great. i'm so happy to see such apacked and lively auditorium here at piper. i'm diane davis i'm the chairof the department of urban planning and designhere at the gsd. and one of the mostwonderful aspects of my job is having the opportunity, andindeed being given the honor, to introduce our speakertonight, jan gehl, professor of urban design atthe school of architecture
in copenhagen, denmark andfounder of gehl architects. i would say thatfrom the vantage point of ourprofession, particularly the privilegedintellectual space where urban planningand urban design meet in synergisticand productive ways, jan gehl can be considereda veritable rock star. and i guess the audiencelends some reality to that interpretation.
so professor gehl will begiving the rachel dorothy tanner memorial lecture this evening. before introducing him, i'd liketo share with you a few remarks about rachel dorothytanner because we could not have found a betterperson than professor gehl to be able to honor the memoryof ms. tanner, who passed away in 2002 at the age of 43. rachel tanner receivedbachelor's degrees in architectureand city planning
from the university ofmaryland, a master's in urban designfrom hunter college, and then a law degree fromthe university of buffalo. but she also worked for the newyork city planning commission for some years, a citythat figures greatly in some of professor gehl'smost significant projects for transforming public space. she also cared deeply aboutpeople and their lives and was considered an astuteobserver of living conditions
and human interactions,something which inspired her own extensivework as a nonprofessional photographer. she's known to have devotedconsiderable efforts photographing the interactionof people and the artifacts they used and createdin everyday engagements. the concern with thequotidian urban interaction also is a theme that threadsthrough the long and highly celebrated scholarly career andprofessional practice of jan
gehl. his path-breaking work onpublic spaces, urban livability, and the sociabilityof cities stands at the forefront of contemporarythinking about cities. and his expansivecontributions in the form of projects and policyguidelines for streetscapes and neighborhoodsserve as inspiration and a point of departurefor many practitioners around the globe.
he's in great demand by citieslarge and small here in the us and worldwide,having been involved in a wide array of projectsin places as diverse as new york city,moscow, melbourne, london, his own copenhagen,and i think our own neighbor, somerville, massachusetts. professor gehl earned hisba and ma in architecture from the school of architectureat the royal danish academy of fine art, butunlike many of his peers,
has situated much of histeaching and practice since then in the contextof grounded, empirical, and observationalresearch, a commitment which began just a few yearsafter leaving architecture school. his first book, titledlife between buildings, which came out in 1971, grewout of a research initiative he started several years afterleaving architecture school. his principal conclusionwas that architects
must pay attention, or moreattention, to public life in the areas of sociability andwhere publicity, so to speak, flowers. he concludes thatbuilding design must be a means rather thanan ends in and of itself, a means to creating moresociable public spaces. with that book and otherpublished works, many of which are now consideredclassics, professor gehl has practically no peer interms of scholarly contributions
and influence in thefield of urban design, even as his workhas also changed much of the debate in urbanplanning and architecture. in addition to lifebetween buildings, he's best known for publicspaces, public life, first published in '96and then again in 2004. in 2008 he wrote new cityspaces, 2010 cities for people, and his latest work, 2013 how tostudy public life, all of which have been translatedinto multiple languages.
given my own prior trainingin urban sociology, i found the most recent piece ofwork, how to study public life, path-breaking in terms ofintroducing new methodologies into architectural practiceand design practice, and i'm particularlyintrigued by his commitment to training architecturaland urban design students how to use ethnographicmethods and other skills for understanding themultivarious ways that people use streets andother public spaces.
among the many lines ofthinking and practice it he's come to beknown for in addition to those embodied inthe titles of his books are his focus ongradual transformations, on the distinctionbetween necessary optional and social activity,and his efforts to rethink the usesand potential of space through what i mightcall an ecotemporal lens, or an appreciation ofseasonality, as in his work
on winter spaces. jan gehl is the recipientof an honorary doctorate of letters from edinburgh. he has been the recipient of thesir patrick abercrombie prize for exemplary contributionsto town planning and territory development fromthe international union of architects. and in 1998 he received theedra places research award from the environmentaldesign research association.
he's on the editorial boardof many important journals. he's done amazingthings, and we're going to hear moreabout them tonight. so it is my distinctpleasure and honor to introduce him to you now. thank you. thank you for the verykind introduction. i would like to meetthat guy at one point. good evening, and thankyou for inviting me over.
i've been here several times,and also here in this school several times. it's a greatpleasure to be back. and i have called mypresentation tonight "from jane jacobsto livable cities," and we are going to talkabout a period of 55, 56 years for two reasons. one is that this yearis the 100-year birthday of jane jacobs.
and other thing isthat this year i've been working in thisarea for 50 years, and it has given me a numberof chances to look back and whatever. but i think i shall startwith telling something which i thought was very,very inspiring for me, and sort of put thingsin place for me. it was at aconference in england where the englisharchitecture critic
[inaudible] he liftedsome kind of object, and he said, oh, ifeel sorry for you architects because your meanof communication, your work, is the still photo and thetwo-dimensional drawing. and in this way, you focuson form all the time. but this is not architecture. this is sculpture. architecture is the interplaybetween this one and life. and only if the interactionbetween life and sculpt
and form becomessuccessful do we have really great architecture. but the problemnow is it's so easy to convey form to each otherand to discuss form and put form on the front page ofarchitectural magazines. it's easy to study form. it's much morecomplicated to study life. and to study the interactionbetween life and form is even more complicated.
that's why so little hasbeen done about this, and so much has beendone about that. i feel sorry for you architects. that also helped me torealize what i had been doing through my career so far. that i have beenlying on my knees and studying this and this. and i can tell youthat at times it's been quite complicatedbecause in great periods, most
of my colleagues, they thoughti was wasting my time utterly because the real thing wasthe form, and what i was doing was sort of redundant. now, that's another story. let's get started. this one works occasionally. now it works. ok. my point is that thelivable cities has much
to do with how wetreat people in cities, and i will start right away withjane jacobs whose year is 1961. she published her famousbook the life and death of great american cities. here we are. she published this book. and i'm going first to tellabout-- why doesn't this work? come on now. i'm going to talk aboutthe two old paradigms which
really have bothered the secondhalf of the 20th century. the first paradigm is aparadigm of modernism. good old corbusier who saidthat cities are redundant and they are out, and buildingcities house by house by house is out. public space is out. what we're going to do now isto do single buildings in parks, and that health, physiologicalhealth, is the main thing, and everythingshould be different.
actually, theythrew out everything we knew about good cities. all the experience of hundredsof years of urban habitat was thrown out. they said themodernist, now it's the modern man weare building for, and everything of the oldman should be forgotten, and now we have toconcentrate on the modern man. and then they built theselovely things here and there.
and they were very radical. this is a project for paris. how paris could be saved is bytaking down paris and building 24 high-rise buildings whereyou can sit and look out over all the grass in paris. but actually, i take 1960 asa really important departure point for modernism because thatwas the time after the war when the economies werestarting really to recover, and where the citiesstarted to grow rather fast.
and that was also thetime when the old way of planning one house nextto the other in the existing streets wouldn't accomplishthese peak expansions of the city. and then the plannersvirtually took off in airplanes and started to plunkdown their compositions from a high distance. the site planers wereup there in helicopters going around adjustingthe buildings.
and what happenedat that time was that down where the people were,that was completely overlooked. that was completely forgotten. no profession was asked tolook after this landscape. we will say that maybe thelandscape architects were down on their knees lookingafter this, but they were not. in all the landscapearchitecture courses i've come across inthe past 50 years, there's never been anymuch education about people
and behavior and social needs. it's been about other things. so the peoplelandscape was forgotten while everybody was flyingaround putting compositions down like this. i call it the brazilia syndrome. brasilia, the capital ofbrazil, was the big competition in 1955. and i was in school ofarchitecture at that time,
and that was the big thing. that was brasilia. we all dreamt aboutbrasilia, and we learned that it was goingto be a fantastic place. and it is a fantastic place. it was where all ofthe modernistic ideas came together. that was why it was socelebrated at that time. you fly over brasilia,it's fantastic.
it's an eagle, and the head ofthe eagle is the parliament. how could it be better? and if you fly ina helicopter, you can see the ministries andthe monumental buildings of niemeyer lying side byside alongside enormous parks. from the helicopter,it's excellent. unfortunately, down wherepeople are, brasilia is shit. and nobody sort ofthought about that they couldn't afford tokeep all of the brazilians,
each of them, ahelicopter so they could enjoy the wonderful citywhich niemeyer and costa had been making. you can walk endlessly,and it's really boring, and all of these big parks,they're full of illegal steps, just like here in howard, wherepeople are taking the shorter ways to things. i have, through my studies,become more and more critical about the influenceof the modernist
and the kind of overlooking thepeople factor in their work. and i would befrank enough to say that if at anypoint in history you wanted to hire someprofessionals to do something which people did not enjoyor like to use and whatever, you should hire some modernists. and they would probablycome up with something like this one, where thiswonderful bench, which i found some harbor front, wherei always thought about that--
imagine a young couplesitting there, sitting there with your girlfriend,and telling her what a wonderful life youare going to create together. modernists. just last week i was in moscow. i'll tell youabout moscow later. but then we walkedaround moscow, and suddenly, therewas corbusier. he was a stout communist, dida few buildings for stalin,
and had a monument inone of the streets. i had the chance to go and tellhim gently where he was wrong. but that's another story. the other big paradigmwhich has really dominated planningin the past 50 years has been, of course theinvasion of motor cars. it started out like here,turn of previous century-- people walking peacefullyin all directions. there are a few street cars, asingle car and a few bicycles,
maybe, also. then the automobilesarrived and it started to change the picture. and then after awhile, the car became king and conditions forpeople became worse and worse. so on one hand, we had aplanning paradigm, which really was people unfriendly. on the other hand,we had invasion of a new species whichpushed people out
of the spaces they used to use. and what hashappened in these 50 years is i've noticed, ofcourse, that all cities i know, they have a fantastictransport department staffed with very, veryefficient and great traffic engineers who have completecontrol of the traffic. they count all thecars every year going this way andthat way, and they can produce all thestatistics to the mayor saying
we shall have these manylanes here and there. that is, we have for50 years-- really, the car invasion hadbeen a major problem, and we have made alot of work to try to control that invasion,and had all these transport departments, where, ofcourse, the major purpose of the transport departmentis to make the cars happy. and they have become reallyhappy in many places. but do you know of citieswho, at the same time,
had a department for people,for public life or pedestrians? do you know of anycities who have any knowledge about how thepeople were using their cities? the effect was that that has,throughout these 50 years, more or less been the fact thatyou knew nothing about people and you knew everythingabout the motor car. and that, of course,in planning situations, lead you to all the timeyou knew a lot about cars, and that's what you planned for.
people was overlooked. so what was known in 1960, aboutthe influence about people, and about the interactionbetween form and life worked? virtually nothing becauseeverything had been thrown out. and we were looking intothe brave, new future with modernists doing thebuildings and motorists filling the voids. then came this voice fromgreenwich village, jane jacobs, 1961, where she battledwith robert moses,
and she actually saidtwo major things. one is if we let the modernistsend the motorists plan this world, it will be the endof the great american cities. we will have dead cities. and the other thingshe said very much was look out of the window. see how the life isunfolding on the streets where people are,and learn from it. and see what a fantasticstreet ballet is going on,
and all the virtues of a city. look out of the windows. look at the people, and forgetabout some of the theories. that was part of hergroundbreaking book, which will be celebrated in may thisyear, especially because that's 100 years since she was born. she was fighting withrobert moses in new york. and robert moses wasone of the new guys, and he really wanted to savenew york by tearing down
greenwich village, soho,tribeca, and little italy, and other redundant areaswhich were no use in the future so he could get his newlower manhattan lomax expressway through and haveall these high rise buildings lining the lomax expressway. unfortunately, he, in hisplan, hit jane jacob's house, and that turned outto a bitter fight. and actually, that fightwas won by jane jacobs. it was not carried through.
but robert moses hasgot his way with most of the rest of new york, whichwas completely filled from wall to wall with motor cars. talking about the influenceof jane jacobs, of course she has had afantastic influence on the mindsets of many,many generations of planners and architects. she was not theone doing projects. she planted some seeds,and it took quite a while
for these seeds really tobe brought into real life. i'll return to this,lomax, the one freeway she fought vigorously. i now turn into a veryshort story of my own life. and i was trainedas an architect. i was trained inthe '50s, and i was trained as a good modernist. and we were lying on our knees. we were organizing allthe objects like this.
and bingo-- this is a good city. the big hero was thisswedish professor. lindstrom, he was called. he said that a good housing areacan be recognized by the fact that it looks greatfrom the freeway. and he's doing one of hisgreat housing areas here. i think later on thatthis was the worst time of city planningever, but not so in '50s when i was trained.
that was a great thing. i rushed out ofschool of architecture and was going to do allthese great things i have learned in school. then i married a psychologist. and at once we had allthese young psychologists and sociologists,social scientists coming into our house, and allthese young architects, and we had a bad time.
they kept saying, why areyou architects not interested in people? and they said, why don't theyteach you anything about people in school of architecture? and they would say,have you ever thought about the practice of yourarchitecture professors to go out at 4o'clock in the morning to take the picturesof the buildings so that the studentswill not be distracted
by the people infront of the buildings when you have your lectures? have you thought about that? we had not. and for a young architect, thatwas quite a difficult period. but also, the '60s wasan interesting period where profession startedto open their windows and come together. and my wife and i,we realized that
the borderland betweenarchitecture-- sociology, and topology, andpsychology on one side and planning architectureon the other side, that borderland was reallynot at all investigated. there was nothing knownbecause everything we knew about that, what wasgood, could make a good city, was thrown out in the processof all this transformation with the modernists. so we had to start fromsquare one, studying this.
what is this? and what happenswhen it meets this? and what does the formof this mean to the life? in my case, i had to go backto school of architecture for another 40 years to studywhat they didn't tell me in the first round. and that was, of course,a very interesting time. and here, what did ido in all these years? i really realize now that i wasworking all the time in making
people visible in the planningand architecture process so that we knew somethingabout what is this, and how is this interactionto be organized? i did a number of books,and at some point, i started to feel sometugs in my sleeves, and that was mayors fromall over the world who came and said,you can criticize, but can you pleasecome and tell me what shall we do in our city?
and then i startedin a small way. and then at some point,there was too much going on at the kitchen table. my wife threw us out. and then we startedgehl architects, 2000, and we have now beenin progress in 16 years and have found thatcities from one end of the world to theother are desperately trying to seek informationabout how to make a better
city for people. so now at thispoint, i would say that we now knowquite a few things about what makes a good city. and there is notdone enormously much in this borderland betweenplanning architecture and the social sciences,but there is done enough that we feel confidentthat we know enough to make much better cities now.
here is an overviewof some of the things which have been made up there,in the start is actually jane jacobs. down in the corner is one ofmy books, cities for people. and looking backover these 50 years, i can clearly see that therehas been sort of three centers for this study of thisand the interaction. one has been in berkeleywith appleyard, alexander, cooper marcus, allan jacobs,and peter bossellmann.
one has been in new york withwilliam whyte and pps, project for public spaces. and then the third onehas been in copenhagen where for 50 years in theschool of architecture, continuously has beenstudied this notion of life between buildings, citiesfor people, and whatever. and so now we know distinctlythat we form the cities, but then the cities form us. we know that thereis a fantastic
inference from the form tothe kind of life we live here. we also know inthe smaller scale that even down tosmall things could be a fantastic difference. if i take the best squarein the world, in my opinion, one of the most fantasticsquares, the campo in sienna, and everybody agrees thatit's a wonderful square and it's world renown, andit's been there for 800 years, and you think it's amiracle which has happened.
but then we have,over these years, developed quite a few tools. one of them is thisvery basic keyword list of what you should lookfor to make a good place a good space for people. it's something about protectionagainst the bad things in life, comfort, so that you canstand and sit and talk and see and do and play, whatever. and then there is anumber of enjoyment.
you should have agood human scale. you should be able to enjoythe good parts of the climate. and then finally, it shouldalso have very positive sense experiences. it should bewell-designed, beautiful, good architecture, good details,good materials, plants, water, whatever. art. all this togetheris pre-conditions
for a good place. if you take this list and goback to a place like sienna, you will find that for eachof the items you look into, you come out with agreat resounding yeah. yes, indeed. and when you come down tois it a beautiful space? is it good people scale? and is it good materials,good details, good design? yeah, yeah, yeah.
and for many years,many architects thought, if it looksgood, it would be good. that's not true. it only is good if all thepractical things is also looked after in the same. and then furthermore, itis wonderful to look at. so it scores a high 12. i have found severalmodern places which, out of 12 possible positivecriteria, have scored minus 13,
so this kind list it'snot very well used. but we know a lot now. and as mentioned bydiane, the latest thing we have is makingall the methods we have developed over all these50 years of studying people-- we have made themput into a book so that everybody could start. and the whole thingis, of course, that by seeing, by reallysystematically noticing life,
you become a much betterarchitect and planner. then in my old life, i leftuniversity when i was ripe. that means when the danishgovernment throw people out at 70, i had to leave. and then i continued in gehlarchitects to do my research. and then when i thoughtthat everything was fancy and life was just smoothin front of me, they came. we have in denmark this verystinking rich foundation for the builtenvironment, and they
had taken a shine inthis human dimension, in architecture and planning. when i was inuniversity, they actually donated great sums so we couldset up a research center. we could have a phd, and wecould have a lot of things. and then suddenly, they cameagain after i retired and said, jan, we want you tosit down and write down everything you know whileyou can still remember it. and i said, you realizei'm very, very busy.
i haven't got time. but they said, isn't timeabout how many assistants we will provide you with? and then suddenly i had time. so the book was produced. and this book really iswhat it was supposed to be. it was sort of a compilation ofeverything i had been studying and found out, and experiencesfrom cities and whatever through all these years.
and it has the samesubject as a first book, life between buildings. so i can have this oneand life between buildings next to each other. people will say, whatis the difference between these buildings? and i can only say 40 years. because the life betweenbuildings was very much "we have a problem here."
and now i do thinkwe have a problem, and also we knowwhat to do about it. so this was published in 2000. and now in 2016, it's out. i think it's morethan 30 languages, and we'll reach35 in a few days. and it's the most unlikelyplaces they are found. just to mention some--[inaudible] out in french, it's the first book of minewhich is out in french.
it's not in france, ofcourse, but it's in montreal. and they export it tofrance from montreal. also in german, it's come out. after 40 years in german. i'm very proud. then i was approachedby the greeks. they said, we would liketo publish your book. and i said, oh no, no, no no. you have better thingsto use your money for.
and then they said, don'tyou you worry about the money because the danishembassy will pay it all. so it's out in greece. and it's even out indanish and in english. and here is the graduateschool of design in kazakhstan ready to gowith the kazakh version, which has just come out. after all these 50years, we definitely now have a newplanning paradigm,
which is really gaining momentumin cities across the world. so if you ask any mayor today,what is the purpose of your being a mayor here? what will you cite to do? he would say, i'llmake a livable and a sustainableand healthy city. if you show them this list,they say, that's my program. we do that. and this is distinctlydifferent from the old program
of quantity. now we have muchmore a paradigm which concerns about the quality,and also the quality of life, and the sustainabilityissue, and the health issue. we haven't got allthe time in the world, but there is a growingneed for people to have good public spacesbecause our households are smaller and smaller,we live more and more privatized, wehave, on the other hand, more
and more leisure time. we get older and older. we have all thisdigital information. but throughout thehistory of mankind, actually the man as a speciesis a very social animal, and the greatestinterest of man is man. and the greatest city activityis watching other people, as you know. i thought thatwhen you got older
you will stop lookingafter the girls, but that is not the casebecause throughout life, you will look after interestingand nice things, and that is the numberone attraction in cities. that's other people. and what we have foundis that with the smaller house and the more spreadout and the fewer good public spaces we have, whenever we makea good public space anywhere in the world, peoplecome streaming out
to use it because being togetherwith your fellow citizens face-to-face is quite anotherthing than reading about it or seeing films aboutit or whatever you do. so we have seen at the sametime as a digital thing goes up like here, public lifegoes up like this, but only if thequality is all right. because in the old days,people were out in the streets because they had to. now they're out in the streetswhen the conditions are nice
and the quality is there, sowe have to provide the quality. we have two new drivers for thispeople-oriented city planning. one of the diversis that we have to do much morefor sustainability. i'll not go much into this,but, of course, we had the c40. all the mayors ofthe biggest cities come together to discusshow they could do something more for sustainabilityin the cities where most of the problemsfor the climate comes from.
of course, the morewe walk and bicycle, the better it is for climate. but if we are to have reallycompetition to automobiles as a mode of mobilityand transport, then the public transporthas to be much better. and to have a betterpublic transport, you have to have abetter public realm so you can walk indignity and safety to and from yourpublic transportation.
we will see in thecoming 20 years a real revolution in walking,bicycling, and public transportation and inalternatives to the old detroit technology front1905 with everybody giving four rubber wheels,one in each corner, and then that issupposed to be mobility. mobility in cities of5 and 10 and 20 million can never be organized witheverybody having four rubber wheels.
so we will see a complete newway of building cities emerging actually quite quickly. the final-- come on now. yeah. then we also have anotherdriver for better cities. that is what is now called"the sitting syndrome." we have, for 50 years,made city planning which invites peopleto do nothing, where you could do the wholelife without ever moving
a muscle. you could do drivingthis and driving that, and you could sit allday behind your computer, and you can sit in the sofaall night with your screens. and that is life. but we've found that thisinactivity is a very, very serious problem for the health. and the doctors evennow, they diagnose it as spatial syndrome,the sitting syndrome.
i just told you, diane, that mydaughter is a prominent cancer research doctor in denmark. and she told me justa little while ago about this sitting syndrome. that they've found, of course,that if you don't move enough, you have problems with yourheart and your circulation, you have problems with diabetes. and the new thing theyfound is that also cancer is much more prone to attackyou if you don't move enough.
they had this story aboutthe two cages of mice. one group could run in awheel and the other could not. and these ones had four orfive times more mortality with cancer than theother group of mice. so they knew that there'sa combination here to a lot of illnessesbased on the fact that you're not moving. i have been toldthat if you have 1 hour of moderateexercise every day,
you can live 7 yearslonger than the other guys, and you will be muchcheaper for society because you will not have togo to doctor and to hospital so much. and foremost, you willhave a much better quality of life in your old days. so it's a reallywin-win situation. and that's why worldhealth organization today say in their strategyfor world health,
we urge all citiesto make policies so that people walkand bike as much as possible in theirday-to-day doings. it's not about havingweekend trails and parks. it should be somethingwhich you do every day, and which comes naturally toyou so that the first thing you think about. they've also found that thehealth situation in the suburbs is considerably worse thanthe health situation in cities
because generally, in citiespeople walk much more than they do in suburbs where theyhave to drive to everything. so they found adistinct difference in health condition insuburbs and in city centers from one end of theworld to the other, which are all very interestingbecause we built the suburbs and we invited this behavior,which led these people to have the sitting syndrome. now we have to dosomething about it.
so my own conclusionis that if you look after peoplein city planning, if you make people-orientedcity planning, make good conditions forwalking and bicycling actually efficiently, you get a morelivable city, more lively city, you get a moresustainable city, and you get a much more healthy city. what can we do now? what do we know?
yeah, that's not reallycorrectly spelled. i'll have to look into this. but what really wehave become expert in is improve the existing citiesbecause it's relatively easy to clean out afterthe car invasion and turn cities which were madefor people back into cities for people if youclean up the car thing. so that we have beenvery proficient to do. and i'll show you some examples.
are there cities now who havethis policy, that in this city we will do everything to havepeople walking and biking as much as possible? yes, there are. one of them is my homecity of copenhagen. and it has turned completelyaround from a situation when i started in the '50s to now. they have had people-firstpolicies since '62. it was one of the real pioneers.
already in '62 theystarted to push back the traffic fromthe main streets. and just to realizehow early that was, that was at the same timewhen jane jacobs sat over here and wrote her book. actually in copenhagen,they pushed the cars out. they never did that in. she only stopped something,but they started something. they would not know athing about jane jacobs.
they just knew that their citywas being overrun by cars, and they pushed them back. and there's all thesestories that it could never happen in denmark. we were not italians,we were danes. we're not italians. it will never work. and then they created thespace, and next year, we were italians.
and we have become more andmore italian ever since, for 50 years, andnow it's really bad. this is what it's done. actually, thisstarted in the city of copenhagen. it was verysuccessful, so it started a long string of improvements. actually, every yearthey made something. they made the city a little bitbetter than it was yesterday. and so this samesituation now, if we
look at what has been addressedto be better for people, it would look like this inthe city center of copenhagen. and copenhagen became thefirst city in the world where systematically theuse of the city was studied. it was studied by theschool of architecture. it was part of myresearch brief. and we studied continuouslythe development of copenhagen. and the more thepoliticians came to know about the effect ofwhat they were doing, that there
were more people andthey were more happy, and the merchants weremore happy, and whatever, whatever, the more eagerthe politicians became to do more and more. when i retired as a professor igot this letter from the mayor saying, if you guys atschool of architecture had not produced all thisdocumentation about how the city worked forpeople, we politicians would never have dared tomake copenhagen the most
livable city in the world. now copenhagen, a longtime ago, has taken over from school ofarchitecture, and now they have a department forpeople and public spaces. they count all the pedestriansand all the things in the city, and the culturalthings, whatever. they do it all now,as every city should. just as we have alwaystaken great interest in documenting the cars,we should document the life
just as well. they do it in copenhagen now,and it really goes full out. this is not going tobe the subject today, but i can see thatcopenhagen, who have worked in thisarea for 50 years, we can really see thedevelopment of society in this process. the first wave wereto push back the cars and make it possibleto walk in the city.
the next wave was to make itpossible to sit and to enjoy the city, and tohave cultural events. and that was a time whenall the squares were made and all the cafetables were put out. again, we knew thatyou could never have coffee tables incopenhagen. the weather was too bad. it started out with 2months, and then 4 months. then 11 months, andthen the smoking laws,
so now they're out12 months a year. and we have reducedor we have got rid of the winter in just 40 years. and the most recentsquares would be like this, wherethe main emphasis is on exercise and joy,and enjoying yourself and sport, activity, play. and also the architecture isincreasingly more playful. and we swim in the harborbecause the water is now clean.
we can see that thepublic spaces are changing in character as thesociety develops, and more and more we havethe leisure time society. copenhagen now hasofficial policy-- we will be the best cityfor people in the world. and they have a number ofgoals, and they check every year that the goals are followed. and the main reason why theysay that people should come out of their houses anduse the public spaces
is that they say it'sgood for society. we need to meet our fellowcitizens face-to-face in the public spaces. we need to see whatkind of neighborhoods we are living in, whatkind of neighbors we have. for democracy it's important,and for social inclusion it's important that we meetand we don't sit at home and look at televisionor whatever we do. so they have thispolicy to try to do
whatever they can to invitepeople to come out and enjoy. also now, which isagain interesting, it's not a policyfor the city center and where the tourists come. it's a policywhich is city wide. it should be a goodplace for people. the streets allover the city are being transferred from somefour- or five-lane city streets to two-lane streetswith bicycle lane, street trees,
and median because people crossstreets wherever they are. they always go across. you can see it out herein these lawns in howard. people always takethe shortest route. they do that, and here theyhave all these medians, and so it's much moresafe to cross streets. and the lower streetis much more beautiful. it's much more safe. very few accidentsare there, also.
and lo and behold,the lower street can take the sameamount of traffic as could the upper streetbecause the traffic engineers are muchsmarter now with bylanes and turning lanesand all that stuff. so we've seen thistransformation of this city. and just to mention onething-- that is that just to say that pedestriansand bicyclists are just as important as are anydriver in a mercedes.
whenever you have a smallstreet going into a big street, you take the sidewalkand the bike lane across the small street. you narrow the small street,and i thought, gee, that's good. that's to prioritize peoplewalking and bicycling. but then my daughter,she said to me, oh, papa, it's fantastic. now we've got all thesechanges in the streetscape. and now laura, mygranddaughter of 7-- now laura
can walk all the wayto school because she can stay on thesidewalk all the way from our door to the school. she doesn't have to crossany streets anymore. that is, for a 7-year-old,a fantastic difference of freedom. so to me, this is very muchabout humanizing cities. also in copenhagen, they'vedone all this for bicycles. and we'll have to be alittle bit quick by now.
so they decided ratherearly that there should be a city wide systemof good bicycle lanes. i've seen you incambridge, you have started to do quite a bit of this. and in copenhagen always theyare with a curb to the cars and a curb to thesidewalk, and they are for every generationin the population. it really has turned intoa transportation system. every third family withchildren have a cargo bike,
and the kids love muchmore to go by cargo bike than to be strapped onthe rear seat in a car. this is a copenhagentraffic crossing, where you can see the bicyclecrossing and the medians in the streets, and thepublic transportation. everything is sortedout right nicely. and it is very safeto bicycle now. the critical point inevery bicycle system is the crossings.
if you can manage the crossings,you can have a safe system. that means that mygrandchildren, from they are 5, they can bicycle all overthe city with their parents. and from the timewhen they're 10, they can bicycle alone from oneend of the city to the other. it's safe. so gradually in copenhagen,we've seen all this, a bicycle culture has developed. everybody is bicycling.
businessmen and pregnantwomen and children, whatever. the crown princess bicycling,but not so frequently. but the crown princessdo it more frequently with her cargo bike and discreetpoliceman in the background. in copenhagen we hadserious problems now, and they arecongestion problems, and they are congestionproblems on the bicycle lanes. it's really, really bad. this paper clippingis from 2002.
that's 14 years ago. it was bad 14 yearsago, and so what do you do in this situation? you just widen allthe bicycle lanes. where do you getthe asphalt from? you take it from the parkingand take it from the cars. that is good policybecause a bike lane can take five times morepeople than can a car lane. so if you have enoughbicycles, it's good economy
to give them the room so thatthey will not stop bicycling, but maybe more will bicycle. that is a policywhich is taken there. and we can just go on and on. they also have a policy--we'll be the best city in the world forbicycling, and they're close to the mark in strongcompetition with amsterdam. and what is this? this is not my grandmother.
this is the danishminister of culture. and she was goingto be photographed for a series of culturalministers across europe, and she should sitin a favorite sofa and read her favorite book. and she came to be giggling,and said, jan, i took your book. i took the englishversion so they can see what i'm really interested in. this i take on as an examplethat this kind of thinking
has by now penetratedthroughout the society, throughout the countryfrom one end to the other, from the lord mayor tothe youngest student. they know that people andpublic life is very important. also, this culturalminister, she has changed the architecturepolicy of denmark. so now it's not like theprevious labor government, something about let's makearchitecture ready for export or something like that.
now it's put peoplefirst in architecture. i'm very proud that these changeof mindsets have happened. this is the danishgovernment, the previous one, i should say, comingup to the queen to have theircommissions as ministers. no limousines no more. and no bicycleswere stolen that day because they drove upto the guards and said, would you look afterour bikes while we go
and have this businesswith the queen? this is a country whichi'm proud to be a part of. have they done thispolicy in other places? yes, more and more citiesare into this kind of policy. and i will haveto be very quick. melbourne started out in '85. it was an awful city. i knew it because i wasvisiting professor down there at that time, and itwas really boring,
and there were offices all over,and there was nobody out there in the evening, nobodyout there on the weekends. they decided to turn allthis around and invigorate melbourne. and they had done everythingin the book to do it, and they've beentremendously successful. not that i can go intodetails today, but just say that melbourne byfar is a nicer city in the southern hemisphere.
and if you go tomelbourne, you'll soon pick up that it has adistinct atmosphere of paris. but the weather isright--w quite a bit better in melbourne. so melbourne is reallya fantastic city. if you don't know whatto do, move to melbourne. another city which is fullspeed into doing the same sort of thing is sydney. sydney was famous formany years for having
world summits andolympics and whatever, but actually the quality in thecity center was really awful. now sydney is fullspeed doing everything for walking and biking. they had as election,would you like this policy to save the climateof the world? and i think it was 66% ofeverybody voted for the mayor to go and do this policy. the whole city is fullof posters like this one.
they haven't doneso much, but they're very good in making posters. and it's very importantthat you tell the people why you are doing thesethings and what they accomplish by doing thesethings so it's not against you. it's for the climate andfor a better quality city. one of the things theyare full speed doing is taking all the trafficout of main street and making it into a lightrail and pedestrian street.
this work has just started,and they're digging up the street in this very moment. if you look at these listsmade occasionally by monocle, you can find thatit's very interesting that the cities which have adistinct people-oriented policy like copenhagen,melbourne city, stockholm, auckland-- they are theones i know best, zurich. but also munich,vienna, helsinki, and to some extenttokyo-- they are
on the very top of the livablecities of the world list. i think there's aclose connection. being sweet to peopleis also making the city quite a bit more livable. then the story of new york. we also always heardsome part of it. but 2007, michael bloombergcame out as head of c40 with the mayorsof all the cities. and he said, i promiseyou that new york
will be the most sustainablemetropole in the world in no time to speak of. that means whilei'm still mayor. and i remember that all theemployees there at that point, they had a clock onthe wall counting back 322 days, 321 days, 320 days. that was the days bloomberghad left in office, and that was the day where theyshould accomplish his plan. he had plan for newyork, which was really
to say that i don't wantall these commuting. 1 million cars were commutingto manhattan every day. they can take the bestmetro in the world. we can have widersidewalks, and it's an ideal city for bicycling. it's flat, it's compact,it's wide streets. what are we waiting for? what happened wasthat shortly after, janette sadik-khanwas commissioned
as transport commissioner. she popped up in copenhagenwith amanda burden. we had some greatdays on bicycles. and interestingly enough, wecould not get the bicycle away from the ladies in the night. they just kept on bicycling. only in the airport were weable to get the bicycles away from these ladies. and they were out there lookingat bike lanes and whatever.
and in the end, someof them whispered, we want a city like this one. when can we start? and i was quick. i said, let's start on monday. so they, being american,they started on monday. and they have done,of course, you know, miracles, great things in newyork, in very little time. this enormous bicycle projectnot only in manhattan, but also
in the other boroughs. and then, of course, in theprocess of all this work, we started todiscuss, but don't you need some good public spaceswhere people can meet and enjoy new york? and where all the tiredpeople can sit down and enjoy and whatever? and you have here at timessquare, but it's not a square. it's a bloodytraffic intersection.
and then it was figuredout that they didn't need broadway for traffic. and then we could startto turn the intersections between broadway and theavenues into people spaces. this is the morning in 2009, andthis is the afternoon in 2009. it was very, very quicklythat broadway was transformed. it was done very simply. it was done as an experiment. and the mayor told everybody,don't worry, don't worry.
it's just an experiment. half a year later, he cameout and said, experiment? no way. it's one of thebiggest successes we've had in new york for 50 years. and they go on withthis motif of having recreation in the city. and i'm sure that up in herheaven-- actually, it was still was he was-- i'm not quite sure.
but anyway, it was 2009, and shewould have enjoyed being there when they turned broadwayat various points into people spaces. now they're bringing thebisons and the prairie, and i think thatit looks very good. so we can start to singwith frank sinatra, when you can make iton broadway. "when you can make itthere, you can make it anywhere, new york, new york."
and it's been amazing howquickly that transformation has been made. now they have, i think,50 squares like broadway all over the city. they really have thispolicy-- it should not be for the center of the city,but for the entire 8 million in the city. somehow in moscow theyheard about new york. if you can make it there,we can make it anywhere.
a-ha-- moscow. and then i gave this talkabout what we did in new york in montreal, andthen this little man came galloping up to me speakingrussian as fast as he could. i couldn't. and it appeared that it wasthe vice mayor of moscow. he said, we need thisvery quickly in moscow. we want to humanize moscow. can you do it in 12 months?
and i said wecould start monday. and then we started in moscow. they wanted to newyorkerize moscow. and actually, theywere sick and tired of being completelyoverrun by cars, and they needed some [inaudible]for getting something started. the city was completelyoverrun, and sometimes i have this joke thatfreedom from communism is the right to parkwherever you please.
but it was almost like that. all the streetswere full of cars, and the pedestrian crossingwere the prime parking lots. and it was virtuallyimpossible to move around in moscow because of all thisparking and all this traffic. here is main street,moscow, where at some point there was not enoughparking, so they just said you can park on the sidewalk. and left for the people inmoscow was 1 meter of sidewalk.
they, being even moreorganized than the americans, they started by saying, howmany books have you written? we'll publish them3 months time. and they are all publishedby city of moscow. that's the seal in the corner. and the man with theworried face there, that's the danish ambassador. then gehl architectswas commissioned to make a study of moscow--what could be done?
what was the problem? what was the potential? what could be done? which we did. and while we weredoing this i was invited to come up totalk with the mayor. i said, ok, sobyanin. and he said, what wouldbe in your report? and i said, yeah, maybethe idea of parking
on the sidewalks in main street,moscow is not the greatest idea ever, so i may mentionit in my report that it should be addressed. then 2 months lateri was back in moscow. there were no carson the sidewalks because they have veryefficient democracy. and then you'll think thatthe russians could not really understand these new rules. but mayor had thislittle gimmick.
he goes around and remindsthem of the new rules. and rumor has it that the carsare driven straight to siberia. yeah, there's anafter story to this. because we did thisstudy, and there was a lot ofrecommendations, and we were supposed to helpthem in this, and this, and the other way. and then came thisukranian something, where european uniondidn't want to trade
with russia andrussia didn't want to trade with european union. so suddenly we heardnothing for 2 and 1/2 years. but we heard rumors thatthey were full speed doing what we told them to do. and then a month agoi was suddenly invited back by my old friend the vicedeputy mayor to a conference, and also he wanted toshow me what they've done. and then i had thechance to go back,
and it was a miraclewhat they've done. the parking was moreor less sorted out. there were strict rules,and there were lots of these cars going around. the guys i had whotook me around, i said, are they fined very heavily? yeah, they had bothexperienced this. and they say thatwhatever your income is, the price to get your carback is one month's of wage,
so you remember it for a while. so this is believedto be very efficient. and they had bicyclelanes all over. they have city bikes all over. they had pedestrian streets. they had widened sidewalks. i've never seen a city changingso much in so short a time. new york did it in 6 years. moscow seems to have donethe same thing in 2 years.
and they have, of course, beenvery efficient as you can see. and then you think, this is avery cruel way of doing city planning, but look atwhat they do in lithuania, in vilnius when theypark in bike lanes. i know there aresome people here from the cambridgeplanning office, and maybe you shoulddo the same here because i saw quite a fewdeliveries or cars parked in the bike lanes which youhave put up painstakingly.
this is efficient,and this shows that there's a new windblowing in many, many cities all over the world. this is what i callthe miracle of moscow. these two pictures are taken1 and 1/2 years between. one time, no space for people. the other time, allthe cars are gone. instead you haveseats and planters. instead of a gray street,you have a green street.
and instead of all these sillyadvertisements, you have none. and you can see kremlinin the distance. and furthermore, they don'tneed overcoats anymore, as you can see. a miracle. and they are going on and on. this picture i tooka month ago, and this was one i took some 2years ago, this left one. same place today iscompletely different.
fantastic. so now you hope that i amto end my lecture here. and definitely, i am. i almost am. 55 years after janejacobs wrote this book, i would conclude to saythat a lot of things have changed in theexisting cities. there's really beena political change. they want to havepeople-oriented cities.
they're cleaning up onecity after the other, in kazakhstan and wherever. you think about inchina, [inaudible]. it's been a fantastic success. thank you, jane, forthis inspiration. so that's what we can do. we can clean up inexisting structures. i could end here,but i will not. what can we not do?
which is one of the thingswhich i can, as a mature guy, start to think about whathave been accomplished, what have not? what we cannot do is makewonderful, people-friendly, new towns. and i can still go around. first, here we can seelife between buildings and jane jacobs andwhatever has happened. and up top is all thewonderful things we can do,
and down below is, at the sametime, what we do in new towns as if we have known nothing. as if corbusier and themodernists were still around. so i really see a problem here. all my books aretranslated into chinese. i know that they aredistributed widely because i've signed most every of them. took some time. but what worries memightily is that have not
had time to read them yet. and it's still they're doingthis kind of stuff over there in great numbers. we can see that thisway of planning, which was a modernist wayof planning from above and putting down things andmaking interesting patents, are still around. we can see places likedubai, which is distinctly modernistic and motoristic.
and you can see thatmy good colleagues, the bird shitarchitects, are still flying in new towers, which theydrop wherever they can drop. and in most cases,they don't do contexts. they will do whateverthey are asked to do wherever they can do it. and i think thatthat is not very flattering for my professionthat there are so many things being done just for money.
but you can still see themodernist planning syndrome going on here. this is some of the newstuff in st. petersburg. it's called notstalinism architecture, but oligarchism architecture. but is this good for people? is this wonderful? here is a charmingnew city in china, and they thinkit's very charming
because they reduced main streetfrom 120 meters to 90 meters. look how charming it has become. it is very obvious thatin all these periods, modernist-- this way ofbuilding cities for people have never been popularwith the people. they have hated itthroughout, and the world is full of cartoonsand expressions that this is not reallywhat we dream about. when architects andplanners make new towns,
they will alwaysdo them like this. they would be crawlingwith happy people having a wonderful life,face-to-face in eye level. and then, still, the placeswould rather look like this. so you put a lot ofpeople in the drawings, but you should puta lot of energy in making surethat it's becoming wonderful place for people. we know what to do, andthis is a fantastic plan
of the skyscrapers plannedin addis ababa and abyssinia as if it's the mostimportant problem they should addressin addis ababa. and i will not at all start totalk about people-oriented city planning in the growingworld, in the growing cities of the world, becausethat is a major challenge we do have, of all of them. making new towns inthe developed world is only one irritatingproblem, but it's not
the most widespread. this is what theyuse their time for. this is dubai, as ifyou're more happy to live in a palm-shaped cityif you're a child of 4. this is what isbeing done still. this is wonderfulpromenade in london. this is nice benchby rem koolhaas. so now i finish by saying ifyou go to restaurant owners all over the world, theyknow how to do people scale.
they know how tomake it inviting. they know the importanceof human scale and intimacy and all the thingsbecause they are dependent on peopleloving to come there, so they know exactly what to do. they take the trouble tomake it people-oriented. if you look atthe amusement park around the world, tivoligardens, copenhagen, disneyland, they look shit fromthe air, but down at eye level,
they are fantastic. if they are notfantastic, people will not pay good money to get there. so they're sure that it'sfantastic where people are. if you-- sorry about this one. if you look at the resorthotel around the world, they also canhandle people scale, or people would not comeand pay their good money to have holiday in their hotel.
the big thing whichhappened with the modernists was that they started to dothe buildings first, buildings and then space, andthen perhaps life. that means that theyplunked it down, and instead of spaces,it was left over space. and then they lookedout of the window to see if there was some life,and generally there was not. in the old days we alwaysdid it the other way. we started with the life,then we made the spaces,
and then we put thebuildings over to the spaces. and that is the way wehave to do it to make sure that it's made for people. other examples-- thereare very, very few. we are at themoment in the office writing a book called greatnew towns of the 21st century. it's the thinnestbook you ever saw. we have hardly been able tonotice any great new towns from the 21st century.
most of it is not worthwriting postcards about. this, however, is one which ismade exactly from the spaces to the buildings to the side. it's in sweden. it's 15 years old. it's very, very sustainable,it's very healthy, and it's verylively and livable. bo01 1 it's called. here is one of thestreets, which is really
for walking and bicycling. and it's such apleasure to live there. and if you go to aplace like this one with the little keywordlist i showed you before, you comeup, surprisingly, to find that all the issuesare well looked after. that's why peoplelove to live there. that's what every newtown should be like. i will end-- andnow you are very
happy that i promisedan end-- to invite you to this little areain copenhagen. it's from the turn of theprevious century. it used to be english-inspired,working class row houses. and it's interesting becauseit's not interesting. you can fly overit and you will see that it's completely boring. you can do ahelicopter [inaudible] and it's completely boring.
so if you did anything inschool of planning in anywhere like this, you'll be thrown notbecause of lack of imagination and talent for design. so it's completelyuninteresting. the interestingthing is, however, that when you go down betweenthe buildings in the spaces, everything you can ask fora good housing environment is there. and then comesthe next thing, is
that in this area whichlooks very bad from the air and very bad fromthe helicopter, we have some of thehighest real estate prices in copenhagen. wehave the highest concentration of architectfamilies in denmark-- they live here. and many of the cityplanners and the politicians and the prime minister--they live here. and if you take my little listof good things in the people
environment, you willfind that all 12 are well looked after here. that's why all thesearchitects love to live there withtheir children and their grandparents. it's a good place for people. so in conclusion i'll saythat what really went bad with the modernismand the motorism was that all sense ofhuman scale was lost.
and we have to re-find theability to handle human scale. if you have onlyenergy to do one scale, don't do the airplane scaleor the helicopter scale. do the people scalebecause that's by far the most important forthe livability of the cities of the 21st century. i wish you good luckwith this world, and just would like to end bysaying that for children, it's no great thing to makea great city for people.
well, we probablyhave about three. we probably have time for maybe10, 15 max minutes of questions if there are any buttonsfrom the audience. we can turn the lights on. thank you so much. i think we have coveredthe subject rather broadly. yeah, we've covered the subject. i think we got the point. but let's open the audience.
hi, i've been just handed a mic. i have a question aboutbicycling and bicycle infrastructure. a couple of problemsthat i see with it as i experience thatsituation here in cambridge. on the one hand, if thesegregated bicycling lanes are designed well,this can work well. however, there's a questionof how much right of way is available, and thequestions of supporting
public transportation andenhancing public transportation as opposed to developingfurther development of bicycle first of all, so how do youunderstand that if you see it as a dilemma? and the second questionis, here in cambridge, the way people ridetheir bicycles is really horrible for pedestrians. i know many peoplewho feel terrified of the way, theirresponsible way,
people ride their bicycles. how do you get atthat problem other than just to buildsegregated bicycle lanes, well-designed,segregated bicycle lanes? what are some of the solutions? i do feel that wecould very quickly use the rest of the eveninghere to go into great detail about how to do bicycle systems. the knowledge to solve allthe problems you mention
is available. and i have seen in mycity how they really made a continuous systemwhich is safe from one end of the city to the other. and the other thing aboutthe criminal bicyclists as you mention-- in my town,45% of everybody going to work is going now by bicycle. it's gone up everyyear for 20 years. it's now up to almosthalf of everybody.
and what ischaracteristic in our city is that it's children from5 until elderly people in their 80s. they are bicycling side by side. and by having enough old peopleand children on these bicycle lanes, you slowdown the daredevils and the tour de francepeople who drive too fast. so it's really a matter ofhaving enough critical mass, and really make it a popularthing to do, the thing to do.
and also if there are more ofthem, they will behave better. now they will tend tofeel that [inaudible] all the time sothey can [inaudible] also, some other people. so it is a longprocess, but it has been done in a number of cities. and i was very impressed todayto see how far, actually, cambridge has come. i realize there's quitea distance to go still,
but there were manyinteresting things i did see. so keep at it, and behave. first may i express my envythat you live where you do and how you do. i'm just back fromeurope after long years, and as you showed thesquares, i realized how deeply i missed them becauseyou can meet in them, you can demonstrate in them,you can have festivals in them, you can drink in them,you can relax in them.
and there is something missingfor me here about that kind of space largely. but my question is as thereis this refugee situation in europe, i'm thinking ofplaces like sweden and germany which are the desiredplaces to live. do you have design ideasfor the incorporation of this new reality? this is indeed a verycomplex question. and expressed in mybook are the viewpoint
that all over the worldwe are building for homo sapiens more than weare building for eskimos or japanese or africansbecause there are so many things which are common. and i have done publicspaces in arab countries and in all parts ofthe world, and found that it's more or lessthe same quality criteria. so we can entrust thesame quality criteria for work for various cultures.
and as i mentioned, i dothink that the public space is a very important meetingplace of the new europeans and the existingeuropeans, and that to be confident about the newimmigrants and the meeting with the existingpeople, i really think that publicspace could play a good role where they can justdo their things side by side, and have theirshops and whatever, meet on a daily basis.
so it's not in somecamps or whatever. so i have really thinkthat you can also see that the momentthere is a dictatorship, they at once start by sayingthat people are not allowed to meet on the streets anymore. and when thedictatorship goes away, they celebrate that now you canspeak with each other again. i really believe in the publicspace for social inclusion and for democracy, and asa sort of a place where
we can meet each other. but i have no easy answersto the refugee influx, which is a great problemin many, many cities because it's too abruptand too numerous, and i don't reallyknow what to do. and i don't think it's amatter really for urban design other than in generalities. but talking about squares, iwas down in harvard square, and i was asked, what doyou think of harvard square?
and i said, where is the square? so maybe you could start here. that was the same questionwe had in new york. there was something called timessquare and we from europe said, but there's no square there. there is traffic congestion. couldn't we have a square? and we found out that10% of all the people who pass through timessquare were in cars,
and 90% were on the sidewalks. and the 90% had 10% ofthe space, and the 10% had 90% of the space. so that was thestart of rethinking, maybe we give the90% more space. and that has worked verywell, maybe even too well. no more comments. you were talking aboutthe end about the problem with creating these kind ofpublic spaces in new cities.
and a lot of it,i think, has to do with the scale of developmentand the scale of buildings, not just the streets. i'm just curious ifyou had any success kind of convincingmayors or developers to kind of scale downbuildings and create the kind of buildingsthat you see-- not the kind of oldbuildings, but the scale of the old buildingsyou see in places
that have great publicspaces like in copenhagen or other places. yeah, i was veryrash in my criticism. and i showed just one example. i have four or fiveexamples of cities which really go againstthe modernistic explaining principles and start tobuild from below and up instead of from up and down. and we could easilyspend much more time
discussing what are theconstraints, because there are constraints of economicand production and the way land ownership, and theconservatism of developers. and i also think that the poorplanning, the poor quality of architecture and planningcourses around the world when it comes to people is stilltheir knowledge of people issues is still very mediocre,and the focus on the form is still very, very dominant. so i think that my fellowarchitects are also
much to blame, and theplanners are much to blame. many politicians aremuch more progressive. and definitelyordinary people, they know exactly whatthey would like. that's what they addressin disneyland and in tivoli and in the restaurants. so there is a difference here. and i've seen this culturein the school of architecture in all these years, andthere's not much change there,
which worries me. and it's fine thatthey buy my books or whatever, theypublish my books, but they have to read them. maybe that's agood note to end on because you haven't beenat the gsd long enough. we're introducing peoplecentrism into our program, and i'm hoping this is justthe beginning of conversations that we can haveabout these issues
in the studios and theclassroom, in public fora. and so i want to thankyou, jan, for putting it all on the table for us and forsuch a delightful presentation.