger question: what are cities for? I will try to answer based on current knowledge.

Why cities emerged

According to early‑20th‑century Marxist archaeology, cities emerged from economic necessity: agricultural surplus enabled permanent settlement, which led to defensive walls, local division of labor, administrative structures, and so on. In this view, the modern city is a collection of institutions and resource‑management sites — including homes — between which people must occasionally travel, often at high speed, supported by four‑wheeled friends.

But archaeology of the past 50 years has overturned this story. The Göbekli Tepe complex in Anatolia was built about 11,500 years ago. It was constructed by hunter‑gatherers for ritual events — for marking something, telling stories, exchanging information. People gathered not because they had surplus crops (they didn't yet), but to share stories and meaning.

Urban historian Lewis Mumford concluded the same already in 1961, long before the Anatolian excavations. The predecessors of cities, he argued, were places people returned to again and again: sacred sites and burial grounds.

From this came his famous distinction: cities have two historical functions — magnet and container — and they emerged in that order. The magnet draws people together: celebration, ritual, market. The container, by contrast, holds and preserves: walls, granaries, reservoirs, temples and archives gathered and passed on resources, skills and culture from generation to generation.

The order matters. Before a place needed to store anything, it had to attract. People did not gather because of storage, but because of meaning — the desire to exchange ideas, stories, glances, goods. The chance to meet both familiar and unfamiliar people. A city was — and is — a machine for maximizing encounters.

The economy of encounters

The city's pull — its usefulness — has become measurable. Urbanist Jane Jacobs argued in 1969 that cities grow not because someone (like a city government) makes big plans, but because people notice each other's work and add "new work to old": a bakery inspires a café, a workshop grows into a factory, a painting studio becomes a special‑effects startup.

The city is, in her view, a giant recipe‑exchange machine — the denser the mix of skills and professions, the more new combinations emerge. Every innovation textbook defines innovation as a new combination of existing knowledge.

Forty years later, physicist Geoffrey West and urban theorist Luís Bettencourt gave Jacobs's intuition mathematical form. Analyzing thousands of cities, they found a clear pattern: when a city's population doubles, wages, patents and new businesses increase not twofold but about 2.15‑fold. Per capita, a larger city becomes roughly 15 percent more creative and productive, while requiring less infrastructure per person.

Bettencourt's explanation is simple and radical: a city is a "social reactor." Its output is proportional to the number of interactions between people, and spatial density — the possibility of being together — makes interactions grow faster than population.

Danish economist Bengt‑Åke Lundvall showed that innovation is not a lone genius's spark but arises from continuous interactive learning — producers learn from users, engineers from clients, companies from neighbors, colleagues from colleagues — and such learning requires trust, which forms only through repeated encounters.

Economic geographers Michael Storper and Anthony Venables summarized this with the word "buzz": face‑to‑face communication is the only channel that carries information, attitudes and trust simultaneously, creating accidental connections no one could have planned.

Economist AnnaLee Saxenian showed that Silicon Valley's success over Boston's tech sector did not come from labs or management styles but from engineers' after‑work meetings and conversations in local bars. Innovation's real driver was the region's social structure — the fact that such collisions could occur.

The conclusion for city governments is clear: growth is driven not by population size but by density — by the possibility of encounters. A city where residents live far apart and travel in car‑capsules from one parking lot to another may be statistically large but functions as a half‑powered reactor. Transport policy is therefore not merely traffic management — it is innovation policy. Every decision that reduces encounters reduces the city's potential for prosperity.

Non‑places: streets where stopping is forbidden

If a city is a machine for encounters, what is an inner‑city highway? French anthropologist Marc Augé coined the term "non‑place" in 1992. A real place carries identity, relationships and history; one exists there as someone among others. A non‑place is a space of transit and consumption that creates neither identity nor relationships: a highway, airport, shopping‑mall corridor. It addresses its user only through signs and commands: drive here, speed 90, no stopping.

In a non‑place, a person is not a neighbor or citizen but a role proven by a document — driver, passenger, customer. One shares space with thousands but meets no one. Augé called this contractual solitude.

Augé did not moralize — non‑places are not bad, and freedom of movement has real value. A highway between two cities harms almost no one. The pathology arises when a non‑place is routed through the fabric of a city — when a corridor replaces a place where place is the city's very purpose.

An inner‑city highway does not merely fail to support encounters — it radiates the death of encounters around itself. Jane Jacobs described this in 1961 as "border vacuum": along a large single‑function corridor, street life withers in all directions, building fronts become backs, sidewalks become noise barriers.

And non‑places shape their users. A city whose daily pattern is drive–park–consume–drive produces skilled passers‑through, not citizens. Public space ceases to be a place where one exists among others and becomes friction between two private points.

This is the ironic twist of history: the city was born as a place where people came to be among others. The urban highway is the first city form designed so that one never has to be among others.

Talent votes with its feet

The quality of cities as places also has a recruitment dimension. American urban economist Richard Florida showed in the early 2000s that in the knowledge economy, the old logic has reversed: people no longer follow factories — companies follow talent. Cities compete not for investment but for people.

Surveying the engineers, designers and researchers every city wants, Florida found that their choices are not shaped by highways or parking garages but by street‑level life: walkable neighborhoods, cafés, music, diversity, the chance to participate rather than merely observe. He called cities that invest only in mega‑projects "generica" — interchangeable car‑cities that mobile talent avoids.

Florida later moderated his early triumphalism — winner‑cities' housing prices erode their own advantages — but one core point remains: no study shows that four‑lane urban roads attract talent. And when walkable cities are accused of elitism, it is worth remembering that car‑cities have their own equality problem: they implicitly tax everyone who does not drive — children, the elderly, lower‑income families — by making independent movement impossible.

For Estonia, this creates a paradox. A country that markets itself through e‑residency, startup visas and a capital of unicorns is targeting exactly the people who are choosing between Tallinn and, for example, Berlin. And the cities Tallinn actually competes with — Helsinki, Copenhagen, Amsterdam — have spent the past couple of decades not adding inner‑city traffic lanes but reducing them.

The ideology of "smooth flow"

Back to Tallinn. The coalition agreement signed in December 2025 promises to increase road‑construction volume, maintain green‑wave traffic signaling, avoid introducing congestion charges or climate‑neutral zones, and seek the abolition of the national car tax. Liivalaia tänav is promised to be rebuilt in a way that ensures traffic flow and throughput. The flagship investments are bridges and viaducts — Pirita and Pallasti bridges, Vesse viaduct, Pärnu Highway viaduct. The vocabulary of the coalition agreement is telling: smoothness, throughput, flow.

The street is measured in cars per hour — that is, as a tube. Yet one of the clearest findings in transport research is that congestion cannot be cured with asphalt: every added lane fills with traffic, because people's daily travel‑time budget — about an hour, as identified already in the 1970s — does not change, it simply converts into longer distances.

A faster road does not give a city resident more time; it gives them a home farther away, and thus a more dispersed city. And as urban density decreases, the frequency of encounters, exchange of ideas and ultimately economic development all decline.

Three examples from the recent debate, as reported in the media:

First, tram stops. The city wants to shift stops so that the distance between them grows to more than 600 meters in places, because that makes the tram faster. The president of the Architects' Association, Aet Ader, pointed out that in European city centers the distance is 200–400 meters, because with longer distances the first to give up on public transport are older people, children and those with mobility difficulties. One logic optimizes vehicle speed; the other optimizes human access — and these are not the same thing.

Second, traffic lanes. Architects asked whether a 2+1 solution had even been considered — one that would free up space for short‑term stops for shops, couriers and taxis, and allow benches and trees along the street. The city replied that it cannot do this, because if a "small bump" happens, traffic must have a way to bypass it. An uninterrupted flow is more important than the daily functioning of street‑level businesses, and cars can always park in the Rimi parking garage. The impossibility of stopping is, word for word, Augé's definition of a non‑place.

Third, and most telling, Ader's institutional observation: mobility experts are working on the project, but architects could not identify a single spatial expert — not even a landscape architect. This is ultimately a question of goals. A city that entrusts street design solely to flow engineers has already decided, before the first line is drawn, that a street is a tube connecting one suburb to another — not a place for urban encounters or for supporting good urban life.

Göbekli Tepe's builders did not erect their pillars so people could drive past them faster; they were created for gatherings, because in being together — and in the conversations that come with it — something emerges that cannot emerge alone. Ten thousand years later, contemporary science says the same in measurable form: a city's prosperity, capacity for renewal and attractiveness arise from encounters, and encounters require places where stopping is allowed.

When Tallinn decides on traffic lanes, it is deciding — as cities have for millennia — whether the city is a gathering place or a corridor for individuals passing between two places elsewhere. A magnet or a tube.

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