Driving along Route One in New Jersey last week, looking at the mammoth car dealerships and shopping centers lining the eight-lane highway, it was difficult to see how the words of noted Danish urbanist and architect Jan Gehl applied in such an environment. Where was there a public space to revive? Where was there a place to put a sidewalk cafe, a bicycle lane or a bench?
Gehl had spoken that same night before an audience of public officials and interested citizens in nearby Princeton, most of whom were participating in The Mayors’ Institute on Community Design for two days at Princeton, organized by Regional Plan Association and the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs, Office of Smart Growth. Gehl spoke at McCosh Hall, inside one of the classic stone buildings at the university, as students made their way outside over a thin blanket of snow.
Gehl, Director of the Center for Public Space Research at the School of Architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, has been practicing his profession for four decades. Similar to William “Holly” Whyte in New York City, Gehl has spent his career examining and analyzing public spaces, studying how to keep them vibrant, or make them so. His books include New City Spaces; Life Between Buildings; and Public Spaces-Public Life. The distillation of his work centers around that most ordinary of activities: walking. “We are born to walk,” Gehl said, as he sauntered across the stage, demonstrating one version of that activity. “We are slow-moving animals. All our senses are designed to move at 5 kilometers an hour. Everything important is done on our feet, as we were meant to be.
Walking is more than walking. Walking is life.” He also praised related activities, including sitting, standing, watching and bicycling. His work is a study of urban pleasure, and the ways of producing more of it.
His ideals are classic historic cities like Barcelona, or revived newer ones like Portland in the United States. His native Copenhagen has been his workshop. There, thanks to several decades of what Gehl called “tweaking,” people stroll, bicycle and hang out as a matter of course. His statistics are amazing. Thirty-three percent of people in Copenhagen bicycle to work, Gehl said, while another third use public transit.
The key to generating great public spaces, of course, is taming that dominant master and mistress of most American cities, the car, and the devices created to handle it – the highway, the parking lot and the garage. Citizens must ask their leaders to place other priorities ahead of moving as many cars through a place as possible, or parking them once they get there.
This means removing parking spaces and lanes of traffic. In Copenhagen, the city’s traffic engineer has methodically removed parking spaces each year, while adding space for cycling and walking. “If you remove the parking,” Gehl said, “people won’t drive.” His portrayal of bicycling in Copenhagen would startle many Americans, who tend to view it as primarily a sport. “It’s a transportation system,” Gehl said of cycling.
“It’s not just for the freaks with the bicycle helmets and the padded elbows.” With regards to public spaces, Gehl said, there are four types of cities: the Traditional City, the Invaded City, the Abandoned City and the Reconquered City. Traditional cities are those like Venice, where people have never stopped walking. An invaded city is one like Naples, where leaders have allowed cars to take over squares and sidewalks. Abandoned cities are those like Houston, with ghost-like centers.
Reconquered cities are those like Portland, where citizens have reclaimed the public sector through wise policies.
Seeing the urban vitality Gehl described as a possibility, it was difficult not to endorse his prescriptions. But were they really valid for much of the contemporary American landscape? Suburban municipalities like Virginia Beach, which is actually the most populous city in Virginia, lack any center to reconquer, much less abandon. At times, Gehl seemed to assume the existence of a traditional city framework. He twice spoke about “starting at the railway station” when talking of how to revive public spaces, seemingly unaware that most American cities lacked them.
Still, his words clearly applied to traditional towns like Princeton, which has a centuriesold structure of streets and buildings to revive.
In these traditional towns and cities, attempts to squeeze in more parking garages and more lanes of traffic are viewed by some as eroding the community’s charm. Adding more bike lanes, buses and jitneys, and actually removing parking and traffic lanes in most towns in the tri-state area would be revolutionary here.
Change is possible. It was somewhat gratifying to learn that Copenhagen was not always a Mecca for bicyclists and boulevardiers. In the 1960s, Gehl said, Danish planners were actually discouraging cycling under the theory that this would reduce bicycle accidents with cars. It was not until the gas crisis of the 1970s that planners began to revive the practice. Over the coming years, planners encouraged strolling and walking as well, and pedestrianized more streets and plazas. Many people objected, Gehl said, because they thought it was not consistent with traditional Danish character that valued privacy and the home. The Danish were not Italians, they said, accustomed to dwelling in public places.
“Now, we are more Italian than the Italians,” he said. “We have developed a public-life culture that no one would have thought possible 40 years ago.” Particularly astute were his observations of how the needs of people have changed over the generations. Once, people hungered for open space; now, they hunger for each other.
“One hundred years ago on a Sunday, people would rush away from the crowded city into the woods,” Gehl said. “Today on a Sunday, people rush from the undercrowded suburbs into the overcrowded city.” Gehl’s philosophy was a possible challenge to the architects and designers of the World Trade Center site. He criticized what he called “dog-shit planning,” where each architect lays his piece, and the space left over is considered public space. According to LMDC’s Alex Garvin, the opposite will be true at Ground Zero, with the chosen designer focusing first on the public spaces. If so, Gehl would approve.
“The proper hierarchy of planning,” Gehl said, is “life, space and buildings, not buildings, space, life.”
–Alex Marshall, Senior Editor, RPA.First Published Feb. 6, 2003, in Spotlight on the Region, of Regional Plan Association in New York