Jan Gehl: Cities for People.

Imelda and I went to a very interesting speaker event at the Playhouse Theatre this evening. Jan Gehl, a Danish architect well known in circles, gave a speech to an audience of city planners and architects about the importance of building cities for people. The key message I came away with from his lecture was on the three levels of perspectives: a view from the satellite, a view from a plane, and a view from the ground. Of the three, he had stressed that when designing cities, the view from the ground should be paramount, one that many architects fail to see from. Scale is important: the distance in which one has to walk from the street to the building, or the scale between buildings. He had used Brasilia as an example of how NOT to do things: a city designed by planners and architects who only saw things from a satellite view with a complete disregard of the human eye perspective on the ground. Buildings are spread too far apart from one another in a way that it discourages human traffic in the area. There’s no life within, contrary to brochures and blueprints of happy people going about their way.

I hope to participate in many more lectures such as this.