A Zoo for People
Midas Dekkers
A city is like a zoo for people. The tiger misses its jungle, the shark its ocean, but in general they grow older then in nature. The director did his best to adept the zoo to his animals. A mayor does the same with his city. He takes care that the mind receives enough stimuli and that the body can do whatever it is meant to do.
In a zoo no two cages are the same. The giraffe's is high, the elephant's big. The director knows that every species has its own demands. Before he built his cages, the director took the size of his animals. But who, at a party, ever saw an architect with a centimetre and a scales, go after the guests? Many architects make you think of Procrustes, the mythical giant who hosted travellers near Athens. Procrustes had two beds: one short and one tall. He put the tall travellers in the short beds and the short ones in the tall. To make them fit, he chopped off the legs of the tall hosts and pulled on those of the small ones until they perished.
A government that makes its citizens jump and play ball until they fit the environment, is a bad host. It is her duty to design the environment in such way, that a human being feels at home with his old-fashioned body and his modern mind.
To make healthy people, a government just has to keep itself to Ivan Illich recipe:
"Healthy people live in healthy houses on a healthy diet in an environment that is fit for birth, growth, work, healing and dying; they have a culture that supports aware acceptation of the limitations on the populace, of growing older, of incomplete recovery and ever-looming death. Healthy people need a minimum of bureaucracy to love each other, have children, to share being human and to die".
Translated from:
Lichamelijke Oefening (Physical Exercise), Uitgeverij, 2006, p. 335