Café life in Paris was certainly already in bloom, but it was nothing compared to what would happen during the fifty years following Verrière’s innovation. Now, a platform had been created for a new human behaviour.

We still flock around this remarkable thing, and will certainly do so as long as civilisation exists. What I am referring to here is the modern bar counter, or ‘zinc bar’ as it was named, after the material from which it was made. Previously, the bar was only used as a staging point, where the waiters went to get wine for the guests, but Verrière had the idea that it would be much more effective if a person could serve, wash dishes and, at the same time, converse with guests all in one place.

That was it, of course, and fifty years later, there were more than 70,000 bar counters in Paris. The French statesman, Léon Say, then noted soberly that ”one half of the town is poisoning the other”. It was not just the bar counter’s efficiency that was the driving force behind this development, but also its social function – its ability to triangulate. Suddenly, there was a place where strangers could socialise with each other. A conversation with the bartender could easily develop into a general conversation. Over time, a special kind of bar culture was developed – an international, standardised behaviour that is tightly tied to the bar itself.

The interesting thing here is the bar’s dimensions. It cannot be too wide – then we would be too far from the bartender – and it must have a certain length to encourage strangers to talk to each other. The short bar counters, that fine restaurants use to place guests while they wait for a table, do not encourage conversation. They do not constitute a place for the group dynamics that exist around a real bar.

So, there are thus some dimensions in our environment and in our cities that have large social, psychological and economic effects, because they relate to the human as a body and as a social being. The strange thing is that this kind of knowledge is sat on the sidelines. It disappeared with the 1900s’ industrialism and modernism when our cities were planned for cars and technical systems, rather than for people. It has not been rediscovered in recent years, despite everyone’s mania for the city as a phenomenon. Architecture and design is now much about spectacle, about artistic objects. Human scale is perceived by many in the West as something nostalgic.

But if we look at the global trends, we note that the fastest growing city form – shanty towns – is actually built to human scale. They grow by two busloads per minute, and look strangely alike wherever you go, that is, like our historic towns. The driving force here is life-chances. Despite major deficiencies in sanitation and other things, we find it obvious that the township offers more opportunities than a poor country village.

It is the physical proximity between people and activities that is the secret. For the poor, the neighbour is a resource in a completely different way than it is for the middle-class Swede who, strictly speaking, does not need neighbours. As a rule of thumb, one can say that the poorer you are, the closer to the ground you should stay. When you demolish functioning shanty towns and move the population to large-scale buildings, there are often disastrous results, because the shanty town’s socio-economic structure, based on intense, public social interaction, can no longer be maintained.

For this reason, the UN’s policy of shanty towns should be preserved and developed, rather than demolished. Paradoxically enough, shanty towns are more located in our time than our own neighbourhoods. They have many characteristics that we usually associate with the new economy. Everyone is a business owner and engaged in trade, service and innovation. There is no unemployment. The Economist recently called Kibera, Africa’s largest shanty town located in Nairobi, the most enterprising place in the world.

There is much for us to learn from the shanty town phenomenon, not least in terms of how our segregated and large-scale Million Programme areas could be reformed to enable social and economic interaction in a different way than today. But the changes that should be made have no effect in the short term, and our politicians are incapable of thinking beyond the next election, so that we in Stockholm have to make do with spectacles such as Nya Slussen and assorted bizarre high-rise projects. I do not know what it looks like in the rest of the country, but here in the capital both the Moderates and Social Democrats are stuck in the 1900s.

You get the urge to go to a bar.