Sick Cities: From the Bijlmer to The Line — How Humanity Lost Its Pulse In the 1960s, Amsterdam’s Bijlmermeer was hailed as a utopia. A perfect, modern vision of the future — light, air, and concrete order. It was meant to liberate people from chaos, but it became the opposite: a maze of isolation, crime, and decay. The failure wasn’t architectural; it was spiritual. The planners built apartments, but forgot to build belonging. Half a century later, we are repeating the same mistake — only bigger, glossier, and more digital. Projects like Forest City near Singapore, The Line in Saudi Arabia, and countless “eco-smart” utopias across the world promise paradise through design and data. They call it sustainability, but it’s really control wrapped in green glass. These cities are monuments to a sickness — a global fever that mistakes perfection for progress. Money flows into artificial islands and desert corridors while millions have nothing to eat. We engineer skylines, but not compassion. We optimize life, but forget to live. The Bijlmer was a warning: A city without soul collapses, no matter how rational it looks. But the lesson went unheard. Now we build whole nations like that — private states run by corporations, governed by algorithms, marketed as heaven. Humanity has outsourced its moral compass to profit and PR. We have concrete instead of community, innovation instead of empathy, and “smart cities” designed by people who have never walked barefoot on real earth. There’s a single word that captures this era — a word that’s half disgust, half despair: Sick. Sick of watching technology masquerade as wisdom. Sick of seeing empty skyscrapers rise while children go hungry. Sick of progress without humanity. Until we rediscover the pulse — the messy, imperfect heartbeat of real life — our cities will keep gleaming, our towers will keep rising, and our souls will keep dying. Sick. #power #system #ghosttown