What Works: Success in Stressful Times

But does this really indicate a rise in the quality of city life?

(#litres_trial_promo) In their book Public Spaces, Public Life (Danish Architectural Press, 1996), Jan Gehl and Lars Gemzoe, a senior consultant at the firm of Gehl Architects, make the distinction between two types of activity: necessary and optional. The first are things people have to do and most walking belongs to that. The second are things people want to do-various forms of recreation-and are mostly stationary. People will only make the choice to linger in city streets if those streets are pleasant and safe places. So the extent to which the city centre has people doing some sort of stationary activity is a measure of its health.

In an interview, Lars Gemzoe pointed to the seamless manner in which the city’s way of life has been transformed-to the extent of being an invisible revolution.

(#litres_trial_promo) ‘The character of Copenhagen has changed very much,’ he explained. ‘People sometimes talk about how nothing has changed for a long time in Copenhagen, because there have been no new buildings for a long period. But everyone was thinking about that so much as a symbol of change that they forgot that we have, in fact, changed urban culture completely. Before, we did not have the space for outdoor activity or indeed the culture for it.’

Just shutting off streets from cars, however, does not in itself guarantee that the urban environment will be safer or more pleasant. There are plenty of examples of pedestrianization creating urban wastelands, deserted after dark, with graffiti-scrawled walls and abandoned shops. Getting rid of cars has sometimes meant getting rid of business activity. Copenhagen has taken a number of steps to avoid this fate.

First, there has been a lot of attention to the detail of the planning so that traffic is not simply pushed from one street to another. Developing the project very slowly, over more than forty years, has meant that each new phase can build on the lessons of the previous ones and, where necessary, avoid evident mistakes.

Second, the street furniture and paving have been improved. More seating is provided, both formal (park benches, for example) and informal (raised kerbs, steps, edges of fountains etc.). Paving seems to matter enormously: squares paved in granite attract activity whereas those covered in asphalt do not.

Third, Copenhagen has looked at the street facades and encouraged owners and tenants to make these people-friendly. For example, bright shop fronts attract window-shoppers in the evening, whereas shuttered fronts are threatening. Streets with doorways and steps are more interesting to walk along than those with solid glass or concrete walls.

Finally, the city has encouraged the use of bicycles as a way of getting about, including dedicated cycle-ways and a special rental scheme, which has enhanced its ability to function while it goes about cutting car use. By 1995, as a result, more people were cycling to work or school, 34 per cent, than driving, 31 per cent-the rest going by train or bus. Even on wet days, 60 per cent of those cyclists still used their bikes. More recently the proportion of ‘two-wheel’ commuters has risen to 36 per cent (with car journeys decreasing proportionately) and, through improvements to the bike network, the municipal authorities plan to increase this figure again to 40 per cent by 2012.

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No city is perfect. Cyclists are not perfect, and can behave just as selfishly as other citizens. Copenhagen has its social and economic problems. The key point is that by thinking carefully about the purpose of a city centre as a cultural and social magnet, as well as a business one, it has managed to cope more effectively with pressure from traffic than any other city on the planet.

2. WHAT ARE THE LESSONS?

The first conclusion is that it is possible, over time, to make radical improvements in the quality of life of a city by looking at the space between buildings rather than the buildings themselves. Unsurprisingly, what has happened in Copenhagen is studied by urban planners the world over. Gehl Architects has been commissioned by many other organizations, including Transport for London and the Department of Transportation in New York, to see what part of that experience can be applied elsewhere.

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But all cities are different. They have different histories, a different balance of activities and differences in basic layout. Copenhagen itself has a number of unusual features, some of which have made things easier, some harder. For example, it has a medieval core,

(#litres_trial_promo) with a street pattern originally based on pedestrian traffic-plus perhaps some handcarts. It is largely a single-level city in the sense that there is no underground railway system, no underground shopping malls, no pedestrian footbridges. It has very few privately owned shopping arcades attracting people away from the streets and squares. It is also flat, making bicycles a much more attractive prospect than in hilly cities.

In a sense Copenhagen has been forced to use its street-level public spaces better-but it has also taken the opportunity to do so.

For lessons, though, it is best to start with the medieval core-even though few non-European cities have a similar central zone laid out hundreds of years ago. The most important lesson here is that where it is practicable to turn that core back into a place where people walk there are huge advantages in doing so. For any journey of less than about one kilometre, a little over half-a-mile, walking is the most efficient method of transport. It uses by far the least road space per person and, with the partial exception of using a bike, it is also probably the fastest way of getting about. For any journey taking up to ten minutes, most people are happiest as pedestrians.

But if they are to walk, while sharing the space with other traffic, the process has to be made pleasant. This requires great attention to detail. For example, there has to be enough space so people do not feel crowded and can move at a steady pace. When they cross a road, the lights have to be designed to give them priority, not other traffic. They must not be forced down steps into underground passages or up steps onto pedestrian bridges. So it is not enough to get rid of cars. Street furniture has to be improved, trees planted, pavements made attractive. Lots of design details, each small in themselves, have to mesh together.

Some of these changes can be made easily, but others imply radical rebuilding. For example, the slab-sided tall buildings that are the standard office block of the developed world can whip up vortex effects, increasing the winds at street level. That means it is much less pleasant for anybody walking and makes it impossible to create places where people will linger, such as outdoor cafés. But you cannot tear down every office block.

Copenhagen starts with the advantage of being largely on a single level and its old core is largely made up of four-and five-storey buildings. But it suffers from slab blocks outside the centre and not much can be done about that, except not to repeat those mistakes in the future. There is, however, the lesson that whenever new buildings are constructed, the designers and the planning authorities should consider their impact on the space in between.

That leads to a more general point about coping with weather. There are many ways in which cities in cold climates have sought to adapt, one being to offer people an alternative, as far as possible, to having to go out into the open. In Toronto there is a huge shopping-centre complex underground; in Minneapolis the central business area is linked by walkways one storey up. Copenhagen lacks such facilities. Instead, it has sought to turn the city into a place where people will use outdoor public space in winter as well as summer.

Basically this has been achieved through small details: outdoor cafés supply blankets for their guests and there are space heaters under large umbrellas. And the city is looking at other ideas: big entertainment screens that emit light on dark evenings; heated benches; skating rinks and so on. But the important change-and this applies to cities in all cold locations-is not to fight the winter but to celebrate it.

Perhaps the biggest lesson of all from Copenhagen is that city centres work best as places where a mixture of functions can flourish. They have long been centres of commerce as well as leisure and entertainment; but they also work better if they are residential centres too, particularly with young student populations.

The thing to avoid is letting any one function dominate or being too rigid when new projects are on the drawing board. The parts of Copenhagen that work least well are the planned blocks and streets of the 1960s; since then, the market has been allowed to signal what people want, not what planners think looks good on paper. To illustrate the point, far from being one of those pedestrianized areas that turn into urban wastelands after dark, Copenhagen’s centre is now home to around 7,000 residents-a development welcomed by local people who report that the atmosphere is both warmer and safer thanks to the thousands of city homes emitting light out onto the streets.

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The authorities have worked with the grain of demand to decide on the best use for the different parts of an ancient city. This has worked remarkably well.

•Make the process pleasant •Consider your impact •Allow a mixture of functions to flourish

3. WHAT COULD GO WRONG?

Well, in one sense nothing can go wrong-or rather, wrong specifically as a result of the urban policies followed by the Copenhagen authorities. Thanks to the incremental approach they have adopted, if something does not work then it can be reversed without serious damage.

There are certainly things that might go wrong with the Danish economy and with Copenhagen’s contribution to it: the city might become overpriced; the competitiveness of Denmark vis-à-vis other European countries might slide backwards. But those are general issues. The specific problem that might result from Copenhagen’s policies is that too much economic development is pushed to the periphery of the city, so the main business activities are located outside the centre, while the core becomes little more than a museum.

But the landscape seems to be changing for urban planning in the post-industrial developed world. The model of a downtown central business district, where all the offices are located, surrounded by a suburban sprawl where people live, already looks outdated. We are still at the very early stages of the communications revolution but we can glimpse some of the implications, the decline of the regular commute and the rise of teleworking from home being one of the most apparent.

The more substantial charge is that what works in Copenhagen is specific to that city. For example, it is easier to re-establish the old medieval core as a place where people walk if you have a medieval core to start with. It could also be said that it is simple to encourage people to cycle more if the highest point of the city is just a few metres above sea level-or that the egalitarian Scandinavian society is conducive to the street lifestyle established by the city. Or more generally, it could be pointed out that Copenhagen is a dinky little city by world standards in a very rich country, and the real urban issues are those faced by the mega-cities such as São Paulo, Shanghai, Mumbai or Lagos.

Those are reasonable arguments. But the conclusion flowing from them is not that Copenhagen has little to teach other cities. Rather it is that attention to urban detail can make any place function better for its citizens-with the important qualification that each device used to that end has to be specific to the city in question. You need heated benches in Copenhagen if you want more people to sit down in winter; you do not need them in Mumbai.

But sometimes the transfer of principles really does work. Take Melbourne,

(#litres_trial_promo) where Gehl Architects was involved as a consultant in importing the concept of mixed-use development to a city that had come to be described as a ‘doughnut’-a sprawling suburban ring to which everyone would return at the end of the working day, leaving an empty, hollowed-out downtown centre in the evening. To begin with, Swanston Street, the main thoroughfare, was partially closed to traffic and then a whole range of improvements cascaded down to turn Melbourne into something like a twenty-four-hour city: a huge increase in residential housing; an expanded pedestrian network; wider pavements; and an explosion in shops (sometimes punched at street level into the city’s office towers). As a result, according to the online magazine Worldchanging.com, the downtown residential population mushroomed by 830 per cent, pedestrian footfall rose by 98 per cent in the evenings and 250 new outdoor cafés opened. ‘You cannot just pick up one model and transport it to another city,’ said Roy Adams, director of Melbourne’s urban design department. But you can, he added, ‘pick up the principle that we’re going to make the city more liveable’.

Lars Gemzoe in an interview

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Jan [Gehl] and I wrote a book called New City Spaces, which looks at nine cities with visionary public-space policies. For example, Barcelona tried ‘urban acupuncture’, where you put a good spot here and there and the whole body becomes better, but it actually did not do much for traffic in the city. You have Lyons with its ‘human face’, Strasbourg with its streetcar tramlines and so on. The office has been working with Melbourne. In 1994, Jan did a survey of public space in Melbourne and discovered that the city was like a doughnut-the centre was empty of activity. He made recommendations, and in 2004 we made a new study on how they have improved, and they have performed fantastically. They had a 200 to 300 per cent increase in the number of people using downtown public spaces to hang out. Melbourne is a fantastic example because they have seen a huge change, but in a much, much shorter time than Copenhagen.

That is a tremendously powerful point. Melbourne is based on a grid, rather like so many North American cities that have suffered from the doughnut effect. If the principle works there, as it has done, any city in the world can make itself a better place in which to live. That is Copenhagen’s core message to the world.

CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_7d5d572e-0da4-5d17-a119-dd874b1a634b)

I. WHAT IS THE STORY?

The burghers of Zurich have arguably both the highest standard of living and the highest quality of life in the world.

(#litres_trial_promo) As anyone who visits will quickly appreciate, Zurich is prosperous, comfortable and calm-even, well, just a little dull. It seems like a city without problems.

It has not always been so. In the late 1980s and early 1990s this orderly bourgeois city had the worst drug problem in Europe.

The story goes back to the 1970s. Zurich, like so many other rich cities in the developed world, saw a gradual increase in drug use, particularly among the young. To start with, they would gather in small groups by the river and no one took too much notice. Then gradually the numbers increased. Instead of there being a dozen, there might on a summer evening be a couple of hundred. Residents and shopkeepers complained. The police would break up the groups and move them on, but then they would regroup somewhere else nearby.

Fed up with chasing these people around, Zurich held a liberal social experiment. It allowed drug users to buy and inject drugs in one place without any police intervention. The place they chose was Platzspitz, a pretty park in the centre of the city between the principal railway station and the main river. It was contained by water on two sides and the station on the other and therefore seemed an ideal location.

It was a disaster. The park became a magnet for drug users from all over Europe. More than 2,000 of them would congregate every day. Their discarded syringes gave it the new name of ‘Needle Park’. The citizens, who had initially supported the project, were aghast. Far from keeping the drug problem limited to one location, the social problems associated with drugs increased even faster than the number of users. There was misery, crime and prostitution. Central Zurich became horrid. Eventually the city decided that this could not continue and in February 1992 the police used rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse the drug users. The park was shut down. In the months afterwards, workers had to remove the top six feet of soil to get rid of all the syringes.

This made the problem less visible but the drug users regrouped, first in local streets and then in the Letten railway station nearby. They were allowed to stay there because the citizens felt it was better than having them on the streets. But so many people were arrested that some 60 per cent of the inmates in the jails were drug users. Switzerland was spending more per head on law and order than even the USA. Drug abuse and the associated crime continued. Nothing worked.

Then came a change of approach. The Swiss government had already developed a harm-reduction programme for drug addicts, with needle exchanges and treatment centres, back in 1991. So when in 1995 the crackdown came in Zurich and the station was closed, there was a programme in place to help the addicts. Treatment centres provided injection rooms. Patients could choose their own doctor and treatment was free. There was also a big methadone project, for methadone, as elsewhere, has generally been the favoured alternative to heroin.