Ahead of a special Guardian Cities event , the renowned urban ‘rethinker’ says cities should be six or seven storeys high, Helsinki is on the verge of revolution, and that he’s sceptical of London’s cycle superhighway plans

Jan Gehl had just graduated as an architect; it was 1960 and he had been schooled in how to “do modern cities, with high-rises and a lot of lawns and good open space – good windy spaces”. About to put those years of study into practice, he met his future wife, psychologist Ingrid Mundt, and everything changed. In the years that followed, he would develop the thinking that has made him a pioneer of so-called “liveable cities” around the world.

Meeting Ingrid, someone who had studied “people rather than bricks”, says Gehl over the phone from Copenhagen, catalysed a host of discussions between young architects and young psychologists questioning why architects were not really interested in people, how architecture can “influence people’s lives”, and “how cities are used by people”. Ultimately the idea was to think up ways to make cities “that people would be happier using”.

Typically, says the 78-year-old – not long off a plane from Japan but sounding sharp – “the main focus [of urban planning] has been to keep the cars happy”. But Gehl, bolstered by psychological thinking, spent the next 40 years developing principles based on how the shape of cities can impact on the human lives lived within them, rather than on traffic efficiency and parking spaces.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jan Gehl. Photograph: Henningsson/Gehl Architects

He developed a data-driven approach. In 1965, in Siena, he and Ingrid drew up the first rudimentary “PSPL”: a public space/public life survey. The basic idea is to count how many people are in a space, then determine how they are using it. This data is used as a baseline for recommendations on how to improve the liveability of the city or neighbourhood in question.

These methods and principles, developed and refined since the 1960s, are “readily available to be used to make existing cities and new developments much better”. Members of Gehl’s Copenhagen firm, established in 2000 with one of his students, Helle Søholt, recite them like mantras: conversations are infected with enthusiasm and built around words such as “liveability”, “liveliness” and “density”.

These ideas, Gehl firmly believes, can be applied universally, bending to each new city or neighbourhood challenge – be that recent conflict, climate or unfettered urban sprawl. His firm has worked on projects in cities all over the world, including: developing downtown areas in rapidly sprawling São Paolo; creating cycling opportunities in 20-million strong Mexico City; reclaiming public space for a majority Palestinian refugee population in an area of eastern Amman; developing the UK’s first shared-space street in Brighton, re-imagining the use of space in New York’s Times Square, and opening Moscow up for pedestrians.

Most of the criteria for assessing a space’s quality – Gehl cites 12, including protection against unpleasant sensory experiences and invitations for visual contact – come from the human body and the human senses: “How we move, how our senses work, why homo sapiens like to stay in the corner where you can see the whole space.” There might be differences around the world, he concedes, but there are many more similarities “based on the species we are”.



Practice partner Søholt puts forward one way of improving a city’s liveability: “Mix the city and assemble the people rather than dispersing them.” In direct opposition to the modernist school of architecture which Gehl graduated into, with its “system-oriented thinking … separate the areas: industrial quarter, cultural quarters, living quarters”, lively cities are, in this vision, ones in which each neighbourhood offers access to all the necessary social infrastructure: access to health, to school facilities, to workplaces. Cities need to be compact, and complex.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gehl has re-imagined public spaces in New York. Photograph: Gehl Architects

For Søholt it’s also about opening buildings up, “so you can actually look into buildings and see other people – the opposite of gated communities”. By bringing the neighbourhood’s human faces out on to the street, on to ground level, cities are also made safer, he suggests.

This is precisely what Gehl’s team have been trying to do in São Paulo where, since the end of the dictatorship in the 1980s, urban planning has taken a back seat to sprawl. In the central Anhangabaú Square, they are working to improve access, create smaller human-scale spaces, make a more flexible city space for different uses, and activate the edges of the square by opening its building facades.

“We use the Danish word for ‘cuddly’ [hygge] and say, let’s make it nice and warm and cosy,” says the practice’s director, Riccardo Marini. “The hard-nosed amongst us might turn round and say, ‘what’s that got to do with anything?’… Well, it’s got a lot to do with making a place good so people will want to stay there.”

For cities to be liveable, according to Søholt, people also need to have “freedom of choice in terms of mobility. According to what your daily needs are, you can walk, you can bicycle, you can take public transport. For that to work, the city has to be compact enough.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Gehl Architects project in downtown São Paolo

One city working to make transport truly “on demand” is Helsinki, which is developing a system that integrates all forms of shared and public transport in a single payment network. If they manage it, Gehl thinks, “they will really be a pioneer of something that will become much more widespread. We can easily make cities where you don’t need individual cars for each individual’s transportation.”

A lot of Gehl’s work has focused on the bicycle, a mode of transport he thinks is only going to become more common – thanks to higher petrol prices, increasing concern for health meaning people are encouraged to be more active, and city dwellers finding it is faster to go by bike than get stuck in traffic jams. This, Gehl proffers, is true the world over. “Presently we are even asked to do bicycle systems for Singapore. You’d have thought that would be the last place – with all the heat down there, and the humidity – but not so, they need bicycles as an extra means to get around because of congestion.”

Of London’s “cycle superhighway” plans, however, Gehl is sceptical. For starters: “I don’t like the word ‘superhighway’ – we’ve got that word from another branch of transportation.” And, he adds, these lanes will only ever get you part of the way. “Then, the last half-kilometre, cyclists will have to take chances in places where there is no infrastructure.” Much better if, as in Copenhagen, these grander cycles lanes also filter into good bicycle lanes on every street: “That makes it a system which is safe from door to door.”



Transport for London’s segregated cycle lane plan for Blackfriars junction Photograph: Tfl

If a city’s compactness arguably opens up freedom of choice when it comes to getting around, a new frontier in the debate is urban densification – but this should not, in Gehl’s view, mean high rises: “We should make cities six to seven storeys high, like they did in Paris in the good old days.”

“All over the world, we need to find ways of densifying our cities,” Søholt suggests. “People are moving from suburbs to urban areas or even from countryside to cities. But what does it mean if that density also needs to improve people’s quality of life?”

To Søholt, it means balancing urban density with green space – and densifying transport hubs, something she is thinking about a lot at the moment: “Rather than densify or expand our communities, even building on green fields, it’s really important that we densify our cities around the core infrastructure.



“[Transport hubs] are the most logical place to meet and to have new workplaces, to have extensions of university departments or even living apartments,” says Søholt. The development around King’s Cross in London is, in her eyes, a good example of where the “urban tissue has been stitched together again”.



But what of the idea that all this regeneration is pushing lower-income people out, as neighbourhoods are gentrified? For Gehl, the emphasis needs to be on social inclusion. “When we do city planning, we can make sure it will be a good place for children to grow up, and for the growing number of elderly people to live for many years after they retire.” He wants an onus on governments to take measures such as “demanding that a certain amount of all new housing be made low profit or social housing or for low-income groups”. Copenhagen city rules state that 20% of housing in new districts should be affordable.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Piazza del Campo in Siena. Photograph: Giorgio Magini/Getty Images

Ultimately, Søholt says, the need to curb gentrification feeds into another key strand of today’s liveability debate: urban flexibility. “The city gets awfully boring if it’s all super-expensive, super-high-quality everything. We need a bit of that urbanism which is about diversity, about leaving the unknown … if it’s not there we need to find mechanisms for it to flourish – the cheap amongst the expensive.”

Thus, she believes one priority of the city planner should be to leave room for neighbourhoods to manoeuvre of their own accord. “We work a lot with pilot projects and temporary things, so you can shake up the permanence of the city and actually offer alternatives.”

Such thinking is, of course, rooted in the same principles by which cities were being organised centuries ago. We’ve been enjoying pleasurable tickling “since we crawled out the trees”, says Marini, as proof that there’s no reason why principles of urban planning based on what it is to be human should need to change dramatically, even as cities develop.

“If you look at some of the most famous old squares in the world, like the Campo in Siena,” Gehl says, looking again to those 12 quality criteria for a space, “you will find to your surprise that all criteria are completely met.” It’s just that all of this accumulated experience “has been lost in the translation to modern times”.

And so it falls to those designing our cities today to “painstakingly find them again, and apply them again”.

Jan Gehl, Richard Rogers and Arup’s Jerome Frost will be discussing liveable cities at a Guardian Live event on Tuesday 9 December. Find out more about upcoming Guardian Live events and debates and how to become a member.