Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (22 page)

There is no one perfect neighborhood for everyone. We all have our own tolerance for crowding or quietude, our own thirst for novelty or privacy or music or gardening, and our own complex associations with places, scents, and memories. But the systems in which we live undeniably influence our emotional lives. The lesson of the streetcar suburb or N Street is not that cities need to be organized in grids, or that they need streetcars, or that we must all tear down our fences or look a century back for a geometry that works. It is that we can find various geometries to save ourselves and the planet. They do not all involve stacking our lives into the sky, but they are almost all tighter than what the proponents of dispersal have been selling us.

7. Convivialities

The street wears us out. It is altogether disgusting. Why, then, does it still exist?

—Le Corbusier

Our culture is in need of an art of exposure; this art will not make us one another’s victims, rather more balanced adults, capable of coping with and learning from complexity.

—Richard Sennett

The architect and the psychologist were trained to disagree. It was 1962, a thrilling time of expansion for European cities. Having recently graduated from the School of Architecture at Denmark’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Jan Gehl and his colleagues were invited to build entire new city districts using the methods of high modernism. They obsessed about form and efficiency, about tap water, light, and lawns. But Gehl’s wife, Ingrid, was an environmental psychologist, and she was deeply skeptical about the design tribe’s single-minded mission. She pointed out that architects rarely considered their neighborhoods’ relationships with the creatures who inhabited them. Sure, they added human shapes to their renderings—stick children playing on vast lawns and cartoon mothers gathering to chat beneath blank concrete walls—but they did not actually study how people responded to buildings after they were constructed. It was no wonder that after those new towers were completed, the frolicking children and gossiping mothers often failed to appear where they were supposed to.

It took a radical change of scene for the architect to come around to the psychologist’s way of thinking. After the couple was awarded a grant to study the medieval towns of Italy, they spent six months among the postcard cathedrals, museums, and palaces. But they paid little attention to such architectural attractions. Rather, they were drawn in by the human activity they saw between buildings in cities and towns that had not yet been reorganized by rational planners or invaded by cars. It was nothing like anything they had experienced back in Copenhagen. They began documenting that life: people wandering along the edges of Venice’s canals, the bustle of Perugia’s crooked alleyways, Siena’s Piazza del Campo and its many happy loiterers. Compared with the sterile sidewalks of home, where nobody paused to so much as have a coffee, public space in Italy’s medieval cities seethed with life.

Take the Piazza del Campo, that glorious gathering place at the heart of Siena. The Campo, as it is known, gradually radiates uphill from Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico, terminating in a wide semicircular promenade that is lined with dignified five-story villas. With its tremendous sight lines, the Campo functions as a stage across which the entire city parades. There are no cars.

The couple perched on the edges of the Campo and stayed for days. They jotted down the comings and goings of people every half hour, just as biologists might record the movement of ungulates around a watering hole. The mornings were quiet. As the sun climbed, people began to pour into the plaza through the stone arches and dark alleyways that punctured its edges. They stopped to drink and chat. They gathered in the cafés and restaurants whose tables spilled from the piazza’s northern fringe. They leaned against the chest-high travertine bollards that stood at regular intervals along the edge of the promenade (which had absolutely no purpose other than to be leaned on). When the dew disappeared, tourists sat cross-legged on the sloping brick surface of the piazza, watching the shadow of the skyscraping Torre del Mangia creep across the amphitheater. After sunset, well-dressed Sienese families came to stroll and chat by the marble Fonte Gaia.

The Campo drew people together. It slowed them down. It held them in its palm.

Gehl was captivated by that human Serengeti. Were Italians really inclined, by some genetic or ancient cultural impulse, to hang out together in public more than Danes? Perhaps.
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But even if urban spaces like the Campo were a reflection of local culture and climate, Gehl suspected that their gracious geometries actually shaped people’s behavior by inviting them to come together and to linger.

Designed for Conviviality

With its amphitheater-like shape, its café-lined edges, and its loiter-friendly bollards, Siena’s Piazza del Campo is perfectly configured to attract and hold people.
(Ethan Kent/Project for Public Spaces)

There was no more ideal place to test the theory than back home in Copenhagen, where the city was embarking on what was then a radical experiment.

After the Second World War, the capital of Denmark had embraced dispersal as fervently as any American city. Everyone bought a car, and suburbs spilled out from the city’s medieval heart. Copenhagen did its best to accommodate the flood of private vehicles into the city. Public squares and the off-kilter spaces between buildings, long the shared terrain for all kinds of users, were converted into parking lots. But as the narrow streets of the core were filled with metal, noise, and exhaust fumes, Copenhagen began to seize up. The police simply could not keep traffic moving, and it was impossible to widen the roads in the core without ripping down architectural treasures. When planners proposed running a highway down the middle of the stately lakes on the eastern fringe of the downtown, it was clear that Copenhagen had reached a crossroads. It could either totally redesign its core for cars, as so many other cities had been doing, or it could start pushing back.

In 1962, around the time that New York’s freeway king, Robert Moses, was trying to push an expressway through the heart of Lower Manhattan, Copenhagen’s City Council took a step in the opposite direction. Nudged by anti-auto protests, they banned cars from the spine of the downtown, a string of market streets collectively known as the Strøget. It was an experiment.

Newspapers predicted disaster. Business owners were terrified. How could a street function without cars? What on earth would serious, practical Danes do with all that empty space between buildings? Pundits warned that the historical district would be deserted.

“People said, ‘We’re Danes, not Italians, and we are not going to sit around in outdoor cafés drinking cappuccinos in the middle of freezing winter!’” Gehl told me when I met him in his Copenhagen office half a century later. People believed the city and its civic culture could work only one way. It was the same thing that the engineers would keep insisting in other cities for decades.

But Copenhagen did change, utterly. And nobody is more intimate with its transformations than Gehl. Almost immediately upon his return from Italy, he parked himself on the newly pedestrianized Strøget.

“I sat down every Tuesday and Saturday, in the sun and the rain and the slush, to see what was going on in the winter and summer, day and night, workday and weekend. I watched what children were doing, what old people were doing, and just who was coming there anyway,” he told me. “The idea was to study the cycle of the day, the cycle of the week, and the cycle of the year, to see how the rhythm of the city changed. I was trying to make visible to everyone how people react to city forms, so we can start talking about the interaction between form and life.”

He spent a year on the Strøget, which changed before his eyes. People poured into the space that had been vacated by cars. They came in the summer, but they also came in the darkest days of winter. Businesses thrived.

What brought the people out? Gehl watched, scribbled down every movement to find out. When the city added a new bench, Gehl counted the people who came and lingered. The benches told a story. A bench facing the passing crowds got ten times as much use as a bench that faced a flower bed. He also noticed that more people gathered on the edges of construction sites than in front of department store display windows. But as soon as the construction crews went home, the audience dispersed. “They were much more interested in watching people doing things than watching flowers or fashion,” he noted. His conclusion seems obvious, and yet it was revolutionary at the time: “What is most attractive, what attracts people to stop and linger and look, will invariably be other people. Activity in human life is the greatest attraction in cities.”

Making People Visible

In effect, Gehl was doing for human traffic what traffic engineers had once done only for cars. His studies made pedestrians visible to planners for the first time. He figured out, for example, that each square meter of street could handle about fourteen walkers per minute.
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Any more than that, and people would start bunching into marching packs to cope with the congestion. The same principles governed all kinds of travel.

“We found that if you make more road space, you get more cars. If you make more bike lanes, you get more bikes. If you make more space for people, you get more people and of course then you get public life.”

When Gehl was named a professor at the School of Architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, the city of Copenhagen came to rely on his work. It used his numbers to justify an incremental but inexorable transformation of the core. Every year, the city reclaimed more streets and poured a little more of the city’s road budget into making other streets friendlier and more inviting to people outside of cars.

With the Strøget full up, the city pedestrianized Fiolstræde, a narrow street that sliced north through Copenhagen’s university quarter. Then the serpentine Købmagergade. Gradually, a latticework of pedestrian streets and plazas spread through the city’s core. As they were linked to the rest of the city with a carefully planned network of bicycle paths, even more people spilled through them. Many of those people came not because of previous plans for shopping or business, but simply because there were so many other people to see.
Things were happening, so more things happened.

Over the years, Gehl and Lars Gemzøe, a colleague at the School of Architecture, documented every shift in the way people behaved on Copenhagen’s streets. They didn’t merely measure foot traffic. They also counted people sitting in outdoor cafés, watching street performers, or just sitting on benches or on the rims of fountains. They counted people doing absolutely nothing. (So they can say with authority, for example, that between 1968 and 1995 the number of people to be found just hanging out on the streets of Copenhagen more than tripled.)

In 1968, parked cars were cleared out of Gråbrødretorv, or Grey Monk’s Square, a small plaza dominated by a large shade tree near the Strøget. That summer, the owners of a café on the square set up a few tables outside their door. People sat down at those tables and ordered beer and meatballs, and they let the northern sunlight fall on their faces. It seemed a quirky anomaly. But those tables were the drops that led to a torrent. Now the city center is crammed with outdoor cafés, close to nine thousand seats by Gehl’s last count. Danish winters are as miserable as they come—the winds from the North Sea deliver wave after wave of rain, sleet, and snowstorms, and the weak sun disappears well before the end of the workday—but now you can see Copenhageners out on their plazas in the dead of winter, wrapped in woolen blankets, sipping little cups of espresso. Gehl collects pictures of them, proof that by redesigning city space, you can actually transform the culture.

A few years after Gehl began his studies, the American journalist and organizational analyst William H. Whyte started counting people on the streets and plazas of New York using time-lapse film footage and painstaking notation. Whyte’s studies of behavior on sidewalks and plazas in New York, Melbourne, and Tokyo showed that people almost always chose to sit near one another, even when they had the option of being alone. Strangely, they even tended to stop and gather where pedestrian traffic was thickest. Whyte and his team of note takers and camera-wielding assistants repeatedly found people chatting amid the current of doorways and on busy corners rather than moving aside, as though they actually liked to be jostled a bit.