How to Study Public Life

Jan Gehl, Birgitte Svarre

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781610915250
• Topic: Architettura
• Subtopic: Architettura generale

How do we accommodate a growing urban population in a way that is sustainable, equitable, and inviting? This question is becoming increasingly urgent to answer as we face diminishing fossil-fuel resources and the effects of a changing climate while global cities continue to compete to be the most vibrant centers of culture, knowledge, and finance.Jan Gehl has been examining this question since the 1960s, when few urban designers or planners were thinking about designing cities for people. But given the unpredictable, complex and ephemeral nature of life in cities, how can we best design public infrastructure—vital to cities for getting from place to place, or staying in place—for human use? Studying city life and understanding the factors that encourage or discourage use is the key to designing inviting public space.In How to Study Public Life Jan Gehl and Birgitte Svarre draw from their combined experience of over 50 years to provide a history of public-life study as well as methods and tools necessary to recapture city life as an important planning dimension.This type of systematic study began in earnest in the 1960s, when several researchers and journalists on different continents criticized urban planning for having forgotten life in the city. City life studies provide knowledge about human behavior in the built environment in an attempt to put it on an equal footing with knowledge about urban elements such as buildings and transport systems. Studies can be used as input in the decision-making process, as part of overall planning, or in designing individual projects such as streets, squares or parks. The original goal is still the goal today: to recapture city life as an important planning dimension. Anyone interested in improving city life will find inspiration, tools, and examples in this invaluable guide.

1

PUBLIC SPACE, PUBLIC LIFE: AN INTERACTION

Like the weather, life is difficult to predict. Nonetheless, meteorologists have developed methods enabling them to predict the weather, and over the years their methods have become so refined that they can make forecasts with greater accuracy and reach. The methods described in this book also deal with foreseeing phenomena in constant flux, but the focus here is how life unfolds in city space. Just as with weather forecasting, this doesn’t mean that anyone can develop a sure-fire method to predict how people will use a particular city space. Masses of data have been gathered over the years concerning the interaction of life and space in cities, and just like meteorologists’ knowledge about the weather, this data can provide greater understanding of city life and predict how it will presumably unfold in the given framework.

This book describes the methods that have been developed over the past 50 years to study the interaction between public life and space. They are tools to help us understand how we use public space so that we can make it better and more functional. Observation is the key for most of the studies presented in the book.

It has been necessary to develop, almost from scratch, special tools for looking at people because people’s use of cities has been overlooked, while abstract concepts, large structures, traffic challenges and other amorphous issues have dominated urban planning.

Public Space and Public Life – on Speaking Terms

Good architecture ensures good interaction between public space and public life. But while architects and urban planners have been dealing with space, the other side of the coin – life – has often been forgotten. Perhaps this is because it is considerably easier to work with and communicate about form and space, while life is ephemeral and therefore difficult to describe.

Public life changes constantly in the course of a day, week, or month, and over the years. In addition, design, gender, age, financial resources, culture and many other factors determine how we use or do not use public space. There are many excellent reasons why it is difficult to incorporate the diverse nature of public life into architecture and urban planning. Nonetheless, it is essential if we are to create worthy surroundings for the billions of people who daily make their way between buildings in cities around the world.

In this context, public space is understood as streets, alleys, buildings, squares, bollards: everything that can be considered part of the built environment. Public life should also be understood in the broadest sense as everything that takes place between buildings, to and from school, on balconies, seated, standing, walking, biking, etc. It is everything we can go out and observe happening – far more than just street theatre and café life. However, we do not mean city life to be understood as the city’s psychological well-being. Rather it is the complex and versatile life that unfolds in public space. It makes no difference whether our point of departure is Copenhagen, Dhaka, Mexico City, or a small city in Western Australia. The nub is the interplay between life and space in all its guises.

The Missing Tools

At the beginning of the 1960s, critical voices began to point out that something was very wrong in many of the new districts being built, in record numbers, during this period of rapid urban growth. Something was missing, something that was difficult to define, but was expressed in concepts like ‘bedroom communities’ and ‘cultural impoverishment.’ Life between buildings had been forgotten, pushed aside by cars, large-scale thinking, and overly rationalized, specialized processes. Among the critics of the time were Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte in New York City, Christopher Alexander in Berkeley, and one of the authors of this book, Jan Gehl in Copenhagen.

Public life and public space were historically treated as a cohesive unit. Medieval cities grew little by little in accordance with changing needs, in contrast to the rapid tempo of modernism’s large-scale planning.

Cities have grown gradually for hundreds of years, rooted in many years of experience and an intuitive feeling for human senses and scale. The organic growth of medieval cities encompassed a building tradition based on generations of experience in how to create cities with well-functioning interaction between life and space. But this knowledge was lost somewhere in the process of industrialization and modernization, which led to dysfunctional city environments for the important and yet ignored segment of city life on foot. Of course, society has changed since the Middle Ages. The solution is not to recreate pre-modern cities, but to develop contemporary tools that can be applied analytically to once again forge an alliance between life and space in cities.

The Contours of an Academic Field

The environmental design pioneers of the 1960s took the basic steps needed to better understand the ephemeral concept of public life and its interaction with public space and buildings. Their method was to study existing, and as a rule pre-industrial, cities and public space to gain basic knowledge about how we use and get around in cities.

Several books published from 1960 to the mid-1980s are still considered the basic textbooks for public life studies.¹ Although the methods described were later refined and new agendas and technologies emerged, the basic principles and methods were developed in that period.

Up to the mid-1980s, this work was carried out primarily at academic institutions. However, by the end of that decade, it was clear that the analyses and principles regarding public life and public space should be converted into tools that could be used directly in urban planning practice. City planners and politicians wanted to make conditions better for people in order to have an edge in inter-city competition. It became a strategic goal to create attractive cities for people in order to attract residents, tourists, investments and employees to fill new jobs in the knowledge society. Meeting this goal required understanding people’s needs and behavior in cities.

From about the year 2000, it increasingly became taken for granted in the fields of architecture and urban planning practice generally that working with life in cities was crucial. Much bitter experience had shown that vibrant city life does not happen by itself. This is particularly noticeable in cities that are highly developed economically, because apart from commuters, people are no longer on the street by necessity to work, sell trinkets, do errands, and so on.

However, less economically viable cities are also impacted, because the rapidly growing volume of motorized traffic and related infrastructure provides obstacles for pedestrians and produces noise and air pollution for many people in their daily lives. The core of the matter is to get the large volumes of life in public spaces to function in a way that allows daily life to take place under decent conditions and partner with the physical framework instead of fighting against it.

Observations in the City

Direct observation is the primary tool of the type of public life studies described in this book. As a general rule, users are not actively involved in the sense of being questioned, rather they are observed, their activities and behavior mapped in order to better understand the needs of users and how city spaces are used. The direct observations help to understand why some spaces are used and others are not.

“…Please look closely at real cities. While you are looking, you might as well also listen, linger and think about what you see.”²

Jane Jacobs

Studying people’s behavior in public space can be compared to studying and structuring other forms of living organisms. They could be animals or cells: counting how many there are in total, how quickly they move under various conditions, and generally describing how they behave on the basis of systematic observation. People’s behavior is documented, analyzed, and interpreted, but this is not done under the microscope. The observations are conducted with the naked eye and occasionally using cameras or other aids to zoom in on situations or fast-freeze the moment in order to analyze the situation more closely. The point is to sharpen the gaze of the observer.

A literary author who made a virtue out of describing ordinary life as it unfolds in public space was Frenchman Georges Perec (1936-82).³ In Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (1974), Perec instructed his readers in how to see what is overlooked in the city.⁴ He encouraged them to practice by occasionally taking notes of what they see, preferably using some type of system.

Perec wrote that if you don’t notice anything, it is because you have not learned to observe. “You must try more slowly, almost foolishly. Force yourself to write down what is not of interest, the most banal, ordinary, colorless.”⁵ Life in the city can seem banal and fleeting, and therefore, according to Perec, the observer must look and take the time needed to really see the ordinariness unfolding in public space.

In The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Jane Jacobs wrote in the preface to her descriptions of public life, primarily gathered from her own neighborhood of Greenwich Village in Manhattan: “The scenes that illustrate this book are all about us. Fo...