Let's rehumanise the machine: What Marco te Brömmelstroet made me rethink about cities
18 August 2026
Written by Jos Coolen
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Shaping cities isn't just about infrastructure, funding or technology; and successful cities aren't built through isolated projects: they are built through a long-term vision with people at the centre.
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of introducing Professor Marco te Brömmelstroet in Wellington.
Many people know Marco as "The Cycling Professor", but that title doesn't really capture the breadth of his work. His research is less about bicycles and more about the way our assumptions, language and decision-making shape the cities we create.
His visit came at an interesting time. I had just returned from a trip home to the Netherlands. I've lived in New Zealand for almost thirteen years now, but I regularly travel back to visit friends and family. Every time I go back, I notice change.
A former industrial site that slowly is being repurposed. New apartment buildings have appeared. Streets have become greener, and even more spaces have been allocated to people rather than cars.
What I notice most of all is not just any individual project. It is the bigger picture. There is a sense that cities are continually working towards a long-term goal and putting people at the centre of it.
During my trip I spent some time in Eindhoven during one of their recent summer heatwaves, a city that is spending a significant effort into making their inner city streets greener. Walking around in the city, the impact of green infrastructure was immediately noticeable. Streets lined with trees immediately felt cooler than harder urban environments. Even in areas that were already pedestrian-friendly, the city was continuing to invest in making them better. More trees. More planting. More spaces prioritising people.
At the same time as I was enjoying these spaces, back in New Zealand, the debate around Wellington's future continued – which was quite the contrast.
Not because one country is somehow getting everything right and the other is getting everything wrong. Far from it. Wellington faces challenges that cities in the Netherlands do not. Decades of underinvestment in infrastructure, the ongoing legacy of earthquakes, resilience requirements, rising costs and competing funding priorities all contribute to pressure on the question what we should focus on.
Fixing all these issues is important. But it also raises a question:
How can we spend our energy on today's problems while also working towards the city that we want tomorrow?
Asking Better Questions
That was why Marco te Brömmelstroet’s presentation was so interesting. Good talks don’t just provide you with all the answers, but instead they leave you with questions to ask yourself.
The morning after Marco's presentation, I was walking to work through Wellington's city centre. It was cold, wet and windy.
Standing at a crossing, I was waiting for a stream of mostly single-occupant vehicles to pass, and I found myself asking a question that I had never asked myself before: Why do we accept that someone waiting in the cold and rain must give priority to people sitting in warm, comfortable car seats?
This is not a criticism of cars. I drive occasionally, just as I ride my bike, walk and use public transport. Like most people, I use different modes depending on what I need to do that day. Yet we find it normal that we treat one transport mode as more important than another.
Marco’s talk made me realise how rarely we stop to question the assumptions underpinning our street design or why our conversations about urban spaces have become so polarised?
Rather than offering us some quick fixes for the issues that we are facing in New Zealand, Marco challenged us with three fundamental shifts in how we think about cities:
1. The Power of Language
Marco's key message was clear: The language we use influences the way we think.
As urban designers, planners, engineers and transport professionals, we often talk about streets using terms such as flow, capacity, congestion and efficiency. Those terms seem normal because they are part of our everyday vocabulary. But we often don’t realise they frame our streets in a particular way – as if movement is the only thing that counts.
So, if congestion is the problem, we look for ways to improve flow. If travel times increase, we look for ways to reduce them. Those responses make sense. We see a problem, and we want to fix it.
But do these responses cause us to overlook a much bigger question. What is the purpose of the street in the first place? Our language has changed the street from a place where we walk, shop, meet friends, work, live, play and experience the city into primarily a transport corridor. Our streets used to have all those qualities in the past, but now our children can’t play on the street anymore and we actually have to warn them for its dangers.
So if we focus on solutions that primarily improve movement, how can we create healthier communities, stronger neighbourhoods, more vibrant centres or greater social connection? If those are our goals we should be asking different questions.
2. Have We Been Solving the Wrong Problem?
Another message from Marco’s talk that stayed with me is our obsession with travel time. For decades, transport planning has focused heavily on helping people move faster and further. Yet despite enormous increases in speed and mobility, most people still spend similar amounts of time travelling as previous generations did before all those ‘improvements’. Marco showed that what actually has changed is the distance we cover. We live further from where we work. We travel further to access services. We focus on reducing travel time, but we have actually reduced proximity and stretched our communities further apart. The question is not how quickly people can move across a city, but how can we plan our cities so people can access more of what they need closer to home, creating healthier and more social communities.
3. Cities Are Not Machines
By treating our cities as machines, we have dehumanised them as a result. If there is congestion, we increase capacity. If there is a housing shortage, we zone more land. If pipes fail, we replace them. Responses are mechanical, and focused on solving a specific problem.
But in a healthy ecosystem everything is connected. Transport influences land use. Land use influences housing. Housing influences social outcomes. Public spaces influence health, community and economic activity. We have become good at solving individual problems, but it is very easy to ignore the bigger picture. In my work across urban design, planning and design, in each project I see a value in stepping back and asking bigger the questions. Not simply "How do we respond to this issue?" but rather "What kind of place are we trying to create?"
Designing for People
These key take aways made me reflect on some of our own projects at Boffa Miskell. We see a shift when projects look beyond moving people or vehicles, like the Waterview Shared Path, the Glen Innes to Tāmaki Cycleway or Te Ara Tupua, where transport infrastructure is designed to re-connect divided communities and integrate landscape, resilience, culture and ecology.
Whether we're working on urban design frameworks, growth planning, public spaces, landscape design or spatial plans, the most successful projects rarely start with infrastructure. They start with people. What decides how and where people want to live? What do communities need to thrive? What makes a place distinctive?
How do we create neighbourhoods where children can move around independently, where local centres thrive, where people feel connected to their community and where the environment supports health and wellbeing? Those questions are harder to answer than engineering questions, but they are the questions that ultimately create the places we remember.
Looking Forward
As a Dutch urban designer who now calls Wellington home, I often find myself comparing the two countries. Not because I think New Zealand should copy the Netherlands, as the context, history and challenges are different. But because there are lessons worth reflecting on, and perhaps the biggest I found is that successful cities aren't built through isolated projects, but they are built through a long-term vision with people at its core.
Marco te Brömmelstroet's talk highlighted that shaping cities is not just about infrastructure, funding or technology. It's about how we define success, and about the words that we choose for the questions that we ask. As our responses to those questions will ultimately shape the places where we live our lives.
The next time I am at a cold, wet Wellington intersection waiting for traffic to clear, I hope to be seeing a city that has begun to ask different questions.
True urban transformation is not about copying another country’s blueprint; it is about having the courage to shift our own frame of reference. If we change the language we use, we change the questions we ask. And when we ask better questions today, we stop reacting to immediate pressures and start to build a city designed for people.
When I next board a flight back to the Netherlands, I know I can expect to see more change there. But the real test won't be what has changed on the other side of the world, it will be if we have chosen to listen to Marco’s words here and made the rehumanisation of our urban spaces at the core of how we plan, design, and deliver our projects.
