The amazing professor is telling his Edinburgh audience a joke at the expense of "predict and provide" traffic managers around the world. It concerns a man living in a small town in midwest America who finds a skunk in his basement one morning. He asks a neighbour for advice on how to get rid of it. "Easy: lay a trail of breadcrumbs from the basement back out into the woods." The following morning he has two skunks in his home.
Jan Gehl, professor of architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, is today's global superstar of urban planning. He advises city authorities in Adelaide, Changsha, Edinburgh,
When Gehl and his colleagues announced their programme, the Danish newspapers protested: "We are not Italians." The idea that Danes would leave their cars at home and walk or cycle into town to sit at café tables in the street was considered absurd. Today, more than a third of Copenhagen's traffic is made up of cyclists, and most of the rest either walk or use public transport. Since the 1960s, the amount of pedestrian space in Copenhagen has risen from 15,800 square metres to over 100,000 today. The city centre now only offers just over 3,000 car parking spaces, mostly on the street. Perhaps the most important cultural change, however, has been the 350 per cent rise in people engaged in "stationary" activities in the city centre; that is to say, standing talking, sitting in a café or on a public bench, alone or in groups, simply watching the world go by.
Gehl's programme for a new culture of urban design cannot be gainsaid, as he has endless statistics to prove that it works. The cultural revolution achieved in Copenhagen was incremental, and based on a large number of very small, measurable changes. Year by year a small number of car parking spaces were taken away from Copenhagen's city centre, until eventually there were almost none - but nobody had noticed. Likewise, the targets for increasing the number of public and private outdoor seating places were set year by year, along with programmes for pedestrianisation, street lighting, provision of fountains and other public works of art.
The availability of good statistics is vital. When Copenhagen shopkeepers complained to politicians about loss of trade after pedestrianisation and Gehl was summoned to the city hall to explain, he was able to say, "Well, that is surprising, because we know that before, one thousand people passed their shops every hour, and now it is two thousand, so perhaps they are not very good businessmen."
Many planners insist that the weather remains the principal factor in determining whether people are willing to spend time walking, sitting, eating and drinking outdoors. Gehl denies this. "When I was in Barcelona recently," he told the Edinburgh audience mischievously, "I was asked why people are happy to cycle in Denmark, but not in Spain. It must be our better weather, I replied." Today, he says, we have extended summer in Copenhagen from March until November. During this period, most cafés and restaurants still offer outdoor seating, with blankets, canopies and space heaters, and they are all well used. Like the most influential politicians, Gehl now makes his own weather. When he was invited to Australia in 1994, the first statistics he gathered revealed to the astonishment of his hosts that Copenhagen had far more outdoor café seating than either Melbourne or Perth (2,970, 1,938 and 1,110 seats respectively).
He is on a global mission to explain. In the past two years, I have heard him speak to capacity audiences on four occasions - in Copenhagen, Glasgow, London and Edinburgh. He always starts his lectures with the same story, about the English architect Ralph Erskine, resident in Sweden for several decades now. When asked what makes a good architect, Erskine replied, "First of all, you must love people." Gehl claims that all his work is dedicated to making cities places in which people want to live, work and play.
His report for Transport for London, "Towards a fine City for People," was published this June. Based on extensive research into pedestrian activity in and around a number of key sites in the city, Gehl concluded that: "London has not been designed with recreation in mind and it is noticeable that there are few children or elderly people using the streets."
In the bar after his Edinburgh lecture, he is rather more forthright with me. "To be honest, I was shocked. To my mind, London comes only after Moscow in the contempt the city planners show for pedestrians. You never see any children on London streets - what have you done with them all?" He told me that he had considered making the provocative recommendation that cycling should be banned in London - principally for the reason that so little care had been given to providing any kind of infrastructure to support the safety of cyclists. One result of congestion charging in London, however, has been a 23 per cent rise in cycling in the past year.
The London report is damning. Hundreds of photographs, graphs and tables portray a city in which pedestrians are treated worse than cattle, where parents with small children in pushchairs, or those in wheelchairs, are humiliated and thwarted at every turn by street litter, broken pavements, street furniture and inaccessible stairs.
Of course, pedestrianisation alone cannot solve these problems, and in Britain some schemes have been tried and deemed to have failed (though not in the case of Birmingham's New Street). What British schemes often founder on is poor quality in design and materials, as well as a powerful urge to repopulate every empty space with clutter as soon as it is finished. Cheap, polychrome paving, concrete planters containing parched shrubs and trees, a proliferation of sign-posting, banal works of kitsch public art, and, in the words of architectural writer Richard Silverman, "the casual brutality of beer-sodden wooden picnic benches, still common in British cities, are all quickly inserted into any newly designed public space, to give it 'character' and 'incident.'" The result is risible, and invariably fails.
Gehl's reputation is now international, and he finds himself flying around the world lecturing architects and planners, as well as exhorting urban politicians to repair the damage done to cities by the car in the second half of the 20th century. Happily, there is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come, especially when it is promoted by such a disarming and witty advocate as the amazing professor, Jan Gehl.
