What My Trip to Budapest and Vienna Made Me Think: City, People and Civilisation

Some journeys are journeys not only through cities but through one's own inner world.

My trip to Budapest and Vienna was one such journey for me.

Walking along the banks of the Danube, wandering among historic buildings, watching people sitting in parks, and following the trams gliding quietly by, I did not see only two European cities. I also witnessed how the relationship between city and person can be built.

When I returned, what stayed with me first was not palaces, museums or tourist sites. What truly caught my attention were the seemingly ordinary details of everyday life: clean pavements, preserved historic buildings, wide green spaces, orderly traffic, the aesthetics of public space, and the care people showed for one another's right to live.

When all of this comes together, the result is cities that are not only beautiful but liveable.

Civilisation is often measured by great monuments. Yet true civilisation is felt in a person's everyday life.

In the street where children can walk safely…

In the park where the elderly can sit in comfort…

On the pavements a disabled person can use without difficulty…

In an urban vision where a tree is preserved rather than cut down…

In a culture where a historic building is not destroyed for the sake of profit…

This is where civilisation shows itself most.

That is what I saw in Budapest and Vienna.

These cities are the product not only of economic strength but of centuries of accumulated culture, institutional memory and shared social consciousness. One senses a delicate balance struck between people, nature, history and aesthetics.

This balance did not emerge by accident. It is the result of an established legal order, strong institutions, an education system and an urban culture, produced over many long years.

An important point needs to be acknowledged here.

To explain the West's present prosperity and institutional strength solely through exploitation is to ignore a significant part of the truth. The Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the scientific revolution, technical progress, a culture of production and human labour have also been among the fundamental elements of this rise.

By the same token, explaining the problems the Islamic world faces today solely through external interference is not sufficient either. Internal dynamics — ignorance, bigotry, despotism, lawlessness, lack of production, and decline in education — have also played a significant part in producing this picture.

A society's level of civilisation is measured not by the height of the skyscrapers it possesses, but by the depth of the values it manages to preserve. It is possible to build tall buildings; it is far harder to build respect for human beings, environmental consciousness, urban aesthetics and public responsibility. Because these are built not with concrete but with education and culture. Concrete rises in a few years; culture is formed over generations.

The order and aesthetics I saw in these cities is not an experience unique to Europe. Viewed from a broad historical perspective, similar approaches to urban planning have emerged in other civilisations too. Indeed, an urban vision that placed the human being at its centre was once one of the strongest features of Islamic civilisation as well.

Faced with these scenes, I thought of Baghdad, Córdoba, Samarkand, Bukhara and Istanbul. These cities were once centres the world admired. They were held up as models in scholarship, art, architecture and urban planning; from street cleanliness to the culture of religious endowments, from water systems to city planning, they were, in many respects, ahead of their time.

Today, however, we encounter a very different picture across much of the Islamic world:

Cities growing without planning…

Shrinking green spaces…

Historic heritage abandoned to its fate…

Lives crammed into traffic and noise…

Settlements far removed from urban aesthetics…

Faced with this picture, one cannot help but recall Ziya Paşa's famous couplet:

"I roamed the lands of unbelief and saw flourishing towns and palaces; I wandered the domain of Islam and saw nothing but ruins."

(Translated from the nineteenth-century Ottoman Turkish original.)

That these words still echo in people's minds some century and a half later is worth pondering. Here Ziya Paşa is not so much taking stock of faith as taking stock of civilisation — voicing the difference he saw in the order of cities, the workings of the law, and the value placed on human life.

Faced with this picture, one cannot help but ask:

What happened, that we lost our cities — and with our cities, our claim to civilisation?

There is no easy answer to this. The problem is not only economic or political. It is a deeper matter of mindset, stretching from education to urban culture.

There is a great difference between an outlook that sees the city merely as a space for generating profit and one that sees it as the shared home of human life. The first produces buildings; the second produces liveable cities — and civilisation.

Yet a city is not merely the sum of its roads and buildings; it is also a matter of ethics. Every act, from a car parked on a pavement to litter thrown into the environment, is part of urban culture. A consciousness of following rules, respect for others' rights, and a sense of responsibility for shared spaces make up the ethics of the city.

The appearance of cities often reflects the inner world of societies. Streets are not only stone and asphalt but also a mirror of how people treat one another. A city is not only where a person lives, but also the environment that shapes them. Ugliness wears a person down, chaos exhausts them, disorder breaks their hope; aesthetics, order and green space, by contrast, let the human spirit breathe.

So, then — what kind of cities do we want to live in?

That question is really a question about what kind of society we want to be.

Societies capable of building cities that respect people, nature, history and culture also build their future on solid foundations. Because cities are the places where a society's values and vision of civilisation take concrete form.

The task is not only to build new structures; it is to be able to rebuild the mindset that shapes our cities.

The strongest impression that stayed with me on returning from Budapest and Vienna was this:

Beautiful cities do not appear by accident.

They are works of civilisation, built over many long years by law, education, culture, aesthetics and a sense of shared responsibility.

Perhaps the question we need to ask again today is this:

Do we want to build bigger cities — or more liveable, more civilised ones?