Placemaking « Stephen Rees’s blog

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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All city planning then was about the capacity of roads and parking. Every city has a department for traffic engineers. Is there a city department for pedestrians and public life? Does anybody know anything about people?

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“People are an endangered species.”

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He has found nine cities including Barcelona, Lyons, Strasbourg, Curitiba – and each has the necessary qualities - lively, attractive, safe, sustainable and healthy. And they did this by putting the emphasis on walking and bicycling.

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The shift in emphasis has been from market to meeting. People come downtown to see what is going on. The city is a destination in its own right. We are now an experience oriented society, but due to family fission and smaller homes if you want to see other people, you have to get out of the house. We want the kind of quality we see when we go on holiday in our own city. People leave the underpopulated suburbs to come into city, not seeking out greenery but the company of other people.”Life is too short to go on holidays”.

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He told the story of the man who found a skunk in his basement. He tried to encourage it to leave by setting out a trail of breadcrumbs to the woods. Next day he had two skunks in the basement.

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Q, In Vancouver we currently have the notion that density alone will cause these changes to happen

A. You have to be proactive. It has to be wider concept – “clever density” – do not take out the sun and make it windy – no one can see what is going on on the street 50 floors up. Senseless density won’t help – “high rise is the lazy architect’s solution to density” – you need “sensitivity in density”

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Q – shared space streets -

A – While the plan is to move that way, Gehl likes pedestrian priority better than shared streets. He was against the idea of traffic sign free streets being tried in Holland. He was very critical of that way to doing it – “people should be free of worry”. We need quality in how people feel about it, not just accident statistics.

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q – gentritfication?

a – There is no smart answer to that. When you improve the area new people move in. This should not stand in the way of improving cities. You also need a social policy. Bogota used transit as social policy providing good transit not more roads for cars improves the lot of the poor.

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At the end of the evening Professor Gehl wanted to present a copy of one of his books to the Mayor of Richmond. There was no Mayor to take the book – nor any councillors. Only a rather junior member of the planning staff. It was explained to me that there had been a day long briefing by Prof Gehl of the staff, but again no politicians attended.

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