New City Spaces By Jan Gehl and Lars Gemzoe

Danish Architectural Press, 2000, 264 pp., hardcover 375 Danish kroner (approximately $62 US). Like many new urbanists, I got my first exposure to Jan Gehl in June, when the Danish architect gave a mesmerizing closing address at the Congress for the New Urbanism’s annual conference in Pasadena. Gehl, whose books include Life Between Buildings — still in print 34 years after its initial publication — charmed the audience with his tale of starting out as a believer in Mies van der Rohe and LeCorbusier and then being converted into “a people architect.” Energized by Gehl’s mixture of astuteness, enthusiasm, and humor, I asked the Danish Architectural Press for an English-language copy of his most recent book, New City Spaces. Written in 2000 with Lars Gemzoe, a fellow faculty member at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture, New City Spaces is an ambitious and beautiful production, now in its third edition. Its oversize pages attempt to capture the directions that the design of public spaces has taken since about 1980, not just in Denmark but throughout the world. With revealing color photos and excellent maps, the book presents the public space strategies of nine cities — Barcelona, Spain; Lyon and Strasbourg, France; Freiburg, Germany; Copenhagen, Denmark; Portland, Oregon; Curitiba, Brazil, Cordoba, Argentina; and Melbourne, Australia — and then documents 39 streets and squares, 31 of them in Europe, the rest in Canada, the US, Australia, Japan, and Saudi Arabia. “For a rather long time — from the 1930s until the 1970s — nothing much happened in the field of public space and public space architecture,” Gehl and Gemzoe write. “One explanation is the modernists’ rejection of the city and public spaces. Another is the rapid development of car traffic and the focus on roads and transport.” Whatever the exact reasons, the authors report that around 1970, interest in public life and in the design of public spaces began to revive. This book is the result of eight years of visiting, and assembling information about, urban public spaces that have been built new or thoroughly renovated since about 1980. No city, according to Gehl and Gemzoe, has done a better job of envisioning and building new public spaces than Barcelona. The government of the Catalonian city decided that “every quarter was to have its own ‘living room’ and every district its park, where people could meet and talk and children could play.” The city created many of those public spaces by pulling down dilapidated apartment buildings or abandoned factories. In numerous cities, the authors say public life has blossomed as authorities have broadened the sidewalks, introduced vehicle-free areas, improved access to public transit, installed fountains, sculptures, and landscaping, and generally provided more abundant opportunities for people to interact. Abused old squares have been reclaimed by moving the parking underground, into new garages, and redesigning the squares to accommodate pedestrians. Some public spaces have been designed without a traditional sense of enclosure — without regular building walls on most or all of the perimeter. Gehl and Gemzoe admire most of the departures from tradition, finding them fresh and stimulating. To my eye, however, many of the nontraditional public spaces don’t look very appealing. The book’s photos — candid views in rain and snow as well as sunshine — reveal public spaces that too often focus on abstract sculptures and that pay too little attention to the physical and psychic comfort of the people they’re supposed to serve. Ole Bulls Plass in Bergen, Norway, in particular, reminds me of the failed downtown pedestrian malls built by American cities in the 1960s. Photos show some Bergen residents, mainly young, using large sculptural pieces of stone as places to perch. A skeptic might ask: How many days of the year would people want to sit on a cold stone surface in Norway? Gehl and Gemzoe praise this square’s patterned floor for exhibiting “a fine and lively character any day in Bergen, wet or dry.” The pictures tell a less cheerful story — of abstract sculptures plopped in an open plaza. What most surprised me about this book was the large number of squares that fail to contain space and that offer only slight creature comfort. Many European examples struck me as too starkly designed and too minimally furnished to be congenial. I couldn’t accept that they were really “people places.” It was a relief to come across several pages on Portland’s Pioneer Courthouse Square, so much richer and more variegated than many of its European counterparts. The authors observe, “In many ways Pioneer Courthouse Square represents a special function-oriented North American type of square, with the space divided into a number of areas and zones that invite various types of activities. This contrasts with European squares that place emphasis on simplicity in the design of the space and fixed furniture, so that the space offers an open stage for varying activities, rather than a furnished stage for more specific activities.” An open stage? In my experience, most people rarely want to be on an open stage. Sitters, especially, want a protected edge, where they can observe without feeling vulnerable. Because of its comprehensiveness and detail, Gehl and Gemzoe’s book is well worth studying. But supplement it with other sources, like the late William H. Whyte’s thin paperback, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, published in 1980 and deservedly still in print. Whereas Gehl and Gemzoe sometimes seem eager to push innovative designs, Whyte never took his eye off of how human beings use their environments. u