An important paradigm change happened around 1960. City planning, as a concept, took off on a huge scale in response to the challenge of fast-growing cities. At the same time, traffic planning took over the planning at eye level to address the rapid influx of cars. In the rough and tumble of all this, caring for the people who use cities was completely left behind.
By 1961, people like Jane Jacobs raised her voice about this new situation in her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. But, not much happened for three or four decades. The idea of "Cities for People" became an overlooked and forgotten dimension.
This is the story told by Jan Gehl in his new book. He describes why looking after people is crucial for the quality of cities in the 21st century, how it can be accomplished and how it is actually done by now in more and more projects in more and more cities. The transformations carried out in such cities as Copenhagen, Melbourne, Sydney, Amman and New York will serve as examples of this new people-oriented direction in planning.
Gehl shares his life-long experience of urban development and the increasing connections between physical form and human behavior. If we don't turn our cities around, he warns, we could be facing a social catastrophe.
His talk is part of the Melbourne Conversations series, presented by the City of Melbourne. Afterward, Gehl is joined in a panel discussion by Victorian government architect Jill Garner and moderator Professor Rob Adams, the Director of City Design for the City of Melbourne.
Jan Gehl is a trained architect and Professor of Urban Design in The School of Architecture at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. His international teachings include stints at universities in Edinburgh, Vilnius, Oslo, Wroclaw, Dresden, Toronto, Calgary, Melbourne, Perth, Berkeley, San José, Guadalajara, Jogjakarta and Cape Town. Gehl has consulted on city improvement projects in Europe, America, Australia and Asia - most recently New York, Seattle, San Francisco, Amman, Oman, Sydney and Melbourne. His publications include "Life Between Buildings - Using Public Space", "Public Spaces - Public Life, "New City Spaces" , "New City Life" and "Cities for People". Gehl has been awarded the "Sir Patrick Abercrombie Prize for exemplary contributions to Town Planning" by The International Union of Architects as well as an honorary doctors degree from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh.
Jill Garner is the Associate Victorian Government Architect. She established Garner Davis Architects, a St Kilda-based architecture studio, with Lindsay Davis in 1990. After winning the design competition for the Wagga Wagga Civic Centre in 1995, GDA commenced to develop architectural credentials and accolades for their design of small public buildings and private works. Garner has spent time at RMIT and the University of Melbourne teaching in design, architectural history and contemporary theory, and is a regularly invited contributor to architectural events, including awards juries, publications and journals, seminars and local and interstate lectures.
Professor Rob Adams is Director of the City Design Division at the City of Melbourne. He has guided the urban design strategy for the city since the early 1980s, with his team receiving over 100 state and national awards for design excellence. Major city revitalization projects he has been involved in include Postcode 3000, Swanston Street, QV, Birrarung Marr, Queens bridge Precinct, Turning Basin and Council House 2. Adams has been a visiting lecturer at RMIT and, since June 2004, has been a Professorial Fellow within the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at Melbourne University.
Bio
Rob Adams
Professor Rob Adams is Director of the City Design Division at the City of Melbourne. He has guided the urban design strategy for the city since the early 1980s, with his team receiving over 100 state and national awards for design excellence. Major city revitalization projects he has been involved in include Postcode 3000, Swanston Street, QV, Birrarung Marr, Queens bridge Precinct, Turning Basin and Council House 2. Adams has been a visiting lecturer at RMIT and, since June 2004, has been a Professorial Fellow within the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at Melbourne University.
Jill Garner
Jill Garner is the Associate Victorian Government Architect. She established Garner Davis Architects, a St Kilda-based architecture studio, with Lindsay Davis in 1990. After winning the design competition for the Wagga Wagga Civic Centre in 1995, GDA commenced to develop architectural credentials and accolades for their design of small public buildings and private works.
Garner has spent time at RMIT and the University of Melbourne teaching in design, architectural history and contemporary theory, and is a regularly invited contributor to architectural events, including awards juries, publications and journals, seminars and local and interstate lectures.
Jan Gehl
Jan Gehl is a trained architect and Professor of Urban Design in The School of Architecture at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. Gehl has been awarded the "Sir Patrick Abercrombie Prize for exemplary contributions to Town Planning" by The International Union of Architects as well as an honorary doctors degree from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh.
Art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. The practice of architecture emphasizes spatial relationships, orientation, the support of activities to be carried out within a designed environment, and the arrangement and visual rhythm of structural elements, as opposed to the design of structural systems themselves (seecivil engineering). Appropriateness, uniqueness, a sensitive and innovative response to functional requirements, and a sense of place within its surrounding physical and social context distinguish a built environment as representative of a culture's architecture. See alsobuilding construction.
Programs pursued as a means of improving the urban environment and achieving certain social and economic objectives. Evidence of urban planning can be found in the ruins of ancient cities, including orderly street systems and conduits for water and sewage. During the Renaissance, European city areas were consciously planned to achieve circulation of the populace and provide fortification against invasion. Such concepts were exported to the New World, where William Penn, in founding the city of Philadelphia, developed the standard gridiron plan—the laying out of streets and plots of land adaptable to rapid change in land use. Modern urban planning and redevelopment arose in response to the disorder and squalor of the slums created by the Industrial Revolution. The urban planner best known for his transformation of Paris was Georges-Eugène Haussmann. City planners imposed regulatory laws establishing standards for housing, sanitation, water supply, sewage, and public health conditions, and introduced parks and playgrounds into congested city neighbourhoods. In the 20th century, zoning—the regulation of building activity according to use and location—came to be a key tool for city planners. See alsoPierre-Charles L'Enfant.
As a graduate of architecture school and a professional who has worked for a number of firms, I found Mr. Gehl's position puzzling. My architectural education included extensive training in urban planning and I even spent a year travelling through Italy and France to study some of the greatest cities and streets in the world. As I listened to this lecture, I could have sworn I heard my professors speaking through Mr. Gehl as he described many of his case-study design strategies (I heard the EXACT SAME helicopter/airplane analogy half a dozen times while in school).
From my experience, I think architecture schools are going in the right direction. The problem is that the field is dominated by architects educated in the 1960-70's (before architects became acutely aware of the consequences of modernism). Thankfully, they will be replace by a more sensitive generation within the next decade (no offense).
The issue that need to be addressed more urgently are the civil engineers, urban planners, zoning officials and developers who continue to receive the same car-oriented education from 30 years ago. The reason this is a bigger problem is because they make the LAWS and standards that architects then have to abide by. In other words, you can take all of the best Florentine Villas and place them along the Las Vegas Strip, but it's not going to look anything like Florence.
We need to get the people with the authority to determine what cities look like on board. Leave the actual design and construction of buildings to the architects, but don't expect them to save the world.
member. 
