In Search of the Human Scale | Jan Gehl | TEDxKEA

my first line was just stolen by the introduction I was going to tell you about the mayor of Bogota in Colombia and he was the one who said it's amazing that we know so much about good habitat for for mountain gorillas we know so much about good habitat for Siberian tigers but we hardly know anything about good urban habitats for Homo sapiens and that is exactly what I'm going to address today first I'll take you through a very short story about the story of my life I graduated as an architect in 1960 I was educated in the 50s the big thing at that time was it was a brand new modernism where we were taught a completely new way of building cities we were not going to build cities as we know them cities were bad but what was good was freestanding buildings streets and squares were bad but what was good was parks and grass so a completely new way of building cities were introduced and we were very very fired up and excited and also now City Planning was being done on models and we learned in school of architecture to move about the objects and bingo this is a good City I rushed out of school of architecture in 1962 about to do all these fantastic things which I've been informed about and taught about and and then I married a psychologist and then came all these young psychologists in our home and they kept peek Pickering Pickering aren't picketing on us architects saying why you architects not really interested in people why don't you know anything about people why don't they teach you about people in school of architecture oops that was not a very a good start of a career as an architect going to do modernism all over the place in my own case I had to go back to school of architecture for another 40 years and what did I study there I really started to study something which was virtually unknown at that time because everything we knew about cities and good environment for Homo sapiens was thrown out by the modernists they say now the situation is completely new we have a new person the modern man and everything which was for the old man doesn't apply to the new man everything shall be different the city plan should be different the neighborhood should be different the architecture should be different everything should be different and that this new way of thinking would have any influence on the quality of life for people was not discussed and nobody knew about it and to tell about what I really was studying was if you take an object here and this is form and if you think this is architecture it is not architecture it is sculpture but architecture is actually the interplay between life and form and though it's very easy to study form it is really much more complicated to study life and the interaction between form and life the forms influence our way of of using cities our way of living enormous ly much all this was not known at that time I did a few books and much to my surprise these books are now all over the world and to me tells me that there is an enormous hunger for knowledge about what is good habitat for Homo sapiens I could now go on to tell you about what happened further I had the privilege to be asked by a number of cities to come and try to test out our theories and our research in real life we worked with Gail architects we worked with Copenhagen of course with Sydney Melbourne London New York Moscow but I'm not going to talk about this today I'll talk about what I deem is the most one of the most important items for making good urban habitats for Homo sapiens that is about scale the human scale people scale so we are going to to address the question of what is human scale and how can we find out about it when the modern is took over planning was that we saw a completely new scale appearing we thought we had the old scale and then suddenly we had a completely new scale though Homo sapiens were still the same height he still had the same speed of walking he could still see the same distance everything was the same with him but not with his surroundings I can start by going back to the good old days the the way things were built before we started to change city planning so radically in 1960 I put 1960 down as a year because that was when the cities started to expand and that was where many of these news ideas were tried out in the big build the big way but before that before the Second World War we had another way of building cities they were built in small installments he was one house at a time and typically they were built around two building blocks which have followed you Homo Sapien throughout the history of planning and our building of human settlements they are the street the linear room space for moving actually it's about the feet which are linear and then we move linearly and the street is the expression of that the other space was the square and that was geared to the eye and that is the space you can overlook and where you can have more roomy activities in the city so feet and I were the two things which all the cities were built about and all the dimensions was rather small geared to the actual census of Homo sapiens so if we look at the old cities they were built to suit the body and they took that a pasture in the body of Homo sapiens all of them not only in Venice not only in Europe but all over the world it being Asia it being anywhere all the old cities were built on the way the human the people move how far they could look and how they used the environment the principle of these things where first you made you start here first you had the life then you made the spaces for the life and then you put the buildings over to the spaces life space buildings were the order of operation then came the modern movement and actually there came at the same time two radical new paradigms of City Planning we were going modern and of course it coincided with the big need of expand spending the cities we had to build a lot very fast and this modernism was handy it was easy to mass-produce and it was poured out in very very big projects all over the world what was really happening at this time I think was that the CD planners in the old days they walked around and did it one by one now the CD plane has moved up in aeroplanes and started to do everything from a bow so it looked nice the side planners were also up there just to organize the neighborhoods and the seedling seedlings and whatever they moved around the rooftop hide and and corrected the models a little bit but what was the problem in this development was that the place where people were where they lived their life where the kids were supposed to play and the old people were to get old the the people's faces the people scale was completely neglected no profession was asked to look after this and then we had one place after the other being completely horrible I call this kind of City Planning the proscenium syndrome Brasilia was a capital of Brazil it was made in the late 50s after big competition and when I was a student this was the big thing of mankind imagine a fantastic new modernistic capital in Brazil basilia is great it looks fantastic from the airplane it's an it's an eagle it has his wings and the head of the eagle is a parliament it's just great also in the helicopter Brasilia is absolutely great they have the miniseries they have the various architectural monuments they have the enormous parks great but what is not great in Brasilia is how people are treated because nobody thought about that there would be people walking and moving about so now they are they are trembling new paths in the end in the great lawns all over the place and they have to go to work endlessly and they never thought about that we never there was no money to give them all a helicopter so they really could enjoy so this is the Priscilla syndrome and actually this kind of planning came to influence enormously the 50 years of City Planning all over the world one of the unforeseen byproducts of this way a building was that the planners and architects completely forgot or got confused and they lost the sense of the ability to build things in human scale everything was done too big as if it was not people anymore but dinosaurs which were to live in these places so confusion confusion confusion and loss of knowledge of human scale here it is too big too cold too uninteresting absolutely think about yourself sitting there with your girlfriend proposing and telling what a wonderful life the two of you are going to have this is this is Copenhagen Harbor somewhere along not tell you where the other big new thing which happened around 1960 were the car invasion of course cars were invented before but around 1960 the cars really became a mass movement they were streaming into our societies they were filling all the voids and they were also feeling all the interest of the politicians and the planners every city head from then on a traffic department who counted all the cars every year but none of the cities had a department for people and public space and pedestrians and none of the cities had any knowledge about how their cities were being used by people but they knew everything about how the traffic used the city that gave a fantastic imbalance also the cars and the influx of cars further confused the sense of scale because when the cars were the traffic was moving it needed a lot of room big dimensions and when the traffic was parked it needed also big dimension big spaces and furthermore there was another source of confusion that is the speed of the cars in the old days when we moved about in the cities as pedestrians he was by five kilometer an hour and in in that speed you can need you can have small dimensions you can see all the details you can see the people the environment gets very interesting and personal in this way but now we started to have 60 kilometer and our environment all over the place and you have big spaces so that you can maneuver with 60 kilometer an hour you have big signs to make sure you can see them and there were no details and no people that became the world we built in the last 50 years so here we are do by the little man over there is looking at modernism and car invasion combined and he is wondering is this what we can do to have a good urban environment for Homo sapiens I'll now take you to another place now we are in Copenhagen in a little row house area two and a half story buildings in Copenhagen and the interesting thing about this area is that looking from the aeroplane it's completely uninteresting oh it's boring and going down in the helicopter and going always oh my dear it's boring if you hand it in such a city planning project any school of architecture you will be thrown out because of lack of vision and and creativity but the interesting thing about this area is that down between the buildings it's got all the qualities you can ever dream of in a housing area we have 12 criteria for quality in the human landscape and all 12 criteria are meet beautifully here and here the people are sitting having a jolly good time and they have so they're so busy having a good time that they forget that it doesn't look smashing from the air or from the helicopter further to this area interestingly it has about the highest real estate value in the city of Copenhagen this is about the most expensive place you can live and more interestingly still is this area has got the biggest concentration of architect families in Denmark so my conclusion from the start is and all these reflection is that the most important scale of all is the people scale the city at eye level and the city for 5 kilometer an hour if you can do the CT plane scale and the side plane scale that's fine but for God's sake if you haven't got the energy for all three scales to the people scale that is by far the most interesting and most important this knowledge has to a high extent been lost by planners and architects for quite a long time it is now rapidly being refound especially in improving the existing cities and also it starts to be used in new towns which is about time because this knowledge has been known all the time by say the people who run restaurants and cafes whatever they know exactly the importance of the small scale they squeeze people together like we do in a party where the thing is to get everybody into the kitchen then we will have a good party so these guys they know the people who run amusement park like Tivoli like Disneyland they know and like the people who have hotels here and there they know that it's absolutely important that the little scale is fine because then people will be drawn there they will even pay money to go there and stupidly for all these places to volley Disneyland and this looking from the air it looks very very complicated and it's not very clear whatever it looks very untidy but down between all these things it has got very nice people ends and that's what we like what our children like and whatever there are now a few places where these ideas actually from the old days are being used I would normally say that the best housing area in copenhagen is just across the bridge in sweden it's down here it's called b o bo 0 1 and this has exactly been done from the bottom up they've analyzed what activities are there going to be and then they made the spaces and then they put the building's out to the spaces so it's not rated it becomes very rich it's in a nice low scale the wind goes over it and so forth and there we start to see some other life which characterized the old cities which we did before the Second World War so I will end by saying think big but always remember to make the places where people are to be make them small May I will end by quoting my dear professor training by Andersen he always said always make space is smaller than you think you and you need he said if you have a lecture and you expect hundred people then find the lecture hall 450 and then the first 50 comes and it's great and then the next 50 comes and say oh this must be important because all the other ones are here and then they sit on the stairs and in the corridors and all of them they expect a great in event and the intensity is very high if you want something which is the opposite if you have hundred people coming an electron-hole for 500 they're sitting all over the place all of them are wondering what else is going on in university since the other ones have not arrived and the intensity is very low and the expectation is very low and it's going to be a lousy lecture always make spaces smaller than you think you need that will be much better and I think this is where this kind of knowledge is very important in these days because we are in the coming period to expand all the cities of the world especially in Africa and Asia and South America they are going to expand it mightily and we need to have a better knowledge about good hair urban habitats for Homo sapiens which we can use in all these new areas which we are to build in the years to come also we have an obligation to make the new places much more livable much more sustainable for walking and bicycling and much more healthy for walking and bicycling we have to push them together concentrate and have great neighborhoods in the years to come we are going to change from one paradigm a city planning to another we have them tools good luck

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 129,461

Rating: 4.9608994 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Denmark, Design, Architecture, Behavior, Change, Environment, Evolution, Global issues, Happiness, Health, Ideas, Life, Obesity, Public health, Society, Transportation, Travel, Urban Areas, Urban Planning

Id: Cgw9oHDfJ4k

Length: 21min 15sec (1275 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 18 2015