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Jan Gehl giving a talk at Cooper Hewitt. It's long, but worth watching.
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Urban life is in many ways a matter of rhythms, and the rhythms of human movement and perception have found a gifted interpreter in Gehl. Every city that has implemented his ideas has revived some of its livelier qualities, or discovered them anew.
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Jan Gehl on understanding humans, and thereby creating better cities:
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Ever since planning was professionalized around 1960, instead of adding new streets and new houses to existing cities, they switched to big scale stuff--big buildings, new districts, and handling the influx of automobiles. They were good at handling big blocks, but weren’t paying attention to people. In the book, I talk about three levels in city planning: the big story seen from above; the medium story--the site plans, and the little story--the people landscape seen at eye-level. Planners tended to the two bigger scales, but would not come down to eye-level and see the results. And architects became more and more interested in single buildings and in forms than in society. They were concerned with the skyline than the sidewalk. But the people scale is the most important scale, because that’s where the biggest attractions are--other people--and that is exactly the scale that has for years been forgotten and mishandled. Nobody has been commissioned to look after it in any systematic way.
We know more about the habitat of panda bears and mountain gorillas than we do about cities at eye-level. It’s intriguing why so little research has been done on the urban habitat of homo sapiens in urban settings. Since Jane Jacobs, maybe 10 people have studied it seriously: Holly Whyte; Christopher Alexander; Allan Jacobs and Donald Appleyard among them. Ten years ago, we started our consultancy firm to put all of their theories to work. And we’ve learned a lot about what works and doesn’t work. It’s partly a cultural question and partly it’s a matter of biology and what kind of animal we are--how far we can move, and see. Why is it that shops are four or five meters apart on all the good shopping streets all over the world? Because if you’re walking past, there is a new experience every four or five seconds, which is ideal from a stimulus point of view.
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On cities built for people:
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In traditional cities – those places we instinctively love because they’re lovely and beautiful and make us want to sit and eat an ice cream or sip a coffee – the Godzilla factor doesn’t win. Great traditional places like the Piazza del Campo in Siena, Italy, or cities like Barcelona, or Gehl’s own beloved Copenhagen which have grown on a foundation of progressive urbanism, and great new places like Curritiba in southern Brazil built on sustainability principles, all are full of small signals and eye-level details that can only be seen as you walk along a human-scale street at 5 km/hr. And Gehl Architecture’s extensive research in the public realm – which could be characterized as an anthropological study of the wild homo sapien in his natural urban environment – backs this up. We don’t just happen to love Venice because it has great food or because it’s romantic and old. We love places like this because they’re built in a way that works for an average human being just walking or biking around being human.
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Stephen Rees blogs Jan Gehl's talk at the Gateway Theatre, Richmond February 28, 2008. Found via Gordon Price ("Pricetags"), otherwise I would have missed this excellent summary (and a great comments thread, too). Coincidentally, I also watched Andres Duany's very engaging talk, "On the Edge," from January 16/08 on the SFU "City Program" site (video here: http://www.sfu.ca/city/city_pgm_video014.htm). It's a bit disconcerting to think that but for a fluke, I could have missed both these items. I don't remember seeing Gehl's lecture announced, and I didn't see any media follow-ups anywhere else. Duany's lecture I knew about, but missed that a video of same was available. Well, better late than never, I guess...
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When Professor Gehl first graduated, architects were big and arrogant and people were small and insignificant. Modernists thought streets were bad. They designed towers in the grass. Most schools of architecture didn’t talk about people – and many still don’t. They were led astray by Art: it looks good in a magazine but people won’t use it. That was forty years ago, and then after studying it for a long time people started asking him how it should be done, so he started a consulting firm eight years ago: they call themselves “urban quality consultants”.
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During the car invasion of the 1950s planners and politicians panicked. They thought that the purpose of life is to have more cars. Cities were designed for cars and parking.
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