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Pedestrian Cities
An interview with Danish architect Jan Gehl on how public spaces work.
By Paul Makovsky
August/September 2002
Copenhagen is one of my favorite cities in the world, not only because of
its scale and beauty, but because of how bike-friendly it is. A recent environmental
study of the city found that half of its residents cycle on a daily basis.
I love the idea that a bicycle can coexist with cars as a viable form of
transportation.
At Metropolis, we were so impressed with the Copenhagen plan that we included
the city as one of our top 21 great ideas for the 21st century ("Pedestrian
Cities", August/September 2002).
For more than thirty years, Jan Gehl has systematically studied public spaces
to see how they really work. As an architect and senior lecturer of urban
design and director of the Center for Public Space Research at the Royal
Academy of Fine Arts' School of Architecture in Copenhagen, he has published
several books on public space. These include "Life Between Buildings--Using
Public Space" published in 11 languages; "Public Spaces Public
Life", Copenhagen 1996 (co-authored with Lars Gemzøe), a winner
of the Edra/PLACES Research award USA in 1999; and most recently, "New
City Spaces", also co-authored with Lars Gemzøe. The books are
all published and distributed by the Danish Architectural Press.
I recently interviewed Gehl from his home in Copenhagen.
Paul Makovsky: I hear you are consulting on a new project for the city?
Jan Gehl: There is a big national program going on in Denmark called "Improve
the Public Space". A foundation has put forward about $4 million which
is going to be distributed all over Denmark in order to improve the quality
of our public spaces. The program will not just improve public space projects
over a number of years, but it will also introduce a number of new ideas
and awareness, so that the idea of "city culture"--the way people
think about cities and conceive them--can be developed. We're going to work
on all of this thinking, about how people think of public space and the
joy of going into town, in a nationwide program.
PM: How will it work?
JG: Municipalities can send in their project proposals, and we will give
the most interesting ones fifty percent of the construction costs for improving
the quality of pilot projects.
PM: Will you be advising the municipalities on the projects?
JG: We are not going to advise them. But we are going to look into the applications
to see if they have picked some good advisors and if the project is deemed
interesting enough to yield some positive results which could lift the spirits
locally and maybe nationwide. Personally, I'm on the jury, so my own firm
cannot consult on any of these projects.
PM: That's too bad.
JG: No, it's not too bad. They've selected a very famous landscape architect
and myself. I'm working on the content, where I am exploring questions like:
What are public spaces good for? How can we make them more comfortable for
people? How can we invite people to use cities and public spaces and prevent
cities from being empty and abandoned? On the contrary, we want people to
do the opposite: for people to walk and use their bicycles.
I see this big campaign to improve the public spaces of Denmark as the result
of many years of debate in our media about the virtue of public spaces.
The idea of "city culture" is a result of many years of effort
by many people in Denmark, and has developed to a stage where it is deemed
to be a valuable thing in our society.
PM: How long have you been studying public spaces in Denmark?
JG: I graduated as an architect in 1960 from the Royal Danish Academy of
Fine Arts. The first pedestrian schemes in Denmark were introduced in 1962
and that's 40 years ago this year. I was not involved in that in any way.
I was just a young architect working in the suburbs.
Around that same time, I married a psychologist and we started to have psychologists
and architects meeting in our house. We had many discussions about why the
human side of architecture was not more carefully looked after by the architects,
landscape architects, and planners.
My wife and I set out to study the borderland between sociology, psychology,
architecture, and planning. She wrote a book about the psychological aspects
of housing and I wrote a book about public space, called "Life Between
Buildings" (Danish Architectural Press, 1971). At that time, I was
invited to join the faculty of the Royal Academy of Art's School of Architecture
to teach and research. I've been there ever since.
I used that first pedestrianized street in Copenhagen and the city itself
as a laboratory for my research. Very soon after the opening on the first
pedestrian street, we started to publish scientific papers and articles
on what happened and how people responded to it.
As the pedestrianized street system expanded, we did more studies about
Copenhagen at the university. Finally, in 1996, Lars Gemzøe and I
published "Public Spaces, Public Life", where we described in
detail all the things which had happened in the city and all the effects
this has had on the way the city was used and the way the city conceived,
and the pride in the city which has grown because of all these nice things
happening.
All these studies have been done not by the city but by the university,
and they have been very instrumental in changing the face of Copenhagen.
The politicians and city planners became confident because we had all the
data measuring the success in hard facts, which in turn they could show
to fellow politicians and businessmen. This made them increasingly confident
and after a period, they started to be very proud of the city. The university
has provided the ideology and the data, the city has laid the stones, and
we have worked together.
PM: What I really liked in your book "Public Spaces, Public Life"
is how you showed that it was all a series of small steps that gradually
transformed the city of Copenhagen from a car-dominated to a people-oriented
city.
JG: Yes. One of the interesting things about Copenhagen is the gradual approach.
"Public Spaces, Public Life" is the first ever recording of the
life of a city. Every city counts its traffic one or two times a year, but
hardly any city knows about what people do in a city and how the city is
being used.
In Copenhagen we've pioneered this as a working method: study what's going
on, look at the problems and potentials, improve it, and check it again,
so that you can follow the development. Observations like being able to
point out that we have four times more public life in Copenhagen after twenty
years of work, have been very strong in convincing people about the value
of what has been going on. This book demonstrates for the first time the
systematic study and recording of the people just as you would cars.
In my new book "New City Spaces", we describe nine fascinating
cities from around the world which have been made much more people-friendly,
including: Barcelona; Lyon and Strasbourg, France; Freiburg, Germany; Portland,
Ore.; Curitiba, Brazil; Cordoba, Argentina; Melbourne, Australia; and Copenhagen.
We talk about how these cities have applied different strategies to make
them people-friendly.
Copenhagen, in this context, is interesting because of the gradual approach.
The city has never had a master plan. If city officials did have a master
plan that would say for example, "Ten years from now we will have 100,000
square meters of pedestrianized and people-friendly streets, and we will
remove 2,000 parking spaces from the downtown area," they would utterly
fail in the next election.
PM: Why is that?
JG: This would be too drastic and it's difficult to see radical change.
I think Copenhagen has taken a very wise approach for two reasons. When
all this started 40 years ago, there was no culture of public space and
public life. Everybody said: "We are not Italians, we are Danes. It
will never work here. It's for the Southern Europeans, and here the mentality
is not for mingling in the streets," all this kind of stuff.
Then the city closed the first street as an experiment, and people thought
this was interesting. Then shopkeepers found out they were doing better
economically. Then the next street was closed. And then every year after
that, the city put in a nice square or removed some parking spaces. Because
the development is gradual, people in this culture gradually came to like
this kind of thing, and realized in small steps, that they liked more of
this. Because the city also made it gradually more difficult for people
to drive and park, people had time to figure out that it's too complicated
to take the car, and took the bus or bicycle instead.
Gradually the city invited people to walk and use the city more; to cycle
more; and made it a bit more difficult every year for the unrestricted use
of the car. People had time to adapt to these changes. It's also cheaper
for cities to implement these changes this way because they're only doing
a small budget every year. When you put all these changes together, it's
marvelous.
PM: What's happened to the city in the six years since the book was published?
JG: There have not been too many changes in the downtown area. We think
there are enough pedestrian streets in the city. Motorists are trained very
well and pedestrians can walk in the middle of streets, so why do anything
more? We pointed out in the book that the fringes of the inner city have
a number of problems, and that's where the next effort should be. We're
building a subway at the moment in Copenhagen and the connection with the
subway stations at these edge points are being improved and addressed. The
city has also started in earnest to go into the inner suburbs to do wonderful
pedestrian spaces. Every neighborhood should have good public spaces available
as meeting places. It shouldn't just be in the downtown areas, but citywide.
PM: Was there anything in your research that the city did wrong?
JG: No. We found out from our study that generally all the squares and streets
worked quite well except for one particular area, where during the 1950s,
some new modernistic office buildings were built quite horribly. It's not
very charming in that corner of the city, and is heavily underused in comparison
to the rest of the city. We know from other studies that there are a number
of qualities which people like. When you put these qualities together you
have what William H. Whyte [author of "Social Life of Small Urban Spaces"(Project
for Public Spaces, Inc., 2001) and "City: Rediscovering the Center"
(Doubleday, 1989)] describes as "100 percent places"--places which
have nearly everything going for them. That's why I think many of these
things could easily be applied to American cities--maybe not in widespread
systems, but in smaller forms.
PM: In your new book, "New City Spaces", you pick only one American
city--Portland--as a good example. Did you look at other American cities
or was that the only American city that really worked?
JG: I really think Portland stands out as one city with a high quality of
public spaces and public transportation. It's way ahead of other American
cities. Seattle, Boston, Charleston, S.C., and San Antonio, Texas, are other
American cities doing interesting things. I was never impressed with the
quality of spaces in New Orleans--they are very badly kept--but there are
a number of places in that city which could be wonderful.
In "New City Spaces", we talk about four types of cities. The
first is the "Traditional City" which was built for people moving
about on feet and where you still have all the traditional city functions
like meeting spaces and marketplaces. You can find this old model in cities
like Venice, or in developing countries where cars have not yet penetrated.
The second type is the "Invaded City". These are old cities where
the balances among the various things going on in the city have been upset
because everything is now car dominated. We have many of these cities in
South and Central America, Europe, Asia, and in many developing countries.
They were originally built for another type of city life and people are
suffering heavily from this inundation of cars.
The third city is the "Abandoned City," which is the next step
an "Invaded City" goes through. That is when people give up walking
and cycling and gradually the whole city fabric becomes adapted to everybody
moving in cars: the public life ceases to exist. We have a number of examples
in the book. I've seen plenty of examples of this in America, like a city
in Mississippi, where there are no sidewalks, and everything happens in
the mall or on television. That's why I find a city like Portland interesting,
which is at the other end of the same country, and is very much like a European
city.
The fourth type of city, called the "Reconquered City", is included
in a chapter called "Winning Back the Public Spaces". It's about
a number of inundated or invaded cities which decided that unlimited car
traffic is unacceptable, and have turned to improving their cities through
public spaces and walking and cycling. We then give examples of reconquered
cities--the nine aforementioned cities, and describe specific spaces, streets
and squares all over the world that have been interestingly changed or newly
built.
Copenhagen, for example, is used as a role model for what they could do
and should do in an "Inundated City" like London where people
are treated very poorly.
PM: When I visited the architect Richard Rogers at his home in London, we
talked about Copenhagen as a model for London, and I remember him showing
me a copy of "Public Spaces, Public Life" which he had studied
very carefully.
JG: Speak of the Devil! He's the one who's heading the committee to carry
out these new policies and I'm also sitting on the panel, at his invitation.
It's a small world!
PM: Yes, it is. What else are you working on?
JG: Aside from working on the National Campaign for Improving Public Spaces
in Denmark, I have a firm that consults on the human dimension in city planning
and in this regard, I have an enormous amount of work all over the world.
It's heartwarming to see this great upsurge in interest for the human side
of city planning which has happened in the last twenty years.
It's only in the last five years that we have started to build up this consultancy,
where not only do I preach and criticize in books, but where we're also
trying to find out what people can actually do to improve the quality of
public spaces. These days, I'm applying these theories and looking at how
we can turn cities around.
PM: Well, It's been a delight talking to you. Thanks so much for speaking
to me.
JG: You're very welcome.
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