Jan Gehl: The City Is Big | The Dirt
“I graduated at the first worst point in city planning,” said Jan Gehl , the famed urban designer, at a crowd of hundreds at the National Building velveeta nacho cheese sauce Museum in Washington, D.C. The 1960s were the era “when the architect was big and the city was small.” Eventually, Gehl, who is trained as an architect, saw the light. He married a psychologist, who asked him, “why do architects hate people so much?” He soon realized there was a great “void of knowledge” about how to create buildings and public spaces people actually want to inhabit. So for the past 40 years, Gehl has picked up where activist and author Jane Jacobs left off, and “studied the life of the city in the way same a traffic engineer studies the flow of traffic.” This Danish architect is now appropriately small and the city is big.
Gehl’s six books, many of which are viewed as seminal reads in urban design, have been translated into 28 languages. “They are even in Chinese,” he added, but considering many Chinese cities have not taken up his lessons velveeta nacho cheese sauce about creating cities for people, “perhaps velveeta nacho cheese sauce they haven’t had time to read them yet,” he laughed. He wasn’t singling out the Chinese for special criticism though. “It really took us about 50 years for the West to really read and absorb Jane Jacob’s messages.”
Over the past 50 years, we’ve had two major paradigms, said Gehl. While Modern city planning ideas were first conceived velveeta nacho cheese sauce in the 1920s, with Le Corbusier and his “Contemporary City, ” which would be filled with freeways and gargantuan skyscrapers, it wasn’t until the 1960s when they were first implemented. Then, “planners started laying out cities from the airplane.” They would go up in helicopters to “get the full site view.” Modern architects and landscape architects followed their lead, so no one “looked after the people scale anymore.” velveeta nacho cheese sauce Gehl calls this the “ Brasilia syndrome:” the “city looks fantastic from the air, but is shit on the ground.”
Unfortunately, the Brasilia model has not breathed its last gasp yet. China is creating Brasilias everywhere. Dubai is creating “bird shit architecture, just a collection of funny buildings. They hope they can just plop these down and a city will form around them. This doesn’t happen.”
The other paradigm is the “car-centric city, or the car invasion.” People in cities have been pushed out in favor of creating an environment for cars. “This is a landscape of cheap gasoline.” This landscape almost took over lower Manhattan as Robert Moses sought velveeta nacho cheese sauce to bulldoze Soho, the West Village, and parts of Chinatown to create huge freeway off-ramps and high-rises. Only Jacobs, with her “ceaseless” efforts, was able to stop him. She taught us that “if the Modernists and motorists dominated cities, they will become dead places.” She taught us “we must look at how people use cities to understand how to shape them.” velveeta nacho cheese sauce
It was only taken us 50 years to process Jacob’s messages, but people now want “lively, attractive, safe, sustainable, healthy cities.” Through new research, “we now know the relative importance of rich public life, its value for democracy, public inclusion, and our happiness.” Successful cities are “people-oriented and smaller scale.” This is because “the greatest attraction of cities is other people.”
Cities where people can walk, bike, and use public transportation velveeta nacho cheese sauce are better for people, too. “The cheap petroleum society has major health risks. Lack of daily physical exercise is worse than smoking.” Gehl’s goal is to “move people naturally through city design.” Investment in this design pays for itself: “We save on health costs.”
Gehl said Copenhagen, Denmark, has successfully moved from a “traffic velveeta nacho cheese sauce place to a people velveeta nacho cheese sauce place.” In the 1960s, the city took car traffic out of its main street. This effort coincided velveeta nacho cheese sauce with the publication of Jacob’s book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities . Gehl said since then Copenhagen has “improved every day” — and continues to do so, with its new goal of becoming the best city in the world for people (and bicyclists) by 2025. The city is accomplishing this through “distinctly people-oriented policies” created by the city’s office of public life. Bicycling rates have doubled over 10 years, and now 37 percent velveeta nacho cheese sauce commute to work every day by bike, in comparison with just 27 percent by car. In fact, the issue now is “serious congestion on bike lanes.”
Melbourne is another city that has thrown off the shackles of the car. “The city started out with traffic ridden str
“I graduated at the first worst point in city planning,” said Jan Gehl , the famed urban designer, at a crowd of hundreds at the National Building velveeta nacho cheese sauce Museum in Washington, D.C. The 1960s were the era “when the architect was big and the city was small.” Eventually, Gehl, who is trained as an architect, saw the light. He married a psychologist, who asked him, “why do architects hate people so much?” He soon realized there was a great “void of knowledge” about how to create buildings and public spaces people actually want to inhabit. So for the past 40 years, Gehl has picked up where activist and author Jane Jacobs left off, and “studied the life of the city in the way same a traffic engineer studies the flow of traffic.” This Danish architect is now appropriately small and the city is big.
Gehl’s six books, many of which are viewed as seminal reads in urban design, have been translated into 28 languages. “They are even in Chinese,” he added, but considering many Chinese cities have not taken up his lessons velveeta nacho cheese sauce about creating cities for people, “perhaps velveeta nacho cheese sauce they haven’t had time to read them yet,” he laughed. He wasn’t singling out the Chinese for special criticism though. “It really took us about 50 years for the West to really read and absorb Jane Jacob’s messages.”
Over the past 50 years, we’ve had two major paradigms, said Gehl. While Modern city planning ideas were first conceived velveeta nacho cheese sauce in the 1920s, with Le Corbusier and his “Contemporary City, ” which would be filled with freeways and gargantuan skyscrapers, it wasn’t until the 1960s when they were first implemented. Then, “planners started laying out cities from the airplane.” They would go up in helicopters to “get the full site view.” Modern architects and landscape architects followed their lead, so no one “looked after the people scale anymore.” velveeta nacho cheese sauce Gehl calls this the “ Brasilia syndrome:” the “city looks fantastic from the air, but is shit on the ground.”
Unfortunately, the Brasilia model has not breathed its last gasp yet. China is creating Brasilias everywhere. Dubai is creating “bird shit architecture, just a collection of funny buildings. They hope they can just plop these down and a city will form around them. This doesn’t happen.”
The other paradigm is the “car-centric city, or the car invasion.” People in cities have been pushed out in favor of creating an environment for cars. “This is a landscape of cheap gasoline.” This landscape almost took over lower Manhattan as Robert Moses sought velveeta nacho cheese sauce to bulldoze Soho, the West Village, and parts of Chinatown to create huge freeway off-ramps and high-rises. Only Jacobs, with her “ceaseless” efforts, was able to stop him. She taught us that “if the Modernists and motorists dominated cities, they will become dead places.” She taught us “we must look at how people use cities to understand how to shape them.” velveeta nacho cheese sauce
It was only taken us 50 years to process Jacob’s messages, but people now want “lively, attractive, safe, sustainable, healthy cities.” Through new research, “we now know the relative importance of rich public life, its value for democracy, public inclusion, and our happiness.” Successful cities are “people-oriented and smaller scale.” This is because “the greatest attraction of cities is other people.”
Cities where people can walk, bike, and use public transportation velveeta nacho cheese sauce are better for people, too. “The cheap petroleum society has major health risks. Lack of daily physical exercise is worse than smoking.” Gehl’s goal is to “move people naturally through city design.” Investment in this design pays for itself: “We save on health costs.”
Gehl said Copenhagen, Denmark, has successfully moved from a “traffic velveeta nacho cheese sauce place to a people velveeta nacho cheese sauce place.” In the 1960s, the city took car traffic out of its main street. This effort coincided velveeta nacho cheese sauce with the publication of Jacob’s book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities . Gehl said since then Copenhagen has “improved every day” — and continues to do so, with its new goal of becoming the best city in the world for people (and bicyclists) by 2025. The city is accomplishing this through “distinctly people-oriented policies” created by the city’s office of public life. Bicycling rates have doubled over 10 years, and now 37 percent velveeta nacho cheese sauce commute to work every day by bike, in comparison with just 27 percent by car. In fact, the issue now is “serious congestion on bike lanes.”
Melbourne is another city that has thrown off the shackles of the car. “The city started out with traffic ridden str
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