What Makes a Public Space Work? A Danish Architect Spent Fifty Years Watching Squares and Streets

Roads, squares, fountains — having them doesn't mean they work. Beyond building them, there's a layer of design you can't see.

On every ranking of the world's most livable cities or its happiest populations, Copenhagen lands near the top — even though most Danes themselves couldn't tell you how happiness or livability is measured, or how one city is compared with another. Unlike a car-centered city such as Los Angeles, Copenhagen is easiest to get around by bicycle, and its streets and squares are always full of people.

The city was not born this way. It took more than half a century to make its public spaces interesting, and that process is bound up with one urban designer: Jan Gehl.

In 2017, to mark the city's 850th anniversary, Copenhagen published a list of ten people who had shaped it — from the 12th-century Archbishop Absalon and the father of Danish literature, the playwright Ludvig Holberg, to Carl Jacobsen, founder of Carlsberg, and Jan Gehl.

We met the 82-year-old Gehl at a waterfront restaurant; he had just walked over from Nyhavn, thick with tourists. To keep him healthy, his doctor has him carry a pedometer and walk 10,000 steps a day.

"Luckily, Copenhagen today is a good place for a walk."

Fifty-odd years ago that would have been unimaginable. Gehl still remembers the 1960s, just after he finished graduate school, when squares and streets belonged to cars and people had to dodge noise and exhaust — on top of the long winter. "Nobody found much pleasure in walking."

Unlike architects who put up buildings, the work of Gehl Architects is somewhat "invisible." More often than building things, they supply a city with a strategy — as they did in their redesigns of Melbourne's CBD, New York's Times Square, and Moscow.

What makes a square work? What kind of streets do we need? Why should a street be worth walking down? Jan Gehl has spent his career trying to answer these questions.

Pedestrian Street or Elevated Highway: Copenhagen's Dilemma in the 1960s and '70s

"Give a person a ton and a half of iron and four rubber tires and they can move, free of the constraints of space. That was the 'freedom' Detroit sold the world at the turn of the twentieth century."

After World War II, many European cities rebuilt themselves in pursuit of that freedom. Modernists like Le Corbusier drew the city of the future: seen from above, from a god's eye, all you could make out were large single-purpose zones — housing, industry, commerce.

Roads belonged to cars and were graded by traffic volume: expressways, arterials, secondary roads. Le Corbusier simply denied that street life was necessary at all, and roads became the property of traffic engineers. Old neighborhoods had to come down to make room for highways and towers.

In the 1960s and '70s, pedestrians had little say in what a street should look like.

Copenhagen faced a choice: demolish and rebuild on a grand scale into a modern metropolis, or keep the fabric of the old city? It tried both.

In 1962, to build a commercial atmosphere and encourage a slower kind of public life, city hall drove cars off a main street called Strøget, which became the longest pedestrian street in the world at the time.

The "car-free" plan met plenty of opposition at first. Gehl still remembers the complaints in the papers: "Denmark isn't Italy." "Danes just don't like to walk." "We have long winters, you know." "Why not build more wide roads instead?"

The pedestrian street worked well enough that in 1970 Copenhagen launched another ambitious plan: a six-lane elevated highway, Bispeengbuen, cutting through the dense neighborhoods of the city's north on its way to Frederiksberg.

"Unlike Strøget, it became a symbol of a particular kind." People living along the route could see the wide road from their second-floor windows — no broken pavement, no crowds of pedestrians, just smooth, fast traffic. "Modernization" was right there in front of you.

But Bispeengbuen did not go smoothly. The biggest obstacle was money: before it was finished, its main contractor, Nybyg A/S, went bankrupt. Post-war Denmark was short of funds, and like this road, many large development projects were either killed off or left half-built.

The other force against it came from the public. On the day the road opened in 1972, locals protested that a hugely expensive project had wrecked the city they had.

Unlike the 1960s, when press opinion had been almost unanimously hungry for "modernization," the modernizing bulldozer now had opponents all over Europe.

Some environmentalists used boats to mark out lines on Copenhagen's lakes, showing people how much water would disappear if the lakes were filled in for development. Others flew balloons above the low historic buildings to mark the height a proposed high-rise hotel would reach, hoping people would stop to think about what more and more towers would do to the city.

"The argument started in the 1960s. Le Corbusier's influence produced Brasília, and Jane Jacobs attacked that kind of large scale with no people in it, arguing it would bring about the death of cities."

Keep the small streets and lanes, or build bridges and roads? The argument over where cities should go had no time to reach a conclusion before the first oil crisis hit in 1973. Barely a year after it opened, traffic on the much-hyped Bispeengbuen collapsed.

"Nobody asked the government for wide new roads anymore." Gehl remembers scholars lamenting that Denmark had missed the "modernization" train. The country depended heavily on imported energy at the time, and the two oil crises hit it hard; the government could no longer afford those hugely expensive development plans.

Denmark's later shift in energy, and Copenhagen's identity built on bicycles and the "livable city," both began in a historical accident.

What Makes a Public Space Work? Is Spending a Lot Enough?

Bispeengbuen took years to recover. But Jan Gehl was more interested in the space under the bridge than in the traffic above it.

In recent years the ground beneath the six-lane road has become a gathering place for young Danes. Graffiti, skateboarding, concerts — informal spaces are often fertile ground for subcultures. The Vice writer Sara Elisabeth Nedergaard once had a "silent dinner" there: 30 strangers sat under the bridge in headphones, not allowed to speak, and had to get to know one another over one meal using only pen, paper and gesture.

Like this space under the bridge, many informal public spaces were never designed on purpose. Next to how lively they are, the expensive squares of some new districts sit empty. So what makes a public space work?

Jan Gehl ran into the question on a trip in 1965. He and his wife, Ingrid, went to Italy and studied the squares of Siena. At first Gehl looked at the old buildings — windows, lintels, façades, structure. "That's what architecture school had taught us to look at."

"Why don't architects study people?" Ingrid, a psychologist, asked him.

"Architects are a bit like birds — they fly overhead and drop a tower wherever they get to." Years later Gehl would bluntly call such architects "Birdshit Architects," and the skyscraper competitions that drew so much attention he called "perfume bottle" contests.

"But once we lower our eyes to the level of a person walking past, we can't say why one street is alive and another is dead."

For the second half of the Italian trip, what they watched was what people did. Gehl worked out a method he called the "Public Space / Public Life Survey": observe every square and street, record how the number of people changes, the paths they take, and what makes them stop.

Back in Denmark, Gehl kept going. He spent a year sitting on street corners around Copenhagen, watching every Tuesday and Saturday — how fast pedestrians walked on average, where people stayed longer, what sunshine or a strong wind did to outdoor life.

In 1971 he published Life Between Buildings. Its first chapter is about the safety of sidewalks. "Strange, isn't it? Almost no one in Europe was seriously discussing it then. Traffic engineers thought that as long as the road was built and the sidewalk kept clear of the cars, there would be no problem. But was that true?"

"People can work out what happens inside a single building, but nobody could say what happens, or what could happen, between Building A and Building B. Even now, many new cities — including China's — repeat this way of thinking. A new city has its roads, squares and fountains, but having them doesn't mean they work, and nobody can say why so many of them sit unused."

Led by Gehl and others, many architects and planners stopped thinking in terms of the car-centered city — partly, of course, because Denmark had no money for demolition on a grand scale — and turned to a cheaper way of remaking a city: put people at the center and bring them back into public space.

Researchers at the School of Architecture of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts have tracked how life in Copenhagen changes, recording it in 1968, 1986, 1995 and 2005. Today the school is a global center for research on livable cities.

"It's like our laboratory. Whenever something in the city changes, we go out and see how people react to it. People learn about our research through the mass media and think further. They keep asking their own questions — why did the same thing work here and fail somewhere else, and can we have more of something different?"

From the 1970s on, the city converted 18 parking lots into public spaces one by one, and added 7,500 café seats across Copenhagen.

In the 1980s it put places to sit into public spaces, encouraged rollerblading, jogging and cycling, and let people swim along the waterfront.

Copenhagen is still improving the infrastructure that serves slow traffic. Jan Gehl pointed at a bridge in front of us: the "Kissing Bridge," finished and opened two years ago, for pedestrians and bicycles only. It links two areas — Paper Island and the main city — that had been hard to get between.

Danish politicians now pose for publicity photos holding his 2010 book, Cities for People. But livability was never as simple as one more square, or a few more bike lanes.

Cities for People is full of street-level scenes from cities around the world, some sensibly designed, some absurd. Take a supermarket in Adelaide, Australia, whose façade advertised "open seven days a week, around the clock" — except that people could barely find the door.

"Maybe people should ask what's stopping it from 'opening' onto the street. Is it selling something it would rather nobody knew about? Did the designer do it on purpose, or do the rules on that street forbid an entrance facing it?"

Gehl attacks these "hard edges": ground floors along the sidewalk made of concrete wall or dark glass that shuts out the view from outside. Streets like that, he says, are "extremely boring." The opposite is the "soft edge," where the line between the private building and the public street blurs. A transparent street front invites people to slow down, look, and go in.

Tin Shui Wai, a new town built in Hong Kong in the 1980s, has exactly this kind of hard edge. Bad planning meant that shops were concentrated inside malls, big property developers were tied to the government, and small street-level shops and street vending were strictly banned. Eighty percent of Tin Shui Wai's residents live in public housing on low incomes; they can't afford the pricey goods in the malls, and they can't make a living through informal channels either — the "dawn market," the street food stalls. Tin Shui Wai was once known as the city of sadness.

The "Invisible" Design

In the 1990s, Jan Gehl began getting invitations from cities abroad to "repair" public spaces that had once been given up to cars and towers. The project he most likes to talk about is the twenty-year remaking of Melbourne's CBD.

Melbourne's CBD was laid out in the colonial era. To squeeze the most profit out of land sales, the colonists chopped the land up, and the city center kept that pattern of long, narrow, gridded blocks.

By the industrial age those narrow lanes had become dumping grounds or parking lots. The center was no longer a pleasant place to live, and anyone who could afford to left for the suburbs. People used to call it Melbourne's hollow "doughnut."

In the late 1980s speculative money poured in to build offices in the industrial district. The bubble soon burst and the CBD sank further. In the 1990s a new Melbourne government launched a district revival plan called "Postcode 3000," and it came to Jan Gehl.

Robert Adams, Melbourne's director of city design, explains that unlike the big projects of the twentieth century, this plan made more use of what was already there. The office buildings left over from the bubble years were turned into apartments for people to live in.

By the 1980s industry in the area was already on its way out. Gehl proposed turning the whole district into a pedestrian zone and building community life in its small-scale lanes.

The urban planner Zhang Naige, who has studied the revival of Melbourne's CBD, found that what really brought the streets to life was a set of designs you can't see, tied to a series of policies.

First, the drink laws loosened. Before the 1980s alcohol was tightly controlled in Australia, and only large restaurants could afford a license. Once the rules relaxed, small places could sell alcohol too, and the little storefronts in the narrow lanes turned out to be perfect sites for small bars.

To liven the streets further, the Melbourne government issued the "Kerbside Cafe Code," which set out in detail who could apply, where outdoor dining could go, what the hours were, and how the rubbish would be collected. Anyone could apply, and once granted a permit, could legally take their business out onto the street.

After more than twenty years of this, the Melbourne government has built up a detailed body of rules that steers new development to the same "human scale."

Jan Gehl once taught at the University of California, Berkeley, where researchers pushed the idea further, arguing that all this talk of streets and public space comes down to "the right to the city."

Peter Bosselmann, a professor at Berkeley, studied new high-rises in San Francisco and argued that the shadows and hard winds they created were changing the "microclimate" of the streets and the city. In 1997 he and his students made a documentary named after Mark Twain's famous line, "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco" — The Coldest Winter I Ever Spent: The Fight for Sunlight in San Francisco — arguing against the rising number of towers.

"What matters is never what got built; I'm more curious about what people think," Jan Gehl said, turning to a research theme of the past few years, "Reclaim the Streets." It is more of a slogan, he says. "The kind of 'freedom' Detroit once defined stopped working in today's big cities long ago. Everyone can ask themselves: what kind of street do I want, and why is it worth it?"

(Cover image / VisitDenmark)