Towards a fine City for People - Public Spaces and Public Life in London - 2004
My christmas reading - Jan Gehl’s excellent report on London; “Towards a Fine City for People”. Well worth reading! London still has a long way to go. Read the project summary here and the main report here.
An amazing talk by Jan Gehl on creating Cities for People! Definitely worth a watch on a Sunday afternoon!
He covers a vast amount of content throughout the talk including; the pressing need to plan for people, walking and cycling; the damaging effects cars have on the scales of planning; the phenomenon of “bird-shit” architecture and ”perfume bottle” sky scrapers and the confusion of building scales! Gehl is eager to point out that good architecture is not about form, but about the interaction between form and life and that life is much more difficult to define and study. Later he mentions that humans seem to know much more about creating the perfect habitat for mountain gorillas than they know about building good urban habitats for mankind!
The Q&A is worth watching also with some nice points on density toward the end!
Cities in Focus | New York City
New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Department of Transportation are on a mission to make the Big Apple the “greatest, greenest big city in the world” by ramping up bicycle infrastructure across the city, introducing bus rapid transit to the Bronx, and pedestrianizing Times Square, among other bold transportation initiatives.
