People-powered urban design

Danish architect Jan Gehl, who shared CNU XIII closing keynote duties with author James Howard Kunstler, was a modernist and “less is more” believer when he graduated from architecture school in 1960. Then he married a psychologist and set himself on a path to become what he calls “a people architect.” Because participation in public spaces today is optional, Gehl takes seriously the challenge of making them irresistible. He’s succeeded in making the streets and plazas of cities from Copenhagen to Melbourne, Australia, teem with human life. His renowned presentations are the kind of wise, joyful expressions you’d expect from someone thoroughly committed to architecture’s human dimension. Early in his remarks, Gehl got a strong response from the crowd as he talked about an image of a toddler. “Here is the client. This is my grandchild and this is the greatest day in her life, the day that she learned to walk. She stands up one day and suddenly realizes, ‘I got it.’ Mama will spring to the phone and tell grandmother, ‘she can walk, she can walk.’ That is the beginning of everything for a walking animal. All of our life happens on our feet. We never take the car into the living room, into the library, the pool. We are a slow, linear, horizontal, 5-kilometer-per-hour walking creature. “So the more I studied these things, the more I was sure that the key to understanding good places is just this — it’s the human body, how we move, how our senses work, how we interact with other people ... . “All cities that I know have very good traffic departments and perfect statistics about cars. They know how many go east and west. They know how many parking spots there are and how they’re used … Every time there is a planning process, the cars are very visible and somebody looks after them. “I know of no city in the world that has a department of pedestrians and public life. And hardly any of the cities have any data or systematic information about how the city was used this year, how it was last year, how it was 10 years ago, and generally nobody is really responsible for the people in the city and generally nothing is known and generally people are completely invisible. “Everybody says, ‘we do it for the people,’ and in the end the people are the ones who are not discussed. I think this is a serious problem and I think the traffic engineers are very skilled and I have tried to copy them as best I can, in a good way.” Visit www.cnu.org for more quotes from unforgettable CNU XIII speakers. u