Jan Gehl: It's About More Than Buildings

He calls it recognizing his spaces between spaces. While most consider the building as the most important element of architecture, Jan Gehl's works are appreciated by millions for emphasising what isn't there.

Jan Gehl (Pictured to the left) is a Danish architect and urban design consultant based in Copenhagen and whose career has focused on improving the quality of pedestrian urban life.

Whether or not you have heard of Jan Gehl before, you are probably familiar with his work. If you have walked down Copenhagen's Strøget, the longest pedestrian shopping centre in the world, then you know what he is capable of. Gehl, 71, has been responsible for the gradual pedestrianisation of large areas of Copenhagen, converting it from the car-focussed city that it was in the 1970s and 1980s, to the walker-friendly place it is today.

Gehl was recently been awarded the honour of becoming a 'Lifetime Fellow' of the Royal Institute of British Architects for a career dedicated to creating 'welcoming environments that are well used year-round'. The title shows RIBA's recognition of Gehl's considerable worldwide influence in the field of architecture and urban design.

His work over the last forty years has largely been focussed on the kind of small changes in our public spaces that are too subtle to grab the headlines, but nevertheless make a long and lasting change to the life of the city. It is in large part for the resounding success of his work here in Copenhagen that Gehl has been honoured with the title of RIBA Lifetime Fellow.

Psycho-social constructions

After qualifying as an architect at the Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Gehl married a psychologist in the 1960s, with whom he had 'many discussions about why the human side of architecture was not more carefully looked at'. He and his wife resolved to 'study the borderland between sociology, architecture and planning'. Gehl rooted many of the social problems of contemporary cities not so much in the building stock itself, but in a systematic neglect of the spaces in between the buildings.

In 1971 he wrote his influential 'Life Between Buildings' (first published in English in 1987) and started to carry out a style of urban design that involved a process of measuring, making incremental improvements and then measuring again. Banal though that might sound, the process has been the basis for a significant transformation in Copenhagen over recent years, and increased a global awareness of the importance of accessible and inviting public space in our daily lives.

Invisible improvements

For Gehl, architecture is 'the mirror of the surrounding society'. His interest in revitalising public space has taken him across the world as researcher, author, urban designer and lecturing professor. Gehl's book 'New City Spaces', published in 2000, is a best-seller in urban planning circles and brings together examples of the recent upsurge of interest in public space and life. Included are examples of projects from international cities such as Barcelona, Lyon, Melbourne and Curitiba.

He has carried out important projects in the UK and was commissioned by Transport for London to report on the sort of barriers and obstacles that pedestrians encounter everyday there. In the resulting report presented by the Mayor of London, Gehl fought hard for returning 'dignity and style' to what he described as an 'invaded city' where 'car is king'.

As well as teaching at Copenhagen's architecture school, the Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Gehl has been a visiting professor at universities in Germany, Belgium, Poland, Norway, Canada, Mexico, Australia and the United States. There is a new generation of architects and urban planners emerging with a humanistic and pragmatic approach towards public space. For them, Gehl's words are their buzzwords.

Jan Gehl can be thanked for real changes in the public spaces of cities such as Copenhagen that are almost invisible because they have been so well-judged and successfully taken up. This subtle but influential achievement is something that RIBA could not overlook in choosing him as Lifetime Fellow.

Source: The Copenhagen Post, March 6, 2007