00:04
Jan Gehl
I chose a painting by Hans Scherfig and it's called Street View in New York. It refers back to my love for New York and my work in New York and my devotion to these fine people I met and worked with over there.

00:23
Jan Gehl
It's a back street, a rear street. It is a little bit of a depressing scene. It's dark colors. It's somewhat blue. It is surrounded by highrises. I can see at least 12 stories and a fire stair going up. I can see a stoop. I like the stoops of Brooklyn very much.

00:45
Jan Gehl
I think to have a good life in a city, you feel much more comfortable in a space than in a void. And in all the history of city planning, we always had cities made of spaces. Venice is made of spaces. Rome is made of spaces. Paris is made of spaces. Spaces are where life goes on.

01:07
Jan Gehl
And I think that's very deep in human nature and in the human body that we need spaces. So building spaces is very deep in man. But it is very hard to get a space if you haven't from the start.

01:22
Jan Gehl
I've seen many of these places in my time. So I see this as an opportunity to make something much better.

01:36
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
My name is Tina Jøhnk Christensen, and I'm the host of Danish Originals, a podcast series created in partnership with the American Friends of the National Gallery of Denmark. Our goal is to celebrate Danish creatives who have made a significant mark in the US.

01:52
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Today, our guest is Jan Gehl, a Danish architect and urban designer. Welcome, Jan.

01:59
Jan Gehl
Thank you very much.

02:02
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
First of all, let's get your title straight. You are an architect and an urban designer. Let's make sure that our listeners are aware of what this means and what your job entails. What is an urban designer? Or let's be more specific. What kind of an urban designer are you?

02:21
Jan Gehl
I would normally refer to myself as somebody who works with the architecture in the cities at eye level, as opposed to an urban planner who at least for many years have had the tendency of flying over and saying, let's put the factories here, the residences here, and the recreation here. Now we are in a new generation, I would say.

02:46
Jan Gehl
Although I'm very old, I was a pioneer in this particular humanistic urban design, which very much focuses on people, and how we can accommodate people in our cities so that we feel more at home and more relaxed. And we would like to use our cities and stay outside in public spaces among our fellow citizens.

03:10
Jan Gehl
That's what I have very much worked upon, very much in the tradition of Jane Jacobs. She was a New Yorker and worked from Greenwich Village and wrote a very famous book in 1961, The Life and Death of Great American Cities. We look upon it as the bible of humanistic urban design.

03:34
Jan Gehl
And I would say that I would be stepping in her footsteps. I started my studies, my research, a few years after that book came out. I didn't know about the book when I started, but I found it quickly. So that kind of urban designer am I, a people architect, I would say.

03:57
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
A people architect. And you have been working for about 65 years. You are 88. You graduated in 1960. You have a masters of architecture from the School of Architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. When did you realize that you wanted to be an architect? And what was it about this job that appealed to you, that spoke to you?

04:23
Jan Gehl
I can say truly that it was a coincidence. I'd never heard about architects in my family. I was going to be an engineer. In the very last months in high school, came students from various studies, and then the architecture student sounded much more interesting than the engineering student. So I said, that sounds more fun, I'll go for that one.

04:48
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Was it a personality thing, like the architect student sounded more interesting?

04:54
Jan Gehl
What he was working on was appealing to me. In my family, there were no artists. I think I never heard the word architect in my childhood and my teenage years. So, it was an unknown terra incognita when I went to the School of Architecture in 1954. Also, I was not going into architecture to be a big artist, but to build some bloody houses. It was the practical part of it, which appealed to me at that point.

05:25
Jan Gehl
As everybody else in the '50s, I was trained as a good modernist. We spent five years hanging over models, five kilometers up in the air and putting building blocks around in funny patterns. And we were told that it doesn't matter how you put the blocks, because if people can get a new apartment with fresh air and running water in the tap, they will be happy because people are very adaptable.

05:54
Jan Gehl
And there was all this hype about modernism. We were bending three times a day towards Brasília. That was the biggest thing to think about in the '50s in schools of architecture. And I went straight out to do all these good modernistic things.

06:13
Jan Gehl
Then in the office where I was, there came a man one day and he had a big piece of land in a city which was going to be made into housing. And he was a good Christian. And he said, I would like this area to be built with something which is good for people, so that I can come back when I get old and be proud — I did this and this is good for people.

06:42
Jan Gehl
In the meantime, I had married a student of psychology at that time. In the office I was in, we thought everything architects do is good for people. Then we started to think it might not actually be so. I brought the question back to my wife and said, what do you, psychologists, know about "good for people"?

07:03
Jan Gehl
She didn't know anything. But she brought the question over to the university and asked all the professors and sociologists and whatever, and came back and said that it appears that nobody knows what is good for people, how housing could be good for people.

07:20
Jan Gehl
We actually made housing as best we could. There was a bit of inspiration from Italy and there was a sociologist who mentioned that 15 households was a good sign. So it was something with cluster housing with 15 units in each cluster. We started to think about maybe "good for people" is not what is inside the house, but what is between the buildings, what is outside the house.

07:48
Jan Gehl
And then my wife and I, in 1966, we applied to get a big grant from Carlsberg breweries, the one with the beer. They had a good grant for studying in Italy. And we went to Italy to study life in public spaces for half a year.

08:10
Jan Gehl
We wrote three very famous articles in Denmark. One of them was called "People in Cities," where we described what people used Italian squares for. And it was a big sensation. And everybody said this is the first time in history when human needs are mentioned in the Architecture magazine.

08:34
Jan Gehl
And my wife was employed by the Danish Building Research Institute as the first environmental psychologist or housing psychologist in Denmark. And I was invited back to the School of Architecture to continue my studies of how people use public spaces. And that was the beginning. And then I continued to study by observing how people used spaces. 

09:05
Jan Gehl
In Copenhagen at that time, we had a brand new pedestrian street that was a main street of Copenhagen. And suddenly, in 1962, the same year almost as Jane Jacobs wrote her book in America, the Mayor of Copenhagen said, all these cars, they actually are not conducive to the use of our city center, so let's take them out of main street.

09:33
Jan Gehl
He took the cars out. It was not to make it better for the people, but to make it better for the businessmen. Everybody said it would never work, we cannot make pedestrian streets in Denmark. We are Danes, we are not Italians. It will never, never work. And furthermore, the climate will kill everything. So forget about it.

09:52
Jan Gehl
Then they did it anyway. That's a typical Danish reaction to opposition. They took the cars out and then in just a year we could see that the Danes started to be Italians very fast. And we realized that the difference was that suddenly there was room to be people or to have Italian behavior in your public spaces.

10:17
Jan Gehl
That was a very famous move because that was one of the very first pedestrian streets in Europe, and the first time they actually started to make a stop for the invasion of motor cars, which in the '60s was really, really massive and sort of occupied everything.

10:38
Jan Gehl
And that was a great success. It's now 63 years ago. And that was the beginning for an uninterrupted era of making people-friendly city planning in the city of Copenhagen, which have led to rather dramatic changes, and made Copenhagen in all these years a very outstanding city.

11:04
Jan Gehl
I remember that in all this period, I had this feeling that every morning you woke up, the city was a little bit better than yesterday. And that contrasted very much with many of my other friends and colleagues around the world, who said that from Mexico City or from other places, that whenever I wake up, I know for sure it is worse than yesterday.

11:31
Jan Gehl
In Copenhagen, it started to be better. And when I started my studies in Copenhagen, it was very obvious to start by studying in detail why were people so happy about these car-free streets and how did they use them. It was already in Italy, we saw that there were some places in the cities where there were no people gathering anytime and other places in the cities, there were lots of people all the time.

12:05
Jan Gehl
What was the difference? What was the explanation? And we developed a number of theories of what could be the factors. That was also what we studied in Copenhagen. Where did people gather, where did they not gather? And started to make keyword lists and identify quality criteria, which should be met to accommodate people in cities.

12:33
Jan Gehl
And in my case, my study in the university ended in a PhD study. PhD was not invented at that point, but it was the same thing that you get some three, four, five years to study a subject, and then you are supposed to come up with a thesis. I came up with a little book called Life Between Buildings.

12:57
Jan Gehl
It's now 50 some years ago, and it's still coming out. I just signed two days ago the contract for the third version in Korean, and the French are finally starting to think about it. We just published the eighth version of the Danish language Life Between Buildings.

13:18
Jan Gehl
So this Life Between Buildings actually has become a classic among architects and city planners and urban designers around the world. It's out in 33 languages, but that's not all. I have another book later on. It's out in 40 languages that was made 40 years later.

13:38
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You wrote seven books in total. Why did you decide to write all these books? Why was it important to you to put the new mindset that you had into writing and help others understand it?

13:51
Jan Gehl
I can see now more clearly that it was a new mindset, a new way of looking at cities. There is, in America, a saying, what you count you care for. And all the cities in the world, when all the cars came, they made the traffic department, and they started to count all the cars, and all the traffic was recorded every year, how many went east and west and whatever.

14:17
Jan Gehl
And they could make a prognosis. Everything about traffic and cars was known. And not a single city anywhere in the world had a department for pedestrians and public life. And not a single city had records of how their city was used by people. They knew absolutely nothing. Around the world, the people's side of the story was ignored completely.

14:42
Jan Gehl
And what we actually did in Copenhagen, and that was from the School of Architecture, where after a while I had some students, and I had some colleagues who helped me, and we started. And Copenhagen became the first city in the world where the use of the city by the people was just as carefully recorded as the use of the city by the cars.

15:09
Jan Gehl
And then we had the people side of the story and the traffic side of the story. And the politicians very early on got more interested in looking into the people's side. And that became a hallmark of Copenhagen and still is.

15:26
Jan Gehl
They have continued now — we have continued now — first in the School of Architecture, later in the city, this tradition of recording, with intervals, how the city life, the life of the people and the use of the city has developed, and where new spaces are taken into the system, and how it has evolved over all these years.

15:51
Jan Gehl
We have that recorded very carefully and that has been a tremendous inspiration for the city planners and the politicians. We have a wonderful quote from one of the mayors saying, if you guys in the School of Architecture had not provided all this data about the life of the city, we politicians would never have dared to make Copenhagen the most livable city in the world.

16:20
Jan Gehl
I think she's right because they used it very much and it was really a change of mindset that mobility and cars were not the only important thing. It could also be important to think about if it was an inviting city. If people like to come there, if people like to spend time there, that could also be a good thing to aim for in city planning. That was a change of mindset.

16:49
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How did you approach it on a more practical level? One thing is having a mindset, and one thing is applying it to real life and going through with it. How did you approach it?

17:00
Jan Gehl
I really consider myself as basically an academic and basically a guy who has used his life to study how public life has developed and how people use spaces and what works and what doesn't work.

17:18
Jan Gehl
And we used, all the time, Copenhagen as our laboratorium, where we went out every time they did the change, we went out and studied what the consequence of the change was. And we were able to prove that the better quality they put into the city, the more people came and were overjoyed about what was happening.

17:41
Jan Gehl
And that inspired the politicians. And I knew of course, as an academic, that there were very few people, actually, who had started to take an interest in the life of the cities and the life around housing areas, in detail. And I realized that it started to have quite a bit of influence and I thought it was important to provide this research, which could change the mindset.

18:12
Jan Gehl
And really, I only started to be a consultant when I was 63 years after having been in the School of Architecture for 35 years. There started to be mayors saying, Hey, you could criticize, but couldn't you come and tell us what we should do in our cities? And then I was gradually forced to make a company, which I did in 2000 when I was 63 with a young colleague of mine.

18:42
Jan Gehl
So we went from research and changing the mindset into changing the cities. And my general observation is that first you have to change the mindset, then you can change the cities. You cannot just jump in and say you do this, that, and that. It's like if you are to restore a house, you start by investigating the house.

19:09
Jan Gehl
And we actually have worked with cities in the same way that first we study how the city works and then we can start to say that this city works well here, here, and here, but certainly not here, here and here. And then we can start to improve the cities based on knowledge of how it is used, how people used it, and how the local culture is, how the local climate is, whatever.

19:37
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And you have worked in cities all over the world: Russia, the UK, Australia, New Zealand. What was it that you did, Jan? What was the trick to make it a good city?

19:49
Jan Gehl
All my work in cities, which was done on top of the research because I always had these five, six, seven books behind me. I was sitting on them and could draw on the knowledge. We actually had worked first for Copenhagen. Then came Oslo and Stockholm, the two other Nordic capitals. They came, couldn't you start to make a survey of how our people use our city and how it could be improved?

20:21
Jan Gehl
And then the next one was Australia. Already when I was an academic, I did quite a number of guest professorships because this subject of people's relation with architecture and city planning was very sought after and very little was known and written about it. So I was swimming in invitations from all corners of the world.

20:48
Jan Gehl
Very early on, I came to Melbourne, and at various points later, I was invited to Australia to be a visiting professor. And the first time when we really worked on a city was in Perth, west Australia, which was really bad. And now it's really good. It's really fantastic, that particular city, but all cities in Australia and New Zealand, all the major cities I worked with, and I'm very proud about that because they all became quite a bit better.

21:22
Jan Gehl
In all these cities, we made studies of how the city was used and based on what we knew from other cities, which worked better. We could say, if you widen the sidewalks here, if you take the obstacles away here, if you take the cars out of this street, if you make a park here, you'll find that it will be a much better city.

21:46
Jan Gehl
So it was something about using experience from one city, because one would say all cities are very different and all cultures are very different. What I have found in my studies is that homo sapiens is homo sapiens. We have the same biological history, we have the same senses, we move in the same way, and we basically kiss in the same way.

22:13
Jan Gehl
And there's a lot of things we do completely identical, whether we are in Japan or in Greenland or in South Africa, because they're all homo sapiens and we have all these basic things. We have the same body, all of us. So there's all these similarities. So that made it possible to use knowledge from one sector in another place. And that's what we did.

22:43
Jan Gehl
We worked quite a bit in Melbourne. And then the rumors from Melbourne that we could do this kind of stuff came to London. And then we did a big study in London, which was the only city where we worked very hard and you can't see it now. In all the other ones, you can obviously see it, but not in London.

23:06
Jan Gehl
And that was because Ken Livingstone was the sponsor of these studies and he was a lord mayor. And then a guy called Boris Johnson came in and he thought other things were important, so they shelved the report. But gradually, many of the things have been done now in London.

23:27
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You also worked in New York. What was your first impression of this city from your professional point of view and what made working in New York special?

23:39
Jan Gehl
Michael Bloomberg took over in New York —

23:42
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
— the mayor of New York.

22:44
Jan Gehl
— and he decided to make a difference. And he had heard about this London study. And some people from London went over and told him that he should go to Denmark. And so we were invited by the Bloomberg administration and had a very interesting period of work with a very dedicated team of people in the Bloomberg administration.

24:10
Jan Gehl
And he was very adamant that you should do a lot of things for the people and for the climate. He started up the C40 movement, of cities working together to help each other, to inspire their work for the climate challenge. And he wanted people to walk more and to bicycle more and to take the metro more and not commute so much with cars.

24:35
Jan Gehl
And then that was the brief and we did a number of things. Of course in such a big city, it would only be a sort of acupuncture where you could select some points. But one thing, which was not a point, was the idea of making a bicycle system that was actually introduced very much by the city engineer of Copenhagen.

25:04
Jan Gehl
He had just retired and I said, we need you in New York. And he went with us in our team and he bicycled all over New York and came up with many of the ideas they used. And they put in all these bicycle lanes and they put in these city bikes and they did a number of things all over the city for the bicycles.

25:26
Jan Gehl
And then there were a number of acupunctures for making more room for public life, which was really having a bad time. There was really too little room on the sidewalks. And of course the crunch was in Times Square, which was not a square, but a traffic circle. And it was dangerous. And it was the key for changing Times Square.

25:56
Jan Gehl
There were two keys. First, Bloomberg looked at his traffic engineers and said, do we really need Broadway for driving? Absolutely, absolutely. But couldn't you go and model it and find out? Then they modeled it for a year. Then they came out and spoke very lowly and said, yeah, actually, the whole traffic in New York would be a little bit better if we didn't have this street intersecting in funny angles, all the avenues.

26:26
Jan Gehl
And then it was decided that they did not need Broadway. And that opened up our idea of changing all the intersections to people places: Times Square, Herald Square, Union Square, Madison Square and so forth. They actually started this idea of doing things very cheaply, using the paint they had in the traffic department to paint bicycle lanes and paint wider sidewalks and whatever.

27:01
Jan Gehl
And it was done as experiments. And when the idea came to close Broadway in Times Square, everybody said, oh, that cannot. I was told that you can never use these puny European ideas in the Big Apple. We are out there 24 hours a day and it would be absolutely a fiasco.

27:26
Jan Gehl
The mayor said, quiet people, it's an experiment. If it doesn't work, we'll go back. Then after half a year, he came out and said, experiment, no way, it's one of the biggest successes in modern American city planning. And then he took the paint out and put stones and whatever in.

27:48
Jan Gehl
And then they got so excited about this, taking asphalt from the cars and giving it to public life that they actually made, I think, they made 50 squares of the same size as Times Square all over the city because our work in New York was very much something which should be for all the five boroughs.

28:14
Jan Gehl
And there was something in the Bronx and something in Queens, and something in Brooklyn and Staten Island, whatever. So that it really was something about spreading out this new idea that maybe cities were not only made for traffic, but it could be made so that actually you could also have a life in your city districts and then the cars could be of service to life and not the point of having a city.

28:49
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And now you can actually sit and socialize in Times Square. You can relax.

28:56
Jan Gehl
Certainly. And in many of the other places also. The crunch at Times Square — we were able to prove that 90% of the people who visited Times Square on an ordinary day, they were walking on the sidewalks, which was definitely overcrowded. And 10% were sitting in cars.

29:18
Jan Gehl
But then we looked at the allocation of area, because the 10% in the cars had 90% of the area of the square, which was not a square, but a traffic circus. And 10% of the area was used by 90% of the people being squeezed on the sidewalks. And they were squeezed so much that they could hardly get their money out of their pocket to buy anything.

29:46
Jan Gehl
And they found that the moment they gave more space for the pedestrians, all the businesses had a very good time. They could all prove great improvements in their turnover because people had time to see what they offered and had time to go in and buy things, whatever. And that was, of course, an important factor also.

30:10
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You mentioned that you use Copenhagen as a model for other cities around the world and also New York, but what did you learn from your experience in New York and what did you take away from that that you could utilize elsewhere?

30:26
Jan Gehl
That's a good one. I think what I learned in New York was another piece in the puzzle showing the importance of dedicated individuals, because in New York they had a very dedicated mayor and he had a very, very dedicated staff of people: Janette Sadik-Khan, Amanda Burden, and a number of other people who were very dedicated to making a better city for the people.

30:59
Jan Gehl
And I really admired this team and their ability to stick to the idea, and also against opposition. In all the cities I've been in, there's been a great opposition to making any changes whatsoever, and certainly not in favor of the people and having a better time for the people. And I remember also in New York, we were strictly forbidden to mention that we did it to have a better time for people, we should say it's to make the traffic more smooth.

31:31
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Okay!

31:32
Jan Gehl
And we did that because there were fewer accidents and everything was better. Of course I did it for the people, but it was also good for the traffic. And I've learned also, in each of the cities we have done tremendously well — in Copenhagen, in Melbourne, in Sydney, in Bogotá, in one city after the other, in Curitiba, Brazil — when there were some amazing things happening in the cities, there would always be some firebrands, some dedicated individuals.

32:06
Jan Gehl
Like the city architect in Melbourne. He said, I've had 16 mayors, I've handled them all. He was dedicated to make a better city, and Melbourne definitely became one of the best cities in the world and definitely the best city on the Southern Hemisphere out of a very, very poor start where it was a derelict and unused, useless city center, completely dead in weekends and in the evenings, full of offices and nothing else. And that is now a very vibrant, fantastic city. It's like Paris, but the weather is better.

32:47
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yes, I believe it is. Is that your motto — "I do it for the people"?

32:53
Jan Gehl
Yeah. I think that going way back to the Christian man in the '60s who said, I want to make a housing area, which is good for people. That was really a starting point. And I've been blessed by having at my side all the years a wonderful wife who could add her psychological knowledge. She was also for a number of years, researcher, and then she went into children's psychology and was of support in this idea of focusing on the people.

33:31
Jan Gehl
And we learned in the School of Architecture way back in the '50s that it didn't matter what you built because people would adapt. And we found in our studies very quickly that that was bullshit. Certainly, we form the cities and then they form us. And we form the buildings and they form our lifestyles, our opportunities and whether the children will play with other children and whether the old people have a good time.

34:01
Jan Gehl
You influence a lot with your city planning and with your individual buildings. You have enormous influence. It's so easy to see the difference in lifestyles of people who move from one area to another if they are just aware of what that means — friends they have and where they shop and where they exercise, and where they recreate, whatever.

34:30
Jan Gehl
It makes so much difference if you live in this area or in this area or in this area. So certainly we form the cities, but the cities form us. And the problem was way back we knew nothing about how we influenced. So we did what we did blind-folded and we needed to have this research.

34:56
Jan Gehl
And I'm of course very happy now as an old person to look back and see how much this information has influenced city planning in all corners of the world in many, many interesting examples. We've really questioned the ideas of the modernist that move all these functions apart and have a lot of mobility in the cities.

35:24
Jan Gehl
So you could go from one area to the other with different functions that we now are trying much more to make whole communities which work. And also we try to do more for bicycling and for walking and for affordable public transportation.

35:43
Jan Gehl
And especially because these modes of city planning is obviously the way you can go in the mega cities in the third world where you will never have money to invest in all the smart city technologies and all the drones and all the electric driverless cars, and which are all very expensive gimmicks, which will not be spread in Jakarta and Dakar and Lagos.

36:18
Jan Gehl
And there we will need other ideas and actually we can go right back to our own body and see how we behave all over the world. First we got the car and then we got other gimmicks which we can buy and extend our possibilities.

36:39
Jan Gehl
But basically we all walk and we can all bicycle and when we are small, we all bicycle and some people continue to bicycle throughout their lives. In Copenhagen, they have, of course, very early on, a complete bicycle system which makes it quicker than cars between any destination in Copenhagen.

37:03
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And it's also sustainable, right? It's good for sustainability, right?

37:06
Jan Gehl
It's sustainable and is healthy. And all this walking is also good for the old people, when the doctor tells them to go 5,000 steps a day. So, at some point I talked about that building cities for people was like hitting five birds with one stone. But then I thought it was not good for the birds.

37:28
Jan Gehl
So we can just say that you can achieve a number of things, which we all strive for — a nice city to live in, better addressing the climate challenge, inviting healthy lifestyles, making good for people when they get old. We can actually address a number of questions, which are universal by just simply making it for the people and making sure that people can act as people, that they can walk, and maybe also they can bike in some places.

38:09
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I'm curious, as I live in Los Angeles, which I imagine you've been to. Here, I cannot live without my now fairly old Volvo. LA is a car city. It does not have one city center, but many city centers spread all over this vast city. What do you think of it, LA, and the city planning or maybe lack of city planning that was put into it?

38:35
Jan Gehl
Yeah. When I go around in the suburbs of Copenhagen, I sometimes feel sorry for the people who live there, bound in their single family houses and have two cars out front and need the cars to survive and are completely dependent on this particular idea. And I think that there are so many places I would personally like more to live in, will have more opportunities, than this very high dependence on the mobility system of the motor car.

39:13
Jan Gehl
I know that there are endless many areas which are depending on that. But then of course I also know that there are so many enormous city areas around the world and especially in developing countries which will never get to that state, where you can have two cars and be dependent on that and they will have to come up with other solutions for having a good life.

39:47
Jan Gehl
And that's a worldwide obligation for us to work on because it is absolutely sure that we cannot base city planning across the world on a Los Angeles model. There's no room for it. And there's endless resources and the cars generally sleep for 95% of their life. They're standing there waiting for you to take a little tour.

40:16
Jan Gehl
I read some place that in a good American city there are 13 car parking spaces ready for every car, and that's a lot of waste of land. And so it is from a climate point of view, even if they're electric and automatic, it's impossible to realize that nine, ten billion people around the world can take up that 125-year-old technology.

40:50
Jan Gehl
The idea that to get mobile, you get one ton of steel and four rubber wheels and you're mobile, that was good in the Wild West, in Detroit in 1905 when Ford explained the idea, but it certainly is not as good as it was at that point. And it's not good in these very, very huge 20, 30 million inhabitant cities in the developing world.

41:22
Jan Gehl
It is completely impossible to think that that idea of mobility could be a good idea. So there are two streams now. One is to reduce the need for mobility, and the other stream is to find new ways of securing what mobility you must have or you need for a good life.

41:45
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
If you were to get an assignment to improve LA, what would your advice be and where would you start?

41:53
Jan Gehl
I don't know LA well enough, but I know that, say, the suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne where I've worked a lot, are not very much unlike LA. There are actually some very interesting plans of how you could transform a city like Melbourne into a city of smaller neighborhoods where you have better services and are not so dependent on your car.

42:24
Jan Gehl
And you could have more exercise and more green space and better relationship with nature and whatever. They have made some very interesting plans in some of these other cities.

42:35
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Let's go back in time a little bit. You mentioned that you went to Italy at some point in your career. What did you take away from this experience? I know that you've mentioned Piazza del Campo in Siena as a perfect example for a public space. What else did the Italians teach you about city planning?

42:57
Jan Gehl
It is correct that the studies of my wife and I in the '60s in Italy had a very important influence on our careers and our work and that I refer to these places frequently. And of course, Siena is nice. I love Venice more because that was made for people and was never invaded by cars. That's the only city in the world where they were never let in. So there you can study how it could be done. It's done for people only.

43:35
Jan Gehl
Of course the mobility part is not so smart because they have fast mobility outside the city. And in the city they have these water systems with water buses and whatever. But I really think Venice is a wonderful city. And you will say it's ruined by tourists. That's not the only city ruined by tourists. There are areas in Venice where you have a very nice place to stay and where no tourists come, actually.

44:08
Jan Gehl
And that brings us to another subject, that I'm very critical about mass tourism, which is ruining places and cultures, and makes it completely impossible to preserve and to have these pearls made over the years in history where we can learn a lot. They are one by one being eroded completely.

44:37
Jan Gehl
I was asked in Madrid, in Spain, what is the best thing about Madrid? And I said, the best thing about Madrid is you have no harbor and no cruise ships, because that's the worst that they come with 5,000 people who rush ashore and move around in rapid tempo with buses. And then they go back.

45:00
Jan Gehl
They don't help the tourist industry in the local area. They only help some investors in Miami, who own the cruise ships and whatever. I see that also the cheap flying in all directions endlessly, of course, is unsustainable. It ruins the cities, and it's a challenge to the climate and the resources.

45:26
Jan Gehl
Of course, I could say that if we make our cities much better, maybe you don't need to travel so hilariously much. So make your own city wonderful, and then there are fewer arguments that every time you have two days left over, you have to jump on a plane to go to another place, which you heard should be better than your place. Not so simple, but that's a little bit of a philosophy.

45:58
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I asked you before what you took away from working in New York and you have traveled all over the world. What were the most important lessons you learned from all the cities that you went to and worked on?

46:12
Jan Gehl
I mentioned in relation to New York, the meeting of these firebrands, who had a vision and the will and power to carry it through. And I've seen them all over the world that it's these guys who have moved the frontier posts and started to show what can be done to make a better city, to reduce the climate pressure and to have a better daily life for the people.

46:44
Jan Gehl
And I really think that this is what really stands out when I worked in all these cities, how important it is that some people take the lead and go out and try to change towards a better world for all of us. This, I have been impressed by.

47:06
Jan Gehl
Of course, in London, you had a lord mayor who had very little power because they had 33 boroughs who all had their own policy. And if Westminster went left, then the other one would go right. And this one would go north and south and it was very difficult to carry out anything.

47:27
Jan Gehl
But in New York, you had one mayor who was mayor for eight million people. I saw a system where the mayor actually had influence to the furthest part of the city, and that was interesting. I also found in many American cities that not much is happening in the way of humanizing the cities because the cities as such are too weak and they are too afraid of the next election.

47:57
Jan Gehl
And all of it sums up in a paralysis that they are not able to move. You see a little here, a little there, a little there. But decisions like in Copenhagen when they decided already in 2009 we will be the best city for people in the world, I could not see that happen in Colorado or in Arizona, because it's more diversified and the information level for the people are not so high about what could be achieved by a clever city planning policy.

48:36
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You yourself have been celebrated all over the world. You've won many awards. Which one stands out? What are you the most proud of?

48:47
Jan Gehl
I think that I'm very proud of being an honorable citizen of the city of Sydney. There are only two Danish people who are honorary citizens in Sydney, and we are both architects. Utzon made the Opera House and I cleaned up the city center and we both were invited to be honorary citizens. That, I'm very proud of.

49:12
Jan Gehl
I'm also very proud of being acknowledged as an honorary doctor in a number of universities in various countries. And I am also very happy about being an honorary member of architects associations in seven countries, including the United States of America. So it's these honors which are done by democratic bodies, which I'm especially happy about.

49:43
Jan Gehl
Also, of course, there are a number of medals and stuff. Sometimes I say I've more medals than a Russian General from the Second World War, but —

49:54
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Where are all these medals?

49:56
Jan Gehl
Over here behind me on the shelf.

50:01
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And over here behind you, is that in your home in Copenhagen?

50:05
Jan Gehl
I'm sitting in my private studio in my home in Copenhagen, where my wife and I have lived for 59 years now.

50:15
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Impressive. Did you by any chance, design your own home?

50:20
Jan Gehl
No and yes, but firstly, no. When my wife and I were married, it was basically because I had access to a two-room flat and to occupy a two-room flat, you had to be married. So I put great pressure on my girlfriend that we'd have to marry and we married and got the two-room flat, and when we got one child, we could have a three-room flat.

50:49
Jan Gehl
That was how it was in the late '50s, early '60s. And then when we had more children and needed more space, the way to get it was to get a house. And then we found this house. And then, after I had decided on the house, I realized that it was a very famous house made by some of the most prominent modernist architects in Denmark in 1932.

51:21
Jan Gehl
It is a cube, eight by eight by eight meters, and I have then extended it with a smaller building, eight by eight by four meters, which is sort of an appendix to the place.

51:37
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Who was the architect?

51:39
Jan Gehl
Kay Fisker and C.F. Møller. The next building they made after this one was a university in Århus, a very famous building complex. And when they made this crummy little house and some other crummy houses, the date was 1930–31. That was the time of the Big Depression, and architects had nothing to do. And then these big architects started to make little villas for a while, then they could continue with the big stuff later on. But it's very cleverly done.

52:17
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Did you recognize immediately that this was one of yours?

52:22
Jan Gehl
Yeah, I recognized right away this place has got character, and then we found out why it had got character. It stands out in the area as a sore thumb, very different from all the other houses. But it has a history — Cubism.

52:41
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
It's kind of ironic that it's a modernistic piece of architecture when you went so far away from modernism yourself.

52:50
Jan Gehl
Not only that, but also that we live in a single family house, which I'm very critical about. And in a book about my life, which we just finished, I had to write, we didn't know when we moved in, that single family house was not a good way of living, that we should live much more in a cluster house or in a row house area, and with some more communal spaces and communal life.

53:19
Jan Gehl
So we didn't know that when we settled here. And then we got happy about living here, which of course is also a special case because those single family houses, which are in the first row outside the city, they're very lucky because we have four bus lines here. We have shops and we have services and pharmacies, everything very close by. And then we have the single family house with a garden and a park nearby, whatever. So it's about the best of all the worlds.

53:56
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How often do you use your car, Jan?

53:58
Jan Gehl
Not very often at all, maybe two times a week, to go to my sister who's in a nursing home, where it's a little bit difficult to get there. And also maybe to visit my son in the other end of the city sometimes and going to a cottage on an island. Then we also need the car to go there. That's it.

54:26
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
That's good for you. My final question to you. You are 88 years old. Are you positive when you look at the future of the city of Copenhagen and New York, for instance, you've seen the development for a long time. Do you see it as a positive development? Are we going in the right direction?

54:47
Jan Gehl
I would generally say that my life has been a very blessed one, because my working years have been in a long period of mostly peace and progress. I think it looks a little bit more strange now with the war in Palestine and war in Ukraine and the climate's challenge, which apparently, we all talk about and all of us do something, but apparently it goes rapidly downhill and I can fear very much the consequences.

55:30
Jan Gehl
We can see a number of consequences now, but I'm very surprised that the world cannot unite in trying to do something about it. So I see that a long period of peace and progress, where I have been blessed to have my working life, could actually go over in another period of insecurity and silly decisions and whatever.

55:59
Jan Gehl
But I have been throughout my life very much optimistic. I think that I've seen so many cities become so much better. When I see how Copenhagen was and how it is today, it's completely different and a much nicer place. And other cities, I've seen developments in architecture and housing, which definitely are better than the ones we made last decade.

56:28
Jan Gehl
So I've seen many improvements, and I know you have to work hard for them. And there are always forces which are trying to look more at the profits than in the benefits for mankind. Things like that make me depressed. But I am optimistic and I think that also these various challenges we have now, that we will as mankind be able to meet them and to overcome them.

57:03
Jan Gehl
I grew up during the Second World War and I remember the first ten years of my life as a period of a lot of anxiousness and a lot of restrictions. And Denmark was not hard hit, but as a child, I was scared stiff. And there were so many incidents in that part of Copenhagen where we lived, that you really felt that the Wall was there.

57:29
Jan Gehl
And then there was this long period of peace, at least in our part of the world, broken by the war in Ukraine. And then other wars. Yugoslavia — serious, serious incidents. I know there's been the Korean War and Vietnam War and the Iraq war and whatever there's been in other parts of the world.

57:56
Jan Gehl
But in this part of Europe, we had the United Nations, that we had the European Union and that we have NATO, that we actually have these bodies where we go together to solve our problems together instead of everybody going for themselves. That, of course, has been very important. That can also be a reason for being a little bit unrestful now, because you see some of these institutions being undermined.

58:31
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Alright, Jan, thank you so much for being part of Danish Originals. We really appreciate that you were with us.

58:39
Jan Gehl
You are most welcome. I will have a glass of water to celebrate the end of the talk.

58:46
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
That sounds great.

58:52
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
For today's episode, Jan Gehl chose Hans Scherfig's Street View, New York or Gadebillede, New York from 1929–1930 from the collection of the National Gallery of Denmark.