On the heels of a sold out gig in New York’s West Village, Jan Gehl spoke to an overflow crowd of 500 people at London’s NLA last Tuesday about his latest book “Cities for People.”

After a brief introduction by none other than Lord Richard Rogers (who wrote the books’ preface), Gehl gave a highly engaging talk summing up the vast body of knowledge he’s gained throughout his 50-some year career as an architect, academic, urban planner and most recently – global cult phenomenon.

Gehl’s basic principle is pretty simple –common sense really: design places so people can thrive. It’s just that for some reason around 1960 we lost our collective head and have been designing places that are totally out of whack with what makes us happy and keeps us healthy. As Gehl astutely pointed out, we actually know more about the ideal habitat for the silver mountain gorilla than we do about what kind of place keeps a homo sapien happy. Or at least if we know how to keep ourselves happy then we’re on some sort of self-destructive mission to make ourselves miserable and fat – and to sort of totally mess up our environment to boot. Good times!

Gehl conjured up images of master planners and architects as Godzilla-like figures hovering over models of a new city and making it beautiful from their perspective, but not giving a stuff about the micro-sized people running around below. He calls it Brasilia syndrome, which is basically shorthand for design from 5000 feet – or what it would look like as you fly over a place in an airplane or a helicopter. Another favorite Gehl-ism is “birdshit planning” whereby a giant bird flies over a city and randomly drops huge towers creating a beautiful skyline of unique and artistic masterpieces – not unlike the perfume bottles his wife keeps on the bathroom counter. The problem, Gehl says, with these amazing beautiful towers like those found in Dubai, is they’re just a collection of objects – not a city full of happy, thriving people. There’s no soul – there’s no THERE there.

But there are places that have been designed with people in mind. Looking at an arial photo of a housing development in Copenhagen locally known as the “Potato Rows” which were built in the late 1800s, a “form-obsessed architectural neophyte” (to quote an esteemed colleague) might not be overwhelmingly impressed. From an airplane these charming classic row houses look a bit boring and uninspired, and would likely get most architecture students kicked straight out of school. However, when you get to eye level an entirely different perspective emerges. Gehl pointed out the vibrant street life, sense of community and the walkability of the neighborhood. And the punchline? This boring little development boasts the highest real estate values in all of Copenhagen, and a boatload of urban planners, architects and even the mayor are proud to call the enclave home.

So what can we learn from the Potato Rows about how we should we design our villages, towns and major metropolitan areas so people WILL thrive? According to Gehl it’s all about scale – human scale to be exact. In traditional cities – those places we instinctively love because they’re lovely and beautiful and make us want to sit and eat an ice cream or sip a coffee – the Godzilla factor doesn’t win. Great traditional places like the Piazza del Campo in Siena, Italy, or cities like Barcelona, or Gehl’s own beloved Copenhagen which have grown on a foundation of progressive urbanism, and great new places like Curritiba in southern Brazil built on sustainability principles, all are full of small signals and eye-level details that can only be seen as you walk along a human-scale street at 5 km/hr. And Gehl Architecture’s extensive research in the public realm – which could be characterized as an anthropological study of the wild homo sapien in his natural urban environment – backs this up. We don’t just happen to love Venice because it has great food or because it’s romantic and old. We love places like this because they’re built in a way that works for an average human being just walking or biking around being human.

These cities “invite” people to walk or cycle, something that Gehl has been successful at doing in cities around the world, beginning with his ongoing work in Copenhagen where a full 37% of the population now commute to work by bike, thanks to the way the asphalt is allocated. Gehl’s gentle turn of phrase in “inviting” people to change their behavior actually puts a beautifully subtle spin on what is generally viewed as an impossible shift. But he makes a strong point – instead of building more roads to accommodate more cars, let’s stop for a moment and think about the purpose of the street. It’s pretty straightforward stuff really – design the roads for people instead of cars and you’ll have more walking and cycling. Allocate more asphalt to cars and you’ll have more automobile traffic.

His latest efforts in New York as part of PlaNYC have transformed New York’s famous Broadway into “Broadway Boulevard.” In just two short years, Gehl along with NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Traffic Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan have shut down bits of Times Square and Herald Square to automobile traffic and turned them into bustling pedestrian malls where millions of people per year stop and have lunch, enjoy a conversation or simply just watch “the ballet of the street,” a phrase Gehl borrows from Jane Jacobs “Death and Life of Great American Cities”. But it’s not all artistic and nicey-nicey people having a good time and frollicking. Back when Sadik-Khan hired Gehl for the project they might have predicted some impressive safety results like a 63% reduction in motorist and passenger injuries and a 35% reduction in pedestrian injuries, but they also knew that creating a great public space is a valuable commodity. According to an old Icelandic saying that Gehl is fond of repeating “man is man’s greatest joy.” And this joy actually translates into dollars when it comes right down to it. In an interview with Sustainable Cities, an urban design blog, Sadik-Khan says that since the changes, “property values on retail rents from 47^th and 42^nd street went up 71% in the first six months alone.” Wow.

So. Yup. Jan Gehl basically just wants to be “sweet” to the people, and basically just wants to give them spaces to sit around and look at each other – especially if the people are young and attractive or “goodies” as he likes to call them. And apparently people appreciate that, and if more mayors, developers, architects and planners want to join in apparently not only will be livelier, happier, healthier, safer and more sustainable – maybe we will be sweet to the economy too.

You can view a similar talk given at New York’s Cooper Hewitt Museum here.

Beyond Green is pleased to work with Gehl Architects on the public realm strategy for our Broadland project.