Jan Gehl Quotes

Cities must urge urban planners and architects to reinforce pedestrianism as an integrated city policy to develop lively, safe, sustainable and healthy cities. It is equally urgent to strengthen the social function of city space as a meeting place that contributes toward the aims of social sustainability and an open and democratic society.

The diagram shows three streets with heavy, moderate and light

An extensive expansion of the opportunities to bicycle in New York began in 2007. Photos show 9th Avenue in Manhattan in April and November 2008 with the new “Copenhagen-style” bicycle path designed so that parked cars protect bicycle traffic.

Neither the city planners nor the traffic planners put city space and city life high on their agenda, and for years there was hardly any knowledge about how physical structures influence human behavior. The drastic consequences of this type of planning on people’s use of the city were not recognized until later.

For decades the human dimension has been an overlooked and haphazardly addressed urban planning topic, while many other issues, such as accomodating the rocketing rise in car traffic, have come more strongly into focus. In addition, dominant planning ideologies — modernism in particular — have specifically put a low priority on public space, pedestrianism and the role of city space as a meeting place for urban dwellers.

It has been almost 50 years since American journalist and author Jane Jacobs published her seminal book The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961.1 She pointed out how the dramatic increase in car traffic and the urban planning ideology of modernism that separates the uses of the city and emphasizes free-standing individual buildings would put an end to urban space and city life and result in lifeless cities devoid of people.

The Danish urban pioneer Jan Gehl made a wonderful illustration that shows the increasing detachment of humans from real life, the higher the storey of their building.

Life happens on foot. Man was created to walk, and all of life's events large and small develop when we walk among other people.

First life, then spaces, then buildings - the other way around never works.