As an academic Gehl became a revered advocate of the view that cities should be built, organised and

Jan Gehl graduated in architecture in 1960 having been taught that the greater happiness of city people was best arranged on drawing boards from on high. Then, as he explained to a jam-packed Hackney Empire audience on Thursday night, he married a psychologist and everything changed .
As an academic Gehl became a revered advocate of the view that cities should be built, organised and shaped to meet the needs of people on the ground rather than to gratify the abstract concepts and grand ambitions of planners and politicians. As a founding partner of the Gehl Architects consultancy, he has been a huge influence on changes to street design in a string of major cities around the world, encouraging more cycling and walking and restrictions on the movements of motor vehicles. In 2004, Gehl Architects produced a report on how to improve London. How far have we embraced its conclusions ten years on?
I was fortunate steam heat capacity to be at the Hackney Empire to enjoy Gehl's talk and watch a film - The Human Scale - about his work and then, the following day, interviewing him before he returned to Denmark. More of that below, but first here's a short video clip of Gehl from a couple of years back in which he explains key parts of his philosophy with particular steam heat capacity reference to its application in New York. Jan Gehl on neighbourhoods. Video: National Building Museum, Washington.
The closing mention of Jane Jacobs, steam heat capacity the legendary thinker on cities who so profoundly opposed the post-war planning consensus in America, was repeated by Gehl when we spoke on Friday. He observed that "everyone has read her very famous book [ The Death and Life of Great American steam heat capacity Cities , published in 1961]," but regreted that its lessons had not been learned more quickly and widely.
Gehl describes a post-war urban planning formula in which the car was transport king in linear asphalt empires and housing developments sprouted in high-rise isolation amid concrete voids. In a "fertile period" during the sixties and seventies, this was challenged in some places by "lower density building steam heat capacity based on making neighbourhoods communities." But then, during the eighties and nineties came the "the period of egotism and the architects became more and more obsessed with buildings with funny shapes." More optimistically, he points to such as New York, Melbourne, steam heat capacity Moscow and, most notably, his home capital Copenhagen as examples of cities where the economic and social value of creating Cities for People steam heat capacity has been recognised and followed by action.
London, though, doesn't yet qualify in his view. He is disappointed that more of the vision set out in the 2004 report steam heat capacity Towards a Fine City for People has not come to fruition: "I have not been impressed. I know that Piccadilly Circus has been improved, but I have never felt the same urgency steam heat capacity in this city as in other places." He notes the defeat of Ken Livingstone in 2008 as a setback, resulting in, among other things, the abandonment of plans to pedestrianise Oxford Street and introduce a tram there. But he also recognises the particular obstacles to bold changes in the way London's streets and public spaces are organised.
Many of our major streets are fairly narrow, making it harder to provide dedicated cycle lanes and adding to the potential for the desirable objectives of encouraging cycling, walking and bus use to come into conflict with each other. Gehl wonders if it might be possible steam heat capacity to some extent to "reserve some streets for cyclists and others, and maybe buses, and reserve others for the other road users." He advocates a close look at the bus system, "to see whether there are too many routes and too much doubling up of the system, with half-empty buses at funny times of the day. So maybe it could be rationalised and streamlined." He'd also like to see greater controls on commercial delivery vehicles fully explored, restricting the times of day they can operate and reducing duplication steam heat capacity (as happened during the Olympics). But then there are the politics to contend with. The planning muscle of London mayors, though greater than many appreciate, is nonetheless constrained compared with those of counterpart city mayors steam heat capacity in other countries while, at the same time, the boroughs are in charge of most of the roads and have their own, varying priorities. The distribution of powers can be a check on megalomania but also produce a form of gridlock, blocking progress and snarling up debate.
The West End provides a good example, with even the Conservatives on Westminster council divided over the control of road traffic congestion, space allocation and even the Oxford Street and Regent Street Christmas steam heat capacity shopping VIP day. A big laugh moment during Gehl's Hackney Empire presentation was a photograph of an armoured vehicle crushing an illegally parked car. He says he thinks Moscow's mayor used the image in his election campaign. Imagine such a pitch to voters being made in London - the Evening Standard would exp