[Urbanstudy] Jan Gehl on the Politics of Transforming Cities

[Vinay Baindur]

http://www.planetizen.com/node/88830/jan-gehl-politics-transforming-cities



Jan Gehl on the Politics of Transforming Cities
Advancing the politics of public transportation and public spaces is not
easy. Danish architect Jan Gehl and his firm Gehl Architects, however, have
a track record of success with cities around the world.
September 28, 2016, 5am PDT | Lily Song
<http://www.planetizen.com/taxonomy/term/44138>






Jan Gehl and his team worked with the city of Melbourne in 1993, taking
inspiration the grand boulevards of Paris and the communal squares of Rome
to remake the public experience of the city.
OPIS Zagreb
Shutterstock
<http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-271171460/stock-photo-melbourne-australia-march-16-2015-black-and-white-scene-of-the-burke-street-life-on-autumn-afternoon.html?src=_O142_T0STwz28qNC3enbg-1-0>

Jan Gehl, the prize-winning Danish architect and urban designer, recently
spoke at the Harvard Graduate School of Design with researchers and
planning faculty affiliated with the "Transforming Urban Transport: the
Role of Political Leadership
<http://research.gsd.harvard.edu/tut/the-project/>" (TUT-POL) project.
Supported by the Volvo Research and Education Foundations (VREF) and hosted
at the Harvard Graduate School of Design under the direction of Professor
Diane Davis, the project seeks to advance knowledge of how, when, and where
political leadership has been critical to the successful implementation of
path-breaking transportation policies.

Gehl, whose research and ideas about the form and use of public spaces have
shaped hundreds of cities around the world, spent the visit discussing the
role of politics and governance as well as related strategies and tactics
in the successful implementation of path-breaking urban policies and
projects. The following excerpts from Gehl's visit have been edited for
clarity and organized by theme:
Across cities set in different types of democracies, the personal factor is
very strong in bringing about transformative urban changes.

My book *New City Spaces* talks about nine cities that have really turned
things around, and in nearly all of the cases, it started with some
centrally placed person or torchbearer who had a vision. It might have been
the mayor of Curitiba, the longstanding director of urban design and city
design in Melbourne, or the mayor in Strasbourg. In Copenhagen, the city
architect, city engineer, and mayor worked together, and in Portland it was
more or less the Greens winning the election in 1968. It could come from
the bottom or above, but very seldom did it grow out of the day-to-day
administration of the cities. It was often a force from the outside, or a
new officer or a new politician.
Gehl Architects get invited to cities because they agree with the firm's
mission.

It's never a fight. They have a plan to make a better city. They find an
expert from very far away and people might listen. In New York, Bloomberg
had his plan, and we came into the picture because we might be useful in
giving some information, which he could use to persuade people. In Sydney,
the mayor brought me in to go between the state of New South Wales, which
ran transport, and the city of Sydney, which wanted a nice city that was
sustainable, healthy, and good for people. After a while, I was called the
Danish icebreaker.
People have always been the strongest supporters of cities, and politicians
answer to them.

I talk about the kinds of things and situations that every person in the
community can recognize and identify with. People have always been the
strongest supporters of cities. They have children who walk to school and
can see right away that a certain type of city is better than the one that
exists. If people start to have an idea and then turn to NGOs and start to
have some influence, then the politicians are very quick to listen. Thank
god for the ordinary citizens and for democracy where the politicians
listen to the people.
Centralized governance structures can enhance urban policy innovation,
while diffuse systems of urban governance can result in policy impasse.

Moscow has the most efficient democracy in the sense of producing the most
amazing turnaround in just three years. The president of Russia issued a
decree that all Russian cities, to become worthy of the great nation,
required the mayors to put their heads together. While all of the mayors
were eager to show initiative, the Moscow mayor was one of the most
successful. He has a very strong position as the mayor of 15 million people
and possesses a lot of authority. He asked us to come up with a blueprint
and has followed it carefully

On the other hand, London made next to nothing of our proposals. Ken
Livingston said he would carry out this thing to the letter. A few minutes
later, it was Boris Johnson saying anything having to do with Ken
Livingston was not so interesting. Furthermore, the mayor of London is not
strong—he has 32 boroughs, and each of them have their own policy. Some
want to go west and some want to go east, and they can yell and scream at
the mayor's office to go that way, but the individual borough always wins.
So nothing much has happened there.
Public support and engagement can promote policy and program sustenance in
democratic contexts amidst political competition and turnover.

There's really a genuine interest in Australia in a number of the issues we
talk about including the green and health issues, and also livability and a
little of an inferiority complex where they want to be better than in other
parts of the world, because they are so far away. In Adelaide, we were to
present our findings at 3 pm in a little room for 200 people. Then they
looked out the window and saw 500 people, and when they looked out again a
while later, they saw over 1,000 people, who wanted to hear about the
future of the city and how to make a better city. So they set out doing the
work right away. The other party could take over and might not continue all
of their ideas, but they would have to do some.
Supplementing policies of change with public relations and engagement
strategies can enhance their salience and acceptance.

In Sydney, every time they do anything, they put up posters saying, "this
is our policy; you voted for it," which I think is a very smart thing to
do. While putting up bike lanes or doing a parking initiative, they will
also run a political campaign that emphasizes the bigger, long-term goal of
climate improvement.
Emphasize the positives of change policies, not what is taken away.

Copenhagen spent 50 years improving the city in ways that complicated
driving, all the while selling the positives. As the changes unfolded
gradually, they emphasized what was given to the city and not what was
taken from the motorists, which is a very important difference. They didn't
sell on the basis of reducing roads or parking spaces but rather creating
more beautiful places to live and enjoy. I always say that my work is not
anti-car but pro-people and sometimes there have been side effects.
Sometimes you have a lot of historic architecture to work with and other
times you build new spaces that bring people together.

The work can be easier in places like Prague and Edinburgh, where the urban
fabric is made for people and we clean up after the cars. But we also have
ample examples from colonial cities—Australian cities included—that share
the story of wide streets but manage to turn the cities around. Melbourne
is a colonial city, which had no squares, but then created the best square
in Australia from scratch and then created several more to become one of
the most livable cities in the world. As far as I'm concerned, pre-planned
colonial cities can certainly achieve miracles.
Don't take away St. Mark's Square because it has a problem with pigeons.
Regulate its uses, again and again.

After the public space improvement in Times Square, a lot of the street
entertainers came, and some, like the ladies with the painted flags, made
certain groups, like the religious people, unhappy. All cities go through
this. If you have too many pigeons on St. Marks Square, do you take St.
Mark's Square away, or do you take the pigeons away? If you do away with
St. Mark's Square, it is gone forever, but the pigeons will come back, and
you have to chase them again. We know that you have to regulate, and you
have to regulate a number of things, whether it's the noise from cafes,
what time they close at night, how many street vendors you can have here or
there, or how many street orchestras you can have standing permanently on
one corner. Then, three to six years later, it's the same again, and you
regulate. It's like a school, or like any place with people. Things
develop, and you gently organize it.
Don't stop public space improvements because they worsen gentrification.
Differentiate and do follow-up interventions.

I think that we have to make city districts as best as we ever can, and
then we will have to do something with the policy to combat gentrification
by ensuring that a certain amount of the housing is made available by
affordable pricing. One of the reasons why more people with children stay
in an area is because now the children can move about, and it's a good
place for children when it didn't use to be that way. And then the prices
go up because more people want to stay there and it becomes an "in" place.
But the politicians will have to solve this problem in other ways than
taking away the sidewalks so that little children cannot walk to school.
Town and gown symbiosis can advance urban transformations.

Copenhagen is very much a product of the university and the city working
together for 40 years. I happened to be in the school of architecture and
observing and studying people in the middle of the city where they had
started to pedestrianize streets. When we published our findings, the city
planners expressed great interest, so we conducted more studies, the whole
time not getting paid. With each study, they got more fired up, asking what
we knew before we even had results. After a while, the city began to pay
for our studies. Then they began using our methodology of learning as much
about the life in the city as we know about the cars and the traffic, which
shortly became part of the city operation.
Data collection and analysis methods on how people use the city can act
like strong medicine for politicians and planners to make public space
improvements.

When I retired as professor, the mayor sent me a letter saying that the
politicians wouldn't have dared to make Copenhagen the most livable city
without our documentation of how people used the city. Being able to
document how people use the city in exactly the same way that traffic
engineers document how the traffic works in a city has been a very strong
strategy. The minute you have the data—the base study—you can ask questions
about how things are vs. how they should be, make comparisons with other
cities, and start a process of change. Five or ten years later, you can
measure improvements—that there are more people in public spaces and that
they are more happier—which pleases the politicians and sometimes motivates
them to work harder and faster than without the data. In Copenhagen, we
found that the data over 40 years time was like strong medicine,
influencing the way the city is planned and how they talk about its public
life.

*Lily Song is a Lecturer in Urban Planning and Design and Senior Research
Associate with the TUT-POL project
<http://research.gsd.harvard.edu/tut/> at the Harvard University Graduate
School of Design. Her teaching and research focus on issues of urban
sustainability, livability, and justice; race and class politics in
American cities and postcolonial urban contexts; and community development.
She holds a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning from MIT.*
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