Positive thinking towards the cities of 2050

By
May 22, 2012
Open data, Research, Uncategorized
Leave a Comment

What does a high tech, networked city look like? Credit; James Silver, Wired Magazine

Predicting the future of cities is somewhat of a misnomer  - if  a very enjoyable one. However redundant an exercise of itself it mostly is (posterity tells us how wrong it can be), as part of an ongoing process of imagineering our actual futures –  as a conversation, it is crucial.  In a time of rapid global urbanization, thinking and planning for the future of city life is vital if we are to sustain population growth whilst ensuring quality of life improvements across the globe.  The Future City Lab, is an open-source initiative for accruing ideas of our future urban environments by a means of crowdsourcing positive utopian ideas for 2050.   In a conversation with Martin Haas, partner of Stuttgart based Haas Cook Zemmrich and co-founder of Future City Lab, Jeff Risom Head of Gehl Institute, answers provocative musings about the role of technology in the city and how radically different – or similar – city life  in 2050 might be…..

1. Haas – In the age of ubiquitous and mobile computer technology, the longing for the “real” and the “tangible” will become a counter-pole that also shapes society. How will that influence cities?

Risom - From the telegraph to the telephone to Twitter, statistical evidence indicates that the creation of new communication technology has always increased the demand and frequency of physical meeting. Otherwise why would the computer industry’s innovators, with the means to connecting collaborators from afar, all choose to locate in an area with some of the most expensive real estate in the world: Silicon Valley.  Yet Silicon Valley as it exists today is the manifestation of 20th century paradigm based on the proximity to a leading university and the concentration of the best and the brightest working in elaborate and expensive, but often isolated corporate office parks. It is cities, with their diversity, opportunity for chance encounters, proximity to customers and related industries that provide the fertile ground for cultivating the ideas that will shape the future.

People still choose to engage in private use of media out in public space

Alone-together. With opportunities for planned or spontaneous meetings, Broadway, New York

2. Haas – In the near future most commodities and services will be available through networking and digital means. Is that the end of shopping malls and retail stores?

Risom - The virtual cannot be conceived as a replacement for “bricks and mortar”, but rather an extra layer that enhances the physical. This added layer of the virtual (which has the potential to lead to more urban density and complexity) only increases the need for thoughtfully designed streets and public spaces. While the potential for technology is huge, we must be careful to not to confuse a city – which is really defined by the people and their interconnected daily lives with its infrastructure, buildings, or technology. Therefore shopping malls and retail stores (or some form of market spaces) will always exist, perhaps not for consumption, but certainly as places for people to meet and interact.

Retail Mall, Pearl St, Boulder

3rd Avenue Promenade LA. Places for cultural exchange and recreation/ play as well as shopping

3. Haas – A responsive mobility network will be created. It will respond to the demands of each individual but will at the same time be linked to a ‘collective mobility’. There will no longer be a need to separate private and public traffic. How does this influence the quality of streets?

Risom - I believe that notions of public and private are fundamental to human co-existence and ownership is a very powerful right.  So rather than the blurring of public and private, I foresee a form of mobility based on “The Sharing Economy”. This concept of more effectively sharing commodities like private vehicles (the average car is used only 10% of its lifetime and during rush hour in a typical high-income city, only 25% of all private vehicles are in use) will allow us to consume less, more effectively use existing capacity of systems and resources, and provide more freedom of choice in mobility options.  This will allow us to build denser along existing streets and transit corridors, meaning street space will become more vibrant but also more contested.  In a typical city, streets comprise 20% of all urban space and up to 80% of public open space.  In the future, the incredible resource and potential that streets provide will be better utilized.

Flexible parking space for cars and bikes depending on the time of day, Copenhagen

Using open data to plan NYC bike share system

By
May 21, 2012
Cities, Cycling, Mobility, Open data, Public Realm
Leave a Comment

Welcome back to Gehl Institute’s partnership with Untapped Cities in New York, looking at the impact of data, both open and collected, in the design of cities.

On March 7, New York City became the first local government to pass legislation ensuring public access to data. The passing of the bill symbolizes a political embrace of the “open” culture already underway in New York City’s “Silicon Alley.”  City agencies and non-profit organizations in New York are making new correlations between urban conditions and social phenomenon, utilizing crowdsourcing and open data, to support traditional methods of data analysis.

Open Plans, a New York-based non-profit organization with a focus on transportation and urban planning, is an example of such a progressive group. The Open Plans team builds software which enables public agencies and non-profit organizations to crowdsource input from the community. You may recognize their work with New York City’s Department of Transportation’s interactive bike station suggestion map from this past year. In its decade of existence, Open Plans developed open source projects which include OpenGeo, Streetfilms, Streetsblog, GothamSchools, Civic Commons and OpenTripPlanner. According to the non-profit, all the tools serve to facilitate open source software, information transparency and progressive transportation planning.

Recently, Open Plans co-hosted a panel at the American Planning Association (APA) Conference in Los Angeles with Denver-based firm Place Matters, highlighting the challenges to come as we navigate amidst a constant and sometimes overwhelming flow of data. Important questions loom: How do we make sense of the data? With limited resources, should companies focus on making the quality of data better or the analysis tools better?

Publicly submitted requests for bike share stations in NYC

In partnership with Open Plans, the NYC Department of Transportation (NYCDOT) has also embraced this trend towards a more “open” culture by utilizing crowd-sourced information to plan station locations for the soon-to-be-launched Citibank bike share program. Bicycle commuting has increased in the city (35% from 2007 to 2008), but there are still significant challenges associated with bike ridership, including access. The collected crowd-sourced data, submitted via an interactive map on the NYCDOT website, allowed the public to suggest bike share stations for the rollout.

To read the full article visit Untapped Cities

What gets measured gets done

By
May 16, 2012
Public Realm, Research
1 Comment

Excited conversations around Open City Data in our office have kept returning to the past – to our own experiences and stories that have framed our understanding of data in cities more broadly over the last 12 years in practice (and 40 years of Jan Gehl’s research). Here we will share some of our thoughts based on these experiences. Our practice’s foundational values are grounded in understanding the human experience of the city, and this sensibility extends to how we approach technological changes that affect it. Open data for us and the increased salience of transparency it evokes should be understood as social change, not simply technological development. There has been a cultural and political shift in will that has created a climate for the emergence of a collaborative spirit. Innovation through mining latent values is – it could be asserted – the spirit of our time in an age of scarcity.

Smart cities, smart phones and censors will create a flood of data and measurements, however it is still what we choose to do with this data, how we apply it, how we process it and of what quality it is that will influence decision makers and create a shift in the city – not the quantity or digital nature of it.

‘Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted’                -  Albert Einstein

All over the world there is a shift by governments and organisations to try to capture alternative measures presenting a more even spread of values and interests that can be drawn on by decision makers.  From National Gross Happiness to measures of well-being, these attempt to capture changing societal values as they move away from the material towards quality of life concerns. This presents a significant challenge for statisticians but is necessary if we are to strive for socially and environmentally minded governance and escape the data ‘cage’ in which the economics of the twentieth century has left us. To continue to base decision making solely on that which is most easily measurable undermines the possibility for achieving the changes which our age demands. For instance, we believe environmental challenges require a more diverse set of responses than those offered by the currently myopically focused approach.

Open city data could offer the backbone to a new ecosystem of shared data, captured for different reasons and to alternate ends. It could sound the death knell for cities’ over-reliance on static sources of data, and provide the platform for much-needed change.

With permission of the Charles Booth Archive at the Library of the London School of Economics http://booth.lse.ac.uk/

Seeing is believing

In 1889 in London the philanthropist and social researcher Charles Booth, frustrated by the lack of data on the city’s changing demography and in particular on the city’s poor, set out to complete an extensive study of the people and places of the industrial city. Claimed to be a more lively and accurate portrait of London than even Dickens’ novels, his mixture of ethnographic, observational and spatial data filled many volumes and was expressed as a colour-coded, beautifully intricate map. This displayed the inequalities that went to form the ubiquitous paradox of the urban industrial society: ‘poverty in a land of plenty’.

Booth’s social survey caused a significant discursive shift – it served to dispel the myth that poverty was the punishment for idleness and immorality; that poverty was due to the failings of the poor themselves rather than society or the poor conditions of the city itself. Booth produced data which showed that 30% of the population lived in poverty caused by low pay, old age, sickness disability and unemployment – and that unemployment was in fact a spatial issue. This led to the urban malaise being treated as a spatial problem as well as an individual one. Areas of low-employment needed targeted injections of jobs, and so began the place based nature of urban regeneration and policy. The work proved to be revolutionary in the scientific spatial representation of society – social cartography or mapping began to interrogate the correlations between urban conditions and social phenomena. Journalistic accounts at the time reported poverty, and the places in which it was endemic – Dickens’ serialised and widely distributed novels dramatized the issues -  but picturesque narrations do little for the legislator. Social-scientific presentations, on the other hand, were more adept at forcing institutional responses. City managers ‘manage what they can measure’. This was – and still is – the bureaucrat’s remit, and this data gave the visibility necessary to spur change.  Booth and Rowntree (who conducted a social study of poverty in York) are cited in the reform of the poor law and their data is said to have inspired the Liberal government of 1906 to embark on their extensive welfare reform programme. The programme explicitly targeted children, the sick, the elderly and the un-employed  and is the basis of the modern-day welfare system.

Have we been measuring the right things?

Booth was a game changer, revolutionising the way in which data was used to feed into social policy.  Does ubiqutous data generated by mobile devices, data sensors and apps only promote a form of surveillance that can infringe on freedom of expression? Or can we use these feedback loops to ensure the city’s structures and systems can better adapt to the rapid change of the culture and lifestyle of urban living? It has been said that we will experience 100 years of social change over the next decade. Perhaps the emergence of open data as a new basis for urban decision making will respond to the uniqueness of our time in the way that Booth’s map did, with equally radical results. After all, that is precisely what we need.

Bloggers are Simon Goddard, Claire Mookerjee, Jo Posselt and Jeff Risom

Untapped Cities and Gehl Institute on Data in Cities

By
May 11, 2012
Uncategorized
Leave a Comment

Gehl Institute is pleased to announce its partnership with Untapped Cities for a series of collaborative posts on how data is reshaping the way cities are designed.  With our experiences on making people the main driver in urban design – we will be writing about how data has shaped this process and cities themselves. Untapped cities will be responding by pairing these lessons with posts on new processes, platforms and publications coming out of New York City’s budding open data movement.

Untapped Cities write;

On March 7, New York City became the first local government to pass legislation ensuring public access to government data — a high-water mark, some might argue, in the open data movement. Nowhere is the impact of this trend more apparent than in cities, where data is the densest and networks most complex. As people begin to sort through and make sense of all this data, government decision-making is coming under increasing scrutiny as savvy citizen groups and organizations create stronger and stronger cases to challenge the status quo. 

Ahead of this curve are Gehl Architects, the Danish urban planning consultancy and design firm that helped produce the World Class Streets document which laid the ground work for the NYC DOT’s remarkable transformation of Broadway—most notably reclaiming public space at Times Square, Herald Square and Madison Square. For decades Gehl Architects co-founder Professor Jan Gehl has been challenging the status quo and working to make people more visible in the planning process by collecting data on life in cities – specifically how people use streets and spaces.  The best place to experience the constantly evolving people-oriented approach to planning is the city of Copenhagen.  Over the past 40 years, Copenhagen has been transformed into one of the world’s most livable cities.

Gehl Architects build on Jan’s data collection methodologies to gather information that enforces a people first paradigm through both design and education. With newly available numbers now quantifying the quality-of-life improvements their projects have helped produced, the Open Data movement is in many ways just beginning to catch up to Gehl’s pioneering moves.

As Gehl Architects told Untapped:

“Through the selective collection and presentation of data around human physiology and behavior correlated with the usage patterns of different city streets and public spaces we have demonstrated the direct relationship between city design and life in cities. Observations and data collected from across the world suggests that many aspects of the relationship between urban form and public life are dependent on fundamental aspects of the human experience– such as our senses, our height and way we soak in our surroundings at the speed in which we walk . These universal aspects can then be combined with the unique and contextually driven characteristics of place to create a more humanized city with healthy public life and mobility. Strategies to these ends we have been deploying around the world for the last 12 years. ”

In this series of blog posts, Gehl Architects’ Institute department and Untapped will interrogate the way in which we produce and use data on cities (as in spatially specific data). We will explore how data collection and selection influences city leaders’ decisions, and how it is often the data that is hardest to collect, that counts the most for our quality of life. This data is therefore often the most neglected in city decision making.

From a lens of people centered planning, these posts will track a course from the pioneers of data collection in cities through to tomorrow’s outlook. We will begin, as many urban geography courses do, with Charles Booth’s 1889 poverty map of London. The series will continue with an interview with Birgitte Svarre, Jan Gehl’s co-author on an up-coming book on people oriented data collection followed by an exploration on how we can use data to compare and contrast life in cities.   We will take a critical look at livability in Melbourne and how data will shape urban design practice in the coming years, using the remarkable public engagement effort in Christchurch following the devastating earth quake there one year ago as an example.  

Throughout, we will continually highlight how decisions around how we collect and map data on the city affects actual built results and how city design today begins with data. Whether we are aware of it or not, data drives change in our cities. 

Bloggers from Gehl Institute are; Simon Goddard, Claire Mookerjee, Jo Posselt and Jeff Risom

Bogotá for Bogotanos

By
May 9, 2012
Mobility
1 Comment

Last week David and I travelled to Bogotá for the second time to collaborate with the World Bank on a scoping workshop. Throughout the four-day process, we meet and worked with various secretariats, including habitat, planning and mobility on imagining the future of the ‘7a’ avenue, one of the most prominent and historic arteries of the city.

The ‘7a’ project is being lead by the Secretariat of Habitat, under the wing of their ‘Taller de la Ciudad’ or ‘City Lab’. Their aim is to revitalise parts of the city centre beginning by enhancing public life, easing movement and increasing security. The ‘Taller de la Ciudad’ has identified 15 nodes along the 7a where they plan to trial pilot projects. Later this year, they will launch an international ideas competition to help gather innovative ideas for the 15 nodes.

The ‘City Lab’ team has already begun their first pilot between the 19th and 26th streets of the ‘7a’ – cars have been re-routed and the road re-distributed to include space for pedestrians, cyclists and service vehicles. Although it is being pitched to users as a pedestrian street, it seems like the opportunity is much bigger and linked to the current mayor’s slogan – Bogotá Humana (Human Bogotá). The planned initiatives along the ‘7a’ translate into projects that are about making an already incredible and inspiring city into a place that exhilarates our senses by smartly transforming them into destinations, experiences, hubs, and magnetic centers that offer the best of city life to every citizen.

7a avenue pilot

Towards a human-centered Bogotá

Standing and observing the altered flows between the 19th and 26th we were struck by the lack of clarity and conflict between users despite the delineated spaces. There appeared to be very little natural propensity to follow the painted lanes and no alliance between pedestrians and cyclists. It left us wondering how Bogotanos can be moved towards and inspired to respond to something that is entirely new? Does this type of lane segregation and order suit the culture? It seems like an incredible opportunity for both the secretariats and the citizens to investitage city-goer behaviour and to trial innovative urban solutions.

The exponential and ambitious transformations of Bogotá, such as Transmilenio BRT program and associated ‘hardware’ restructuring projects by Enrique Peñalosa, socially experimental and unorthodox ‘software’ approach by Antanas Mockus, have yet to be surpassed in fame or efficiency by successive administrations. These projects were, in thinking and finance a product of their time. Now it seems like a new, more dispersed and open city agenda is surfacing. One in which bottom up processes of small change that inspire participation, social connection and trust are developing, needing an understanding of the inter-play between the hard, and the soft infrastructures of the city. The pilot project shows that one size doesn’t fit all and that intelligent design must come from user and cultural understanding.

Main city centre plaza

Leader in Innovation and Design – Jeff Risom

By
April 20, 2012
News
Leave a Comment

Jeff Risom

Here at Gehl we’re very excited that Jeff, our head of Institute within the office has been recognised as a rising talent in the Berlingske Business talent 100 Denmark 2012. Of course we have known he is a rising star for a long time, but it’s wonderful that others are also excited by his talent. Modest by nature and with little information about Jeff’s work specifically out there (pointed out yesterday by Rasmus Brønnum) click here for english we wanted to mark the occasion with a very quick look at some of Jeff’s recent work.

Jeff has been a key innovator on many projects here in the office; advising the NYC Department Of Transport  on the Broadway project; visioning the future with Our Cities Ourselves and working on Market Street in San Francisco. A prolific speaker so far this year he has managed to squeeze in speaking at the Nordic Green buildings conference in Oslo and presented a provocative look at the processes of awarding environmental standards and green building credentials.  It encouraged all of us to go beyond ambitions of neutrality towards regenerative design. In March Jeff presented a paper in Dehli about integrating mobility and public life and the kind of urbanism that this requires. He brought lessons learned from New York to a study of Chennai, India and the paper will be published later in the year. Jeff is a guest lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, The Royal Academy of Fine Art in Copenhagen, and the Danish Institute for Study Abroad and is a Guest Practitioner in the Cities Programme at the London School of Economics.

As a positive thinker and innovator Jeff is always pushing forward people-first design principles across fields that deal with the subject of the city, changing minds and inspiring change. Congratulations on this recognition from your colleagues at Gehl!

A city is only as green as its residents

By
April 10, 2012
Cities
1 Comment

Collage by Gehl Architects Vison collage by Gehl Architects

In Copenhagen it is possible to buy an organic kiwifruit from New Zealand. These are displayed in the supermarket alongside non-organic Italian varieties. Which one should I choose? Should I buy the ethically farmed NZ kiwi, or should I buy the Italian one with fewer air miles? What is the most sustainable decision? And is it possible for the most sustainable decision to also give me the highest quality of life?

Decisions regarding sustainability are increasingly affecting how we build cities. This is especially true in Christchurch as it embarks on the single largest infrastructure investment in its history – that of rebuilding.

Debate around sustainable cities has historically centred on individual buildings. In this regard, it is very easy to get caught-up discussing the merit of a five-star versus six-star green star certification, or green roofs, or solar power, without considering other factors. This is evidenced in Melbourne, where the majority of new 6-star green certified homes have been built on the urban fringe. With limited access to public transport and cycling infrastructure, occupants require cars for most journeys. Just like the organic kiwi, a large amount of high-carbon transport is required to make these ‘sustainable’ homes accessible. Is it right to buy an organic kiwi on the other side of the world to where it grew? Can a ‘green’ house have a three-car garage?

What the Melbourne case highlights is that we must consider end-user behaviour if we want to make the most sustainable city. A recycling bin is no good if nobody uses it, or if its contents are contaminated and so taken to landfill. The most modern green workplace accessed by car produces more emissions than an older workplace accessed by public transport. A green building potentially isn’t green if its inhabitants use it differently than expected. A sustainable city is not simply a collection of green buildings, it is the infrastructure for a collection of people to enjoy sustainable lifestyles because they offer a higher quality of life.

A major factor in a sustainable lifestyle is transport choice. In 2009, 91% of trips were made by car in the Greater Christchurch Region. In Copenhagen the figure is 30%. Copenhagen has a long history of cycling which it has researched extensively. In 2010, 37% of people cycled to work in Copenhagen, with 70% continuing through winter. When asked their reason for choosing to cycle, the overwhelming reason respondents gave was convenience. Cycling in Copenhagen has nothing to do with ethical choices, it has to do with finding the easiest way to get from a to b. It is the result not of a ‘special Scandinavian mentality’, but of ongoing investment in cycling infrastructure by the City of Copenhagen, as well as the development of urban forms that create short enough distances for cycling to be viable. Copenhagen is internationally celebrated for the high quality of life cycling affords its citizens including health and accessibility benefits.

This identifies the issue at the heart of building a sustainable city. The central challenge is to make it easy and even desirable to be green – to create the infrastructure that will allow inhabitants to make sustainable decisions because they are in their own best interest. The challenge is for a city to be ‘Good for me’ and ‘Good for the planet’. This sometimes involves trade-offs such as weighing an isolated green building against integrated green transport. It will involve having an open mind.

In May last year, we asked you: ‘What kind of city do you want?’ Many of the most popular responses related both to a better lifestyle and sustainability. When debating your new sustainable city I encourage you to consider not ‘Is this city sustainable?’ but instead ‘How can this city make a sustainable lifestyle attractive for me?’ The answer to the latter question will illuminate the path to an enduringly sustainable city.

But back to the supermarket: Which kiwifruit did I buy – the organic New Zealand variety, or the lower-transport Italian? I bought the organic Danish apple.

Simon Goddard is a Project Architect with Gehl Architects in Copenhagen. He was extensively involved in the development of the Christchurch Central City Recovery Plan.

This article was originally published in The Press, Christchurch on 21 March, 2012.

Denmark 2050 / ”Der bli’r et yndigt land”

By
March 30, 2012
Books, Cities, Presentations
Leave a Comment

Realdania hosted a great conference in Copenhagen with wonderful speakers such as Bruce J. Katz from the Brookings Institution, Richard Burdett from LSE and Senior Consultant with Gehl Architects Rob Adams, City Architect of Melbourne.

Rob Adams Photo: Claus Bjørn Larsen Rob Adams, Photographer: Claus Bjørn Larsen

Photographer: Claus Bjørn Larsen Photographer: Claus Bjørn Larsen

Realdania has taken forward a brave scenario for Denmark 2050 basing its growth on a green sustainable economy. Bruce furthermore underlined the importance of regions as drivers of economic sustainable growth, and how regions need to collaborate in order to compete. On an urban level Bruce argued for a densification of urban nodes in cities and importantly how the new green economy requires a focus on place making, without going in to much detail about what that might be.

Rob showed on the other hand the great Melbourne story of the past 25 years of sustainable development in Melbourne based on local qualities, and local culture and memory, giving meaning to the understanding of what place making is really about – creating cities that are authentic and sustainable not only in an economic and environmental sense, but certainly also in terms of social sustainability and quality of life for people.

This factor was furthermore underlined by the example of London by Richard, now using their Olympic opportunity to stitch together the eastern part of London by way of providing more diversity of housing stock and parks, reconnecting the urban tissue of land, urban form and people.

Read the full Realdania report here in Danish: http://www.realdania.dk/Presse/Nyheder/2012/Rapport2050_270312.aspx

Thank you for hosting a great event in Copenhagen!

ARKITEKTEN – Gehl in Rosengard

By
March 27, 2012
Cities, News, Public Realm, Uncategorized
Leave a Comment

Gehl Architects are featured in the latest Arkitekten, the official publication of the Swedish Architectural Association.  Helle Søholt and myself, Kristian Skovbakke Villadsen are interviewed onsite as part of the office’s on-going work in Rosengard housing estate in Malmö, Sweden. The area, a typical 1960′s housing development categorized as a deprived housing district.  Since 2006, Gehl has been working with the owner and manager of the Estate, client MKB (Malmo commune social housing unit).  Together we have developed a strong collaboration and raised the bar in design excellence for the area.

Whilst respecting the existing qualities and looking for ways to strengthen the existing cultural and social structure of the neighborhood – we have sought out new opportunities in an area with a long history of social turmoil. Helle and myself discuss in the article the strategic framework we have developed explaining the principle design guidelines which work at the core of the strategy. As part of this effort we organized design competitions for the new rail station and also a Design Brief for an international invited competition to work on the densification of the area. We have also worked on designs for the public space, the results seen in the article operate as an amalgamation of smaller interventions working as urban acupuncture governed by the overall framework vision.

The full article is in Swedish and can be access here. 

Time to reclaim the streets

By
March 18, 2012
Cities, Mobility
1 Comment

Illustration: Gehl Architects

Gehl Architects discuss some ideas for the future of the City in this month’s Monocle magazine. If you subscribe to Monocle you can read it here:

http://www.monocle.com/sections/affairs/Magazine-Articles/Outside-the-box-Global/

In our ever-urbanizing world it is essential to be both idealistic and pragmatic about how we choose to live. If we’re to make our cities healthy, happy and resource-efficient then we must recalibrate the measures used by practitioners to focus more on quality of life: we should invert the space given to  cars for people.

The framework for this is already in place. In 2011 the UN pronounced a draft resolution on sustainable urban development through access to quality urban public spaces – stating it is a basic human right.  This timely decree happened just days before the right was exercised by citizens everywhere from Cairo to Wall Street. Communities took position of places like Tahir square in Cairo and Pearl traffic Island in Bahrain.

If you looked beyond the politics and the violence, what you could see was cities around the world usually full of cars – that were now full of people. Whilst we understand these as acts of defiance, and displays of symbolic solidarity against the incumbent order – physically  they had also reclaimed the streets from a different insidious order, that of the predominance of the motorcar over the human.

According to a 2009 report (WHO,2009) more people are killed on the road each day than die from Aids, TB or Malaria. Globally in 2004 it was the leading cause of death amongst 15-29 year olds and the second amongst 5-14 year olds. The draft UN resolution begins the necessary legislative process against this skewed order taking a tight grip of cities around the world. In Jeddah sidewalks have become a dumping ground for building waste, developers in some Indian residential developments are not bothering to even build sidewalks at all and in Moscow pedestrians are increasingly forced underground into confusing, extensive underground networks as traffic speeds by above. Whilst people seek out their political rights in the public spaces around the world let us not forget their human right to open space, to walk and be free in the city.

This phenomenon is something I have been studying for many years. In 2007, Gehl Architects undertook an important study of Flushing Main Street in New York City. We found that 97,000 pedestrians walk along Main Street every day, but they are squeezed into only 30 percent of the street space. Some 56,000 motorists have access to 70 percent of the street space.

My contention is that this allocation of space should be reversed. In future we should set targets for investments in cities based on the number people that investment will positively affect. This is especially relevant in emerging economies. Take, for instance the city of Chennai in India where 45 percent of all daily transit trips are by foot or bicycle, yet investment in sidewalks and bike lanes comprise less than three percent of all infrastructures. This stands in contrast to highway investment, which comprises 39 percent of all investment but serves only 23 percent of all the daily trips in the city.

Planning more widely should be optimistic and lead with positive frameworks for what you can do, not bureaucratic legal jargon about what you can’t do. Architects should be asking not what your city can do for your building design, but what your building design can do for the city. With regards to how buildings touch the street, disallow any new commercial building that doesn’t have active thresholds facing the city or contribute in another way to the urban realm by providing some sort of public amenities.

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 713 other followers