I grew up in a house with a garden, where fruit trees, plants, and flowers bloomed each year under the loving care of my father. Each season brought its gifts, two kinds of plums, oranges, and grapes which we always shared with the neighbours. In those days, the neighbourhood was made of houses, not buildings, and it was no surprise that everyone knew each other. The streets often echoed with the laughter of children playing together until dusk.

The house still stands today, though it is no longer our family home. Long ago, I knocked on its door, my daughter at my side, eager to see the place I had spoken of so often. The new owner, a kind woman, had already welcomed my siblings before me, touched, she said, by the “pilgrimage” we were all making back to our roots. Yet as I stepped inside, I struggled to recognise the spaces where I had once played, laughed, and cried.

What truly broke my heart, though, was the garden. The fruit trees had all been cut down, only a few plants remained. The old vine, which had once cast a canopy of shade, still hung there but the grapes, once plump and sweet, had been left to the birds.

The new owner apologised, saying she regretted removing the trees but had little time to care for the garden. I reassured her she had nothing to explain, it is her home now, her story to write.

When my father died, my siblings had already left the house, and my mother and I moved to a smaller apartment not far from the sea. The transition was especially difficult for her, but I too felt the loss. In an apartment, neighbours are not only beside you but above and below, and the connections are not the same. There are new inconveniences, noise, lack of privacy and no garden to seek solace in.

As populations grew, especially in big cities, space became scarce. Family homes gave way to vertical buildings, housing more people in less land. The shift changed family life. Houses could once shelter several generations under one roof, but apartments, smaller and more confined, could not. In many countries, this was the moment when care homes became necessary, to house the elderly who no longer had a place in the family home.

In China, I was in awe of the sheer scale of the apartment buildings. Where once families gathered in courtyards and narrow lanes, now towers rose to the clouds, stacking lives floor upon floor. This transformation began in the late 20th century, as populations surged and farmland needed protection. With no space to spread outward, cities could only grow upward.

Some of these towers now hold tens of thousands of inhabitants, vertical villages rising into the sky. But I wonder, how high can we go? Will the day come when space truly runs out, when these towers tumble down like the Tower of Babel in Bruegel’s painting, which I so often visit in Vienna?

You do get glimpses of life here and there, clothes hanging out of a window, someone looking out, neighbours chatting on a sidewalk, young people meeting up on a corner.

But all that remains of the past are memories of the houses and gardens where birds once sang, where the air was scented with flowers, where children’s laughter filled the streets and where families gathered under fruit trees to share simple, happy meals

As our cities climb ever higher, what we risk losing is not only land, but the closeness of life once lived, particularly  the nearness of family and the comfort  of familiar voices in the street. Towers may scrape the sky, but the roots of our humanity lie in simpler places where community once came first.