On the Park Bench - CNU29.Design for (Social) Change

[Music] we're going to give a few minutes for people to come in then we're going to begin for just a minute so welcome to on the park bench a public square conversation brought to you by the congress for the new urbanism on the park bench presents interactive conversations with thought leaders in new urbanism and their allies providing an opportunity for the audience to engage in real time the webinar series is a platform for cnu members to engage debate and collaborate on the pressing issues we're facing right now let us know if you'd like to hear from some someone or about something and we'll try to line it up today we have an author's form which is a series within the on the park bench series and it's discussing recently published books by urbanists and or books of interest to urbanists the author's form is produced by dura tadani who usually works behind the scenes to put these together but today he's going to be part of the program so today's authors forum is life between buildings and cities for people by author yon gayle in a discussion with dear to donnie so share your thoughts on on the park bench hashtag on the park bench www.tinyurl.com otpb feedback and register for our next webinar which is next week tuesday may 11th also at 12 noon design for social change last in a series highlighting the three critical session tracks at cnu 29 designed for change this episode of on the park bench will ask new urbanist thought leaders why we must design for social change cnu 29 sessions in the social track will examine how design has the power to change the way our communities function from investigating who has access to resources to ensuring all voices have the opportunity to shape the future cnu.org resources slash on the park bench to register and i wanted to remind everybody about cnu 29 design for change the 29th congress for the new urbanism which is taking place this month may 19th through 21st there will also be some pre-congress sessions earlier in the week and we're going to focus on the intersection of design and power the power design holds to influence the way we live to physically change and adapt the spaces we inhabit as well as how we can use it to achieve the change we want to see in neighborhoods towns cities and across regions the cnu 29 program will break the mold of previous congresses with multiple formats that maximize the benefits of being held virtually and encourage creativity and innovation from participants learn more at cnu.org cnu29 this episode of on the park bench is going to be really special it features john gale a danish architect whose impact on cities and urbanism over the last 50 years cannot be overstated a measure of that influence is that john gayle is only one of 13 people to win a senior athena medal which honors urbanists whose work has influenced the founders of cnu and who set the foundation for the new urbanism movement john gale was also a plenary speaker at two cnus cnu 13 in pasadena in 2005. and cnu 26 in savannah georgia in 2018 there are only a few people who have attended cmu as plenary speakers only and it is a big deal when they come and jan gayle is among that select few he is a founding partner of gale architects based in copenhagen and working all over the world and as i mentioned durer tadani an architect and urbanist based in washington dc is an interviewer today and and he is a winner of seven charter awards which is quite amazing that's right up there with other top new urbanists he is also an author including two major books on seaside the newest one is just out reflections of seaside muses ideas influences new and future projects that book includes 140 essays on seaside including one by yours truly covering how it has influenced the lives and work of urbanists there are a few books who have had the enduring impact on urbanism of life between buildings which was first published in 1971 and so this year marks the 50th anniversary of its publication it is one of those books that are never out of print and has been published in translated in uh 37 languages and it's being translated into more languages as we speak young gayle is the author of 17 books uh but the other book he is most known for at least in the united states and cities for people published in 2010 in many ways a follow-up book to life between buildings 40 years later you'll be hearing more about both of these books in this episode of on the park bench today this webinar this webinar will feature a presentation by john gayle and then a discussion uh with durham to donnie and then we're going to open this up to questions from the audience so please use the q a function of zoom not the chat function although you can make comments in the chat function ask the questions in the q a function as they occur to you because they will more than likely be asked in the order that they're uh that they're posted and with that i'm going to turn the screen over to yon gayle if i can stop sharing and welcome me on and i will start by saying by thanking you for the invitation i love very much sitting on patch park benches i advocate for cities to put up more benches for 50 years now and sitting on one in washington dc and in u.s is a great pleasure for me and in this good company thank you for inviting me i will now show a few slides few may not be quite the word but show some slides to tell you a little bit about the book we are going to talk about how it came about and what came after it and i'm going to share my screen here [Music] does it work for you yes it does excellent i'm going to tell you a little bit about this book life between buildings and the background for what for how it was necessary to write it and lo and behold i realized it's now 50 years ago the first version of this little book was published in denmark and in danish in 1971 i'll tell you the story i'll tell you very briefly about the story of my life i graduated as an architect in 1960 that is 61 years ago i was taught in architecture in the 50s and what were the the what were we taught about we were taught about modernism we were taught about from guys like this one who said that a good housing area is something with luke smashing from the freeway and we were taught that to make a good city we had to go up in a five kilometer airline height over the site and then place down the elements until there was a nice conversation of elements and then we will step back and say oh that is a nice city here you can see the guy and here you can see one of his presumably nice cities i got this in this education and and also in this time we always in the school of architecture literally we both three days three times a day towards brasilia which at that time was a big thing in city planning and looking back at this period i see it now as the all-time low point of city planning but i stepped out of you at university to do all these fantastic modernistic things and then you think that i read jacobs i met jane jacobs read the uh writing uh no that was not what i did we didn't know about the jacobs over there in denmark in 1960 what i was doing was doing social housing in greenland and here are the results and coming back 50 years later they were full speeds taking it down again it has served its time no i didn't meet jane jacobs but i met england my wife we married in 1961 and she was a psychologist and i was an arctic just an ordinary architect ron of the mill good modernist then i married a psychologist and suddenly the whole climate in the house changed she had her friends and i had my friends we met all of us and all the time we architects had an awful time with a social scientist and they kept saying why are you architects not interested in people why don't they teach you anything about people in the schools of architecture and why is it that your professors go out four o'clock in the morning and take photos of the monuments to be sure there are no disturbing people in the foreground here i have a little ensemble of pictures of the time when we were married 1960 early and what is this about go just now they have a little exhibition actually not the little one but they have a grand exhibition in the danish architecture center about architects at work and they have allocated a nice part of the of the exhibition to show the story of my life and in the background you can see all my books lined up in a book bookshelf i'll tell you about the background because i was sitting there with my wife and i was doing my my ordinary architects work and we were looking out at the world around us and that was a time and i say 1960 is really a turning point where he started to go really fast and where the cars were streaming into our societies way back this is from around the return of the previous century you can see that's copenhagen it's a very peaceful scene people are walking in all direction it's they belong the city belongs to the people and you can walk wherever you like and there are no uh they're not this forest of science which we have today which is part of the automobile but this was a peaceful scene just in before the war sometime we had the automobile arrived in in bigger numbers and people had to run for their lives and get their children safe up to the sidewalks whatever but actually we saw this invasion of motorcars which actually pushed life out of the existing cities this is a picture from copenhagen in the 50s all the squares were full of parking and all the streets were completely full of cars and people the life of the city was pushed away at that time that was what we saw looking out of our windows and we saw the results of modernism we saw the results of kobushi saying city is bad freestanding building is good we saw the lifeless surrounding with all the concrete blocks for housing being put up in denmark we had these enormous areas in the 60s where maybe 10 000 people were moved into it was not social housing it was non-profit housing but it was purely modernistic um where you can sleep and look out of the window but can't do much other things we had i we had the the world was looking like that in the suburbs at that time really boring really unfriendly completely uninviting for people that was what we saw and then of course we started to discuss it and also later on i i've studied it more carefully and realized what happened with the modern nation before modernism the cities were constant where they they were made up by spaces city was space and in the spaces all the life of the city was unfolding there was a connection there was a market that was processions everything in spaces the only thing which when you think about the old cities you can remember all the streets and squares and two buildings the cathedral and the town hall and no more because all the other ones was just framing the spaces where life was going on city was space with the modernist came a completely new concept the focus was moved from the spaces to the objects and whatever was not built upon was leftover space and also instead of making spaces and buildings around we started to have no situation because objects buildings you can order on the web and we had this new generation of architects the bird sheet architects who goes around and drop their droppings whenever they can find it without context just dropping objects it was what happened with the modernism was that again the people were chased out of the environment because these areas were not made at all for people it was meant for sleeping at night but not no concern for public space and people the one to the right is from brasilia endless walking strips here not inviting also with modernism we lost our sins of human scale and we got utterly confused about what was a good scale in the old days the scale was everything in the new uh world of modernism buildings objects were put everywhere and whatever was left over was left for people and in what scale it was was not a big problem generally it was too big i was sitting there doing other things in an ordinary office and then we had the very interesting incident that i came a man to the office he was a christian man and he approached my boss and said i'm a christian man i have a piece of land i want to build something which is good for people i don't want to build single family houses i don't want to be urban blocks or blocks with modernistic blocks no i want something which is good for people in the first instance we of course said whenever whatever the architects do that's good for people and he said no no no it should be really good for people you must study this and we then we panicked what was good for people what could then it appeared that my boss has been in italy and seen some little villages with a square where the buildings around and that looks quite nice so this project ended with um that we defined that good for people is that you have your house but also you have your shared space your public space where you can meet and do things together so we formed this around 11 little um squares it was so progressive at that time that it was never built everybody said it will never work people would not like to live so close and and ten years later actually this was the way which where everything was built this way but this particular project was not but that was the first time when i was met by this good for people and of course we discussed it very much in the household and we actually through england i got hold of the socialities who thought he knew something it appeared that he didn't do anything after all but he mentioned the figure 15 and then we put 15 houses around the yard that was it but we realized my wife and i that we knew virtually nothing about what was good for people and how the built environment influenced people this resulted in two things one my wife was employed right away by the danish building research institute as an environmental psychologist at that time they didn't know that there were something like that an environmental psychologist that whole issue came later she was just a psychologist hired to look into housing and i had to go back to school of architecture to study 40 more years to hear what they didn't tell me first time i was in school of architecture and then i realized that they didn't knew a thing about what was good for people they didn't know anything about people it was completely working land so in my case i had to sit on my behind and he actually i've sat there for 40 60 years now and studied and studied and observed using architecture methods of work which is observation systematic data collection putting things into systems and order and see the patterns that's what i learned in school of architecture and that's what i learned i studied restoration and old buildings very much and learned to measure and then i mentioned colonial housing i measured old churches i majors ruined in greece but then for the next 40 50 years i just measured people and we had to find out methods for measuring life but that was the background for the next thing we did england and i we we went to italy on a scholarship with a purpose of finding out what the italians used their squares for and that was where all the basics were actually collected where would you stand in a space where would you talk with people where would you how would you use the furniture in the city how would you use the walls we found the edge effect that people prefer to stand in the edge very much so of course in this study in the in the school of architecture second time i was there that was where i came across jay jacobs and the great joy um studied her books and later on i also met her and we had through out the later part of her life we have a very nice conversation and very nice correspondence my work was very much along the line but i was an architect so i could go more into what could this mean for the way we are building our cities and our residential areas all this ended this first five phase of studying ended in 1961 by my wife publishing a book called this living environment about the psychological aspects of housing that was really some a really a breakthrough of a completely new way of looking at housing in relation to human needs and i published at the same time from the royal academy of arts i published this first danish version of life between buildings actually where we started to tell what the space between the buildings were used for and how important the life between the buildings be life outside your dwellings were for community and society and for your own well-being we had in denmark a fantastic valuable discussion in these years it's called the great danish debate on living environments i i there's a few letters missing there doesn't matter and the the cartoon shows the architects discussing vividly whether you should rule high-rise or row houses while all the danes are thinking about a little single family house and but the outcome of all this was actually that the row house the cluster housing and the more shared organization of the build in the housing areas was actually quite a bit of benefit the building research institute put full speed on this to try to turn the danish into sinking to build we call it dense low it's something like cluster housing and and then this is a new year's reaching of 1960 71 for many years we imply lived spread out or lived stacked up but we may also live closer together and they went on to elaborate dense low and an old residential concept for people in community but yet a new one and they ended up by wishing you a dense and low and therefore happy new year it was really a discussion which was very strong in our country at that time english work in building research institute was part of this task force for dense law i was sitting in another place in copenhagen i was sitting in the university in the school of architecture and we started with working in real life with life between buildings we started to study how the life in copenhagen was unfolding in the various spaces and copenhagen for this close collaboration between university and city became the first city in the world where the life in the city was documented just as carefully as had been all the time the traffic in the city and we have this saying of course what you count you careful in copenhagen very early on we counted the people and we started to care for the people and they've gone on with this people first policy ever since in copenhagen and it had very much to do with the university because there was a strong collaboration between the researchers in the school of architecture and the mayor and the city planners in the city denmark is a small place we all know each other then came the english translation of this little book and that came already 16 years after it was first published i always thought it was funny that there should be 16 years in between but i realized that at that point we were well ahead of the other parts of the world in this social approach this understanding on life and people in relation to housing and to and to city environments but in 87 it came out first time in new york it didn't sell very well they didn't market it much and but that was the start of it being spread out we can i can also now look back at life between buildings in in 50 years and see how the cover has changed first it was a protest book it was the hippies coming out and making a big party to show that people had a right for the public space then it became more a celebration of the good old days it was back to the village where you could meet on the village street but then in say ages we started to be more and more interested in urban in the urban situation after flirtation with the suburbs everybody was flirting with the suburbs in the 70s and 80s but by the late 80s and the 90s we started to flirt with the city the attention was turning back to the city and the cover reflected this new interest and later on when the book became more and more international the cover became more and more sort of general some people floating around in the environment there much to my joy i have seen this book being spread to all kind of corners of the world in the meantime and i've seen it being taken up by many developing countries who have used these humanistic approach to city planning as an inspiration for their local city planning which i'm very very happy about more and more editions came out and um i got this picture from hiroshima they see the architect of hiroshima proudly flashing the second version second edition of the japanese version of life between housing in this very very somber place the other thing here is a little other event in sydney they had some art interventions in the in the alleyways and lo and behold in one of them there was and the the the roof of the room was covered with with neon lights and actually if you look closer there was a barcode of life between buildings being used as a work of art in sydney just as example here it's from korea it's from 1996 and this all is about how to create the human quality in the city that was what i was talking about but this picture shows that sometimes you're in time to change something sometimes you're definitely too late it doesn't look like a very easy situation they have here now in 19 2021 i can realize that there's been 30 versions of the book cities for people being sorry life between buildings being pushed out and i saw when i made this overview much to my surprise that out of 30 versions 15 of these were pushed out inside the last 10 years that means 40 years after the first version came out and this shows that there is an accelerating interest and compassion for the life in the cities for people in the cities for the public space and for understanding relationship between buildings and public space which to me is very encouraging we have a lot of what i call tailwind on the bicycle lane at the moment as times go by mindset has changed many years later i was approached again by a bay media foundation which has really taken an interest in this humanistic approach to city planning and they came and said couldn't you put down everything you know in one book while you can still remember it and that was in 2009 or something and then they say how much many assistance would you need to do it we know you're busy gave me the assistance and we produced cities for people which came out in 2010 and spread very very quickly across the world and it is supposed to be the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth everything i ever knew found out in all these years of studying and later on in all these years of practicing my work in cities all over the world to help to cater for the people and the life in the cities this book is by now out in 36 languages and four contracts is on the tracks and that has been done inside 10 years and that to me shows that there is an enormous hunger for information about people and life in relation to to to architecture and city planning and it's it's not only about how things look but definitely how things work for people architecture is not to make a monument to make an object architecture is the interplay between a form and the life if there isn't this interplay between form and life it's not architecture it's sculpture so we know a lot about form but we know very little actually about life and the interaction of life and form that is what these books are about and that is maybe which shows why there has been such a hunger all over the world for this kind of information [Music] in denmark we've seen it being used very much we've seen copenhagen been inspired very much by this research done in school architecture we've seen something like here the minister of culture reading her favorite book and she said i read it in english so people can see what i'm interested in but more importantly she's changed the architectural policy to a new policy which puts people first in architecture and planning also some royalty have been interested from time to time in these writings and that of course is very encouraging and other interesting things is that all these the cities which have done much for the life in the city for the interaction between form and life they are to be found on the lists of most livable cities again and again copenhagen and melbourne generally are among the number one in the first five this year took this year because competing was first that year and some other years but it's been popping up and down between one and five melbourne is also very high and all the other cities have done remarkably well especially in the cities of australia and new zealand is just as much up on this line as are the cities of scandinavia copenhagen is now quite famous for its livability and we have the honor of receiving every year 400 delegations of mayors coming to hear what to do and see what has been done this is a mayor from sydney visiting copenhagen she was doing it during the climate conference and we were standing here in one of the main streets or one of the side streets and it was bloody cold and she kept lamenting all this global warming when can we expect it to start that was a visit of the sydney but sydney mayor but she's still on and she's done remarkable things in sydney to make it much more livable to make the much better city for people also to my own great joy and pride proud i was that when copenhagen turned 850 years there was a big festival where they named 10 guys and girls who have formed the city of copenhagen as we know it and lo and behold among all the the bishops and kings and camps christian andersen or whatever they selected number 10 should be me who they say you yan you're responsible for the way copenhagen is today today's copenhagen to help you on your face on the bus stops in your own lifetime that is the highest you can get at least in our society i was very moved at that time and more moved i was when my close associate camila was selected to be the new city architect of copenhagen last year so now copenhagen is going on even more in full speed to be a good place for people in the end of this presentation of this introduction i'll tell you a little bit about the reflections i'm being around now for 60 some years in the profession and i've done a lot in a number of areas and i've been teaching for 40 years i've been giving endless many conference talks i've been been visiting professor here and there i've done courses and post-graduation courses i have been these i have done studies here and there and everywhere and i've written so and i made many projects after i started for many years the mayor started to come and grab my arm and say you can criticize but couldn't you come here and tell us what we should do that was the beginning of a long series where i started to be a consultant and had the glorious opportunity to take my research and put it into real life it started in copenhagen of course berlin came in oslo stockholm and purse australia melbourne australia and then a lot of cities london sydney new york moscow actually 200 cities i and my team have been and and and being consultant for in the meantime there was so much work that i had to make accompany gail architects which was starting year 2000 when i was 63 years so there's been many books and there are many projects and people have asked me what really was what was the best thing you did in your life and i'm absolutely sure that the best thing i did in my life in my career has been to write the books to put it down in writing to make it accessible also by donating my books to developing countries to make it accessible across the world so that this research which is done in one corner of the world can be used in other corners of the world so that many people can have access to this research so the best thing i ever do did was writing the books while i was doing all the other things while writing the books and making the research you can change the mindset and only when you have changed the mindset you can start to change the cities people must be able to understand why this shall be done and they must be able to be inspired and enthusiastic about of course we will do it we can achieve these and these qualities change the mindset and then you can change the cities or do the projects and here we are the books by now there are 98 of them in 42 languages and actually there are seven titles but 98 books and then the remaining two until the 100 are coming in a short little while the latest came a few days ago that was the arab version of the arab version of life between buildings coming just 50 years after the first one so can architecture change the world yes absolutely we can change the world by being humble by studying carefully and by spreading the word if we have some words to spread and if they're good words thank you very much that was the end of that well thank you young for my very inspiring talk so we have people from all over the world tuned in which is no surprise and lots of compliments all those things that you've heard over and over again about your books and your influences and i gotta say it must be very gratifying to see these changes in your lifetime the things because i know in the early we've talked about this in the early 60s and 70s and probably still now academia is not embracing any of these ideas and you were an academic when you started certainly and when i started this work instead of looking at the form i was looking at the life all my good colleagues in school of architecture they lamented his sorts were sorry for me and said oh you're wasting your your career you're you're really into a dead dead end street uh it's it's just it's not part of architecture but then i've seen more and more acceptance that life and form goes together when it's architecture and not sculpture and that the study of life and the care for life is just as important as a care perform we had to look into both that has been increasingly accepted and i think that after year 2000 we really have seen tailwind for this kind of humanistic approach and as you i showed you that especially that half of all life between building books are sent out in the last 10 years that's to me a fantastic story also that it took 16 years before it came out in english that's another story that thing things take time but i'm very fortunate to be over because being old you have the chance to see what has happened with this and this and this and you can go back and see the cities which have changed and see the people who have changed and i meet quite many young people but by now also rather old people saying i'm studying city planning because i was in your course in 1982 or something like that that is gratifying i can assure you it's just too bad that the academics all over the world have not embraced these ideas of public space and people and the life of people uh because as you probably know everywhere around the world they're still architecture schools especially i'm still teaching form and really ignoring uh people and the way people use spaces and i think that's just you know we've talked about this it's just very unfortunate that that's the case because we have this whole group of architects being trained not to think about people i think you're completely right and i have another slide which i don't took along this time but these kind of humanistic approach to architect and city planning which i think of course jane jacobs was the first really to raise that banner and i also feel myself as being a disabled of that humanistic city planning and when i look back at it it's had a tremendous influence on the old cities where you have the spaces the only problem in the in london and new york and in melbourne and copenhagen was really that the cities had been overrun by traffic and the trick was to chase the traffic out of the spaces and give the spaces back to the people and life could go on again but the influence on the new stuff which was built after the second world war based on on modernism and motorism there has been much less influence some years ago we decided in our office to make a new book called great new towns of the 21st centuries century and we started to collect material and in the end we found we had only we could only allow some three four five to be in the book it was the same book in the world and then we gave up the project realizing that while in the cities the citizens could understand this about life and people and the mayors and the politicians could understand because the citizens could understand that was ordinary people who could see there was something missing but this same effect has not been prevailing in schools of architecture i must also say and we have many schools where they still say everybody else teach about everything else we teach about form but that doesn't give good architecture necessarily you have to have this combination of life and form and see it as a holistic thing so uh beyond this you know there's several questions coming in and i'm just going to try to group some of the questions together one one issue that we have especially in american cities is that you have the core of the you know the cbd and then as you kind of move out it dissipates slowly fading into suburbia you know it's not unlike european cities which have a boundary that this is the core and the boundaries then surrounded by agriculture here all the agriculture is you know in most cases wiped out for suburbia so is there any hope for those areas to actually create spaces uh how do you see that edge condition actually being used or revived or changed yeah first i would point out that one of the reasons why portland origin has made some rather remarkable and interesting things is the fact that very early on they define the defined a growth line and say city will not grow beyond this line we will have to densify we'll have to improve what we have got we cannot just go out and take another farmer's land and spread endlessly that of course has been a very good idea i don't know too many good suburban projects but i know one city where they have something interesting brewing and that is melbourne again it is a city which has done miracles with their inner city and when they got bored of doing that they started to think about what about the region what about metropolitan milburn and it's all due to one guy the city architect city director of urban design rob adams um and he has uh with his team made this plan for the suburbs called um the linear barcelona um melbourne is three millions they're going to expand to seven six millions and he was able to prove that they could get all six all three extra millions inside the city boundary if they built more dense along the transport corridors in the suburbs and he said we never built more than seven stories because that's barcelona in barcelona everybody can see the ground and everybody is part of the ground so nothing is higher than seven stories in barcelona and in paris in the old paris right and so that we keep it seven stories but by doing densification until seven stories along the transport corridors they needed 13 of the suburban villas but 87 of the suburban villas could be left there and all of them would be in walking distance from public transportation from services so he saved the service the suburbs and he also in this idea came room for a doubling of the population of the city that is to me one of the very interesting schemes uh nicknamed nicknamed linear barcelona great well thank you for sharing that because a lot of the questions people are always wondering about are these low density uh areas all around the city and of course i have to ask because there's so many questions about close cover and everyone's speculating on what the future is going to be and so i'm going to let you speculate on one public the use of public space and two transit because transit has taken a big hit during this this past year and uh it's absolutely essential for what the kind of places that you and i have been talking about or trying to make uh so what what is the future of transit first and then public spaces yeah you mentioned that the transit was had a bad time because of the kovit there's another thing which has had a good thing good time because of the kobe that's bicycling and we've seen in many cities they put up emergency bike lanes and used they fall in traffic generally to take out space to having more bike lanes there are in in paris in rome and in berlin just to mention some cities where they've rapidly expanded the bicycle system to accommodate that many more people during this epidemic are bicycling authority starting to take on bicycling so that bicycling is really on the growing yes of course the public transportation has suffered and that is very bad of course because we we have to realize when we talk about the kovit that that's not the real problem today the real problem for planning and architecture is sustainability [Music] and that is of course to have a more sustainable city we have to rig we have to change our mobility systems into something which is much more sustainable uses less resources and where we can use our own energy our legs much more the doctors say that we have to do 10 000 steps a day to keep the doctor away they say you can have seven more active years of life if you walk every day and if you make a city which really invites you to walk a bicycle so they talk about the sitting syndrome that for 50 years we built cities which invited everybody to sit from early morning to late night and they say you have to do something else and i can see all these going together you can make a more livable city a more sustainable city a more healthy city and a better city to be old in and young in if you look more after the people and not more after being able to use your own energy instead of using fossil or other types of energy it's also more fun sure so what about public space because there's a real misunderstanding going around that density should be avoided because of this time of coburg and you know public i mean many places don't have the luxury of good public spaces so uh you know where do you see do you first do you see people building more public spaces or defining more public spaces and will they continue to be used when i hear people talk about the kovit and the implications for architecture and planning i would always say look at history right because the human settlements throughout the centuries there's been endless catastrophes there's been fires there's been earthquakes and inundations there's been one war after the other beleaguering of the cities there's been the plague there's been cholera there's been tuberculosis there's been the spanish flu and if we look at that's history of of settlements for people for human homo sapiens we can see that every time the problem is over we bounce back to being homo sapiens so i say don't look too much to a short period we have almost forgotten the spanish flu which was a much worser pandemic hundred years ago and we cannot see it in our city plan really we overdid with the tuberculosis because that was a background for the modernist of spreading the cities and declaring the cities for dead and they've done enormously much harm to the city's um in the name of being making healthy cities they looked at one kind of hills that was maybe the fresh air was good but then they forgot about social parts of hills social relations uh contact with society uh being being able to experience the society you lived in and all these which which creates good neighborhoods and good city districts they did away with all this and say if you can have grass you cannot ask for more let's talk about zoning you've always identified zoning as the biggest enemy of cities that of course was exactly what the modernist came up with but i'll tell you a funny story about modernism in 1933 the major european urban planners met in essence on a cruise ship and signed the athens charter the cim am charter of city planning always separate housing workplace recreation and communication always do this in 1998 all the planners of europe met again in essence and they have produced a cruise ship for the event and all of us signed the new charter of essence in 65 years later saying you must never ever separate housing workplace recreation and communication always keep people together i remember speaking there and the next guy or the previous guy from speaking they they asked 10 people to talk about each of the new ten commandments for city planning i remember that leon crea was before me or just after me so there was really interesting times on a cruise ship they indicated everything which the other guys have propaganded for 65 years ago so um just for the audience we're coming close to the one hour point and uh we still have a lot of questions i'm not sure whether we're going to be able to cover all the questions that we have but what i want to inform people who have a time constraint and have to leave at one o'clock that um this uh event is being recorded and will be posted in the next day or two on cnu's website under on the park bench so you can see all the past authors forums are being posted as well as all the on the park bench events and we're going to continue talking because this is incredibly interesting and beyond if you don't mind you'll continue and maybe for another half hour if you feel like talking some more about some of these issues and everyone else who has to go please do so and know that you can hear the rest of the conversation uh by going online i think that half an hour is a very good time slot because here we have dinner coming up in europe it's it's seven o'clock and um dinner has to be served in about half an hour and i have to i have to be the cook so you have to be the girl now yeah i hope that we're not keeping you uh from a hungry stomach so of course of course not okay well thank you i enjoyed the conversation very much also dear oh okay well me too it's always a pleasure to talk to you and learn from you so one of the things you said way back in probably the first book was about activities and public space and you defined three kind of paraphrasing uh activities that are necessary activities that are optional and activities that are social has any of that changed have homo sapiens changed in the last 50 years or are we still basically looking at those three activities in public space many times over the years when we publish new editions of this book i was asked now we are going to make a new edition what would you like to change and then i read it carefully from cover to cover and all the time i almost came out with saying no i cannot add anything because it's about the relationship between homo sapiens and his physical environment and neither homo sapiens or his relationship have changed in 50 years so no changes the only thing which has happened with this book is that the illustrations and the examples have been extended and exchanged because worlds look different now than it looked 50 years ago and also i had to change a number of places where i wrote that can be seen in the brand new housing scheme there and there now i can say that can be seen in the quite famous housing scheme or in the um in the city plan which we talked much about in the 18th 1980s whatever so this kind of changes there are and it is updated okay but i fully can stand for it as it is today or as it is in the in the error version which i got a few days ago yes that is a news one starts starts the wrong way yes right left i i i checked the text and it's just about all right translated [Music] you have to trust these people yes but i think that everybody which has worked on my books have been very careful in doing a proper job so i rest assured that it's all right great so uh let's see i've got i'm looking at all these questions here let's let's talk about some of the developing countries and the world and i know your books have been translated but you're always you know there's always this hesitation saying we are different or our conditions are different and so this doesn't apply you know it can't apply to our you know when i have worked in places like india and china we get that comment oh that works in the west it doesn't work here but one of the issues that i do see in my homeland is that any public space that you define is used by homeless people and i find you know i i think that's absolutely okay for people to sleep on park benches for faith but they need a place but that seems to be an incredible deterrent to building public spaces my my first project was the retrofit of a master plan in india and they had curb from building property lines to building property line roadway no sidewalks no trees because they were afraid of the homeless people uh occupying those spaces and if there was no trees and no sidewalks a car could come and push or a truck could come and push everyone away uh you've said change the mindset but how do you start to really change the mindset when people are so segregated by income yeah i will skip this about income at this point and just say that i made several times the observation and expressed the viewpoint that this kind of humanistic city planning is especially valuable and useful for developing countries because making good infrastructure for walking for bicycling and for public transportation are some of the cheapest thing you can do in in a society compared to infrastructure for buses and and metro lines and trains it's much much cheaper not to speak of inter structure for cars so that's very cheap and i think that a very interesting example of using this offensively in a social policy is from the work of the of the penalosa in bogota where he had the notion that if this the economy of this rapidly growing south american city should be better we must make it possible for the low income groups to be more mobile and to get those people who have no access to car to get them more mobile we must have good sidewalks good bike lanes and we must have efficient bus rapid transit system so that you can bring people around in the city where they can find work maybe not in their own favela but they will have to travel to another district to find work so by making the less privileged people more mobile you can have a better economy and also you said you will have a better society and less crime because the parents will spend not so much time in a rattling boss but they can come back to their children quickly and look after them and he was also the one who said the poorer you are the more public space you need or you sit in a little cottage the whole family on top of each other and watch television you should have possibility in poor areas certainly to go out and find parks and playgrounds and streets where you can unfold that was his policy and he has followed it rather interestingly in bogota right well i think that's a really good example and thank you for bringing that up and people who might not know about what's been happening in bogota should definitely look that up because the embracing of the rapid bus system it was one of the first places that chose rapid bus over metro lines because it was much cheaper and could be just as efficient i also think that it's very important this idea that by by humanistic city planning policy you can change the economy of the city in a positive way and especially with focus on the poorer statements in the population i think to me it's very logical because it's very cheap to do these things and everybody can use them and everybody will have a better opportunity also the rich people never mind how much you drive in a car you're always also a pedestrian at some point you have to get out of the bloody thing so uh let's look for more things what in your practice or your experience has not worked you know we all i mean you've had incredible success but can we talk about something that was a misstep or misfiring or were you always on track and you always what on track you always did i think generally yes there has been endless many successes because actually it is very much based in studying how the old cities work for homo sapiens and how the cities were built by people for people then for a period modernism motorism we started to go in other directions right and especially with motorism we all worked to make the cars happy not the people and by studying how people was happy in the older days we have a very secure ground to build from and when we repeat these basic qualities which are closely related to the human body the human senses the human abilities to move and whatever then we actually are on quite safe ground and that is why there's been many places where people these things have been a great success these transformations maybe i could mention moscow because in moscow when we started working there it was completely inundated by motor cars after the fall of the soviet union and this whole change of economy everybody rushed out to try to buy a car that was the freedom from communism was to own a car and park it anywhere which they did it was completely silly and then we were asked to come up with plans to make moscow a better place for the people it used to be a nice place but then that was all gone and we had to widen the sidewalks and take the car parking of the sidewalks we have to narrow the streets we have to regulate the parking a number of things which were very very unpleasant and was that was quite a cry of terrorism and whatever we we were doing for a while and then we started to see a new movement of people saying hey he's actually a better city we we we have more opportunities now and in the end they accused me of being responsible for the new moscow baby boom because now they can use the boulevards they can sit on the benches and the parks were not full apart of park cars anymore and life has started to unfold again baby boom i'm proud of that one that's great well i've i've had the pleasure of walking on some of those streets in moscow uh almost eight years apart and it's amazing what has happened to that city um and they have a very strong will to get that done and i think that's a very efficient democracy yes that's a good way of putting it well maybe i should tell one more thing i always thought that maybe all this was done for the benefit of of human beings for the betterment from for the living environments of man then i realized that they were preparing the city for the soccer championship and they just we just finished in time for all the guests to go to moscow and see a nice city but never mind many cities have been proved very much because of an olympic game or because of a of a commonwealth game or being cultural city of europe or whatever so that's fair enough whenever we have better conditions for people that's great we all and for all of us at all times and all economies all religions everything it's for everybody and it's very cheap well john i want to let you know that you know again i'm looking at this list and there's people from egypt india um athens canada sweden bangladesh ireland uh it's endless so a mexico uh so um so you know there's a lot of people interested in what you're what you have been saying and learning from you um let's talk about the um your big five cities [Music] you worked in some of the major cities uh but is that what you did in the major cities uh applicable you know do they have the same resources to apply them to smaller smaller cities of course i've been discussing this many times [Music] and i think one of the best cities i know is a small little college a little little village on a danish island small danish island there are 400 people living on the island and they have one little village and they have a main street which is the most amazing public space i know because if you go up and down that little piece of main street between the store and the church you know everything about that society people are talking to each other they are looking at this all so wherever there is homo sapiens we can apply the same medicine roughly because we have the same aspirations the same senses and there are so many things the same choice of meeting other people whatever so there's so many things which are the same whether it's a big city or small city whether it's a rich city or poor city and interestingly we of course we know now that it's the same species of homo sapiens who live in all corners of the world and i have been amazed myself by studying in japan and in south africa in australia and in greenland [Music] just to mention some extremes also yeah in arab countries whatever to find the enormous amount of shared behavior we have because we have the same biological history we have the same apparatus we are the same species so if there are people living in these places you mentioned if they are species homo sapiens you can use the same tools more or less of course some places are very hot some places are very cold some places are very hilly and there are a number of environmental circumstances with influence in life in the various places also there are cultural circumstances but still with the cultural circumstances i could see working in middle east arab countries that the same behavior basically as you saw in japan or in africa or in greenland which is very interesting and you've said that one of the most interesting things for people is looking at other people so everywhere you are in the world um that was that's what interests us the most is observing other people and public public places are the best place to do that so there is an old saying we found in a icelandic saga which is 900 years old there was a guy saying man is man's greatest joy and we have endless many studies showing that that we are very interested in life and people throughout our lives it it public life is one part but the small children in a flat will be very very interesting what the grown-ups are doing they will gather in the living room in the studio in the kitchen and every time the day is over you have to take all the places back to the children's room and he will be out again next day because they will play where the grown-ups are we know from housing areas how the children again are supposed to be in the park but they are not in the park there in the parking lot because more things are happening in the parking lot we know from from studies of cities our benches where you have a good look to other people if you have can see trees and birds and water and people at the same time that's number one but if you can only see flowers and the other one only people you find that the people binge is more used we have many recordings from elderly from old people's home and places for elderly that the elderly people are just as interested in life as are the children right i have a sister who is unfortunately in an old people's home and she tell me can you see out there there is a pass and sometimes sometimes there are some people walking by that's very interesting that is very interesting that gives variation that gives a little bit to sing about that gives the feeling that you are part of a society of a neighborhood it may be very slow pace of life right in this life terrific um so i think one one aspect of what you're saying uh reminds me that you know urban is uh urban is not always a good word people are afraid of urban life because of the crime and you know they say you must rather be in a village or a small town but no matter where you are in the spectrum of small town village city whatever hamlet there's always a moment of urbanism in those places there's one some place where people gather the crossroads or some little elements uh spatially where everyone congregates or runs into each other so there's that kind of mo there's that moment even if you are in a place with 400 people as you just said uh that has those commonalities of urban life and connects people across the household to community yes give you the feeling of being part of something greater than your own being or your household which is very important [Music] i had i mentioned that very early in my life i was working for a client who wanted something which is good for people yes i have not rather recently met another guy just the same type saying i have this wonderful piece of land but it should be good for people what shall we do and there we have defined good for people is that it's just as good inside as it is outside that means you should put as much energy into making the dwellings and making the bathrooms and the kids with everything and just as much effort into making wonderful semi-private places just around the building and then transition zones to more public and good quality of planting and of of paving and whatever so that there is much inclined to spend some time outside to walk more and to bicycle more and spend more time in the front yards and whatever that is that is how we defined good for people just as good outside as inside normally we as architects do much more effort inside right and then outside is what is left of the budget the landscape arctic can have a heyday with what is left yeah i'm just uh going through these notes so i'm gonna just read you a question um about you know incorporating uh high density towers i know you and i share this idea that everything should be low scale or human accessible by human problem and you can walk up six floors at the i think six or seven floors of the maximum uh four is more ideal yeah how do you deal with this issue of super densities and uh this fixation on building high-rise buildings uh as you know people saying that that is the only solution to accommodate this budgeting population that we have globally i certainly can understand this but i still think it's a quick answer to a complex question and whenever i hear people ask for high density i will say what is wrong about paris what is wrong about barcelona they have a terrific density they have very nice public spaces they have balconies they have courtyards whatever i know that it takes much more architects work to make a good settlement which is not enormous it's very easy to make a tower for god's sake if you take the tower and make it make it horizontal you have to work much harder so that people are not looking into each other's windows and all that stuff but on the other hand they are close to each other they're close to the ground they're part of the city i always would say and and of course this is based on studies we have done all these studies where we have students going up and high-rise and then telling when they are not in part of the world anymore and we found that after the fifth floor is a very important threshold where you stop being part of the city and the world and start to be part of the airline system or bird system yeah because you cannot see you cannot see anything just by glance out of the window you can see a sky going by or the helicopter going by you cannot see any people and not see any life no sign of being in the city that could be for some people a benefit but for other people we know a lot about that the higher you are the more complicated is to get down and out and the less the children come out the less the grown-ups come out we talk about psychological barriers and we talk about physical barriers and we know all this is well is well researched and i know still that there are a number of places like hong kong or other places with incredibly little space singapore is another one where you are forced to build higher buildings and and in some places you can do this like in singapore where they have very little crime in other places when you build high rise you have enormously concentration of crime in and around these bases because they are not so social as as the street uh the low rise development um but of course you have to do it and then it you have really have to work very hard with where you come out of the place and how it lands in the city and you can see there are quite many when you see good high rise they always land in a very friendly way and start to talk to the surroundings with the best example i know is what we call the vancouver plateau system that means that you can make a city a wonderful city of four or five stories and then you can put some high stuff in the middle of the block for those who like airlines but then you have a fine city and then you have also an increased density and some people who like airlines i think that's a good way of addressing it look at how you land in the city and be be careful and actually love the city and do some good things for the city when you even if you when you build high-rise don't let them go into the ground like a norwegian mountain going into a fjord well you know a couple the very first authors forum that we did was with steve peterson and barbara littenberg about their book space anti-space which really addresses a lot of the issues that you are talking about but one of the things that they pointed out was that the early buildings in lower manhattan were all towers that were engaged with smaller buildings so you there were composites and the high-rise did not just be a freestanding object which is what it's you know come out to be now but really the buildings like the singer building and city hall buildings the early buildings in lower manhattan all were engaged so you did have a high piece but you also had this humanistic scale that might fill the block uh and the building was buried which i think is much harder to do as an architect because you've got different services coming down but a much more humane way of dealing with those starvers in the city i think it's important to realize that to do a good job you have to work hard you have to work harder than what is normally done because we see many sing many easy solutions if he wants so many square meters he can have a tower and he can go straight into the ground so what and but then we need the architect to be the advocate and say hey guy you have to we have to have more resources to work this out in a proper way so that we add to the city and don't distract from the city one of my good colleagues in school of architecture he always said always ask what your building can do for the city instead of asking what your city can do for your building he i think he picked it up somewhere but he was a good champion it's a good transformation or a good amount there's another good one that is of course and this is still stealing from churchill that first we form the cities and then the cities form us that was originally churchill addressing a question about the house of parliament had been hit by german bombs and are going to be rebuilt and the architects say mr churchill shouldn't we add the extra seats we are short of because it's always too small and then he said no don't change the house because reform the house and then the form the house forms us that is that that sentence has been elaborated into that other sentence which is absolutely true both the city forms you and the building forms you absolutely um you're very right uh i don't want to keep you from your dinner this has been really delightful yeah uh we could go on for many many more you know and i really appreciate your friendship and your willingness to do this and i hope you have this opportunity again is there any uh anything last words that you want to say to the next generation of architects and planners coming up i know uh you've talked about people but is there any oh oh yeah i could find one burgundy would be a quotation but first i will send a greeting to robstown is that how you pronounce it i really enjoy your your magazine public spaces which you send around with with frequent intervals it's i think it's enjoyable and there's much good stuff to be gotten from that thank you for that but to answer your question i will quote my good friend ralph erskine while all the modernities were doing all their stuff ralph erskine he kept having the ability to do the big scale the medium scale right down to the small scale so when he left an area it was just a wonderful place to live but also you had the cheap housing or whatever you were asked to be he he worked all the way until the landscape for people was very perfect when relvaskin was very old we made an interview in the television with him and we asked what dear ralph could you tell me what is it that makes a good architect and he said oh good architect that's simple to be a good architect you must love people because being an architect you have to form the frames of people's life and to do that properly you must love the people you work for in top quote and end of also i finished my book cities for people with that sentence because to me that was very very strong we must take an interest in the people we work for and we must know more about people in the school of architecture we must know about life we must be human that's right great well again thank you so much young it's been really been a pleasure and rob and the cnu for behind the scenes taking care of all the details and remind everyone if you've missed any of this or your friends have missed it uh go on to the cnu website uh go to resources on on the park bench and uh you can see a lot of these conversations including this one rob i guess it'll be posted on day or two is that the timeline hopefully we'll get it tomorrow maybe the next day great so thank you and to all our visitors from all over the world thank you for joining us this has been terrific i'm so glad to see people from every part of the world uh as part of this conversation and um one more reminder cnu the congress 29 is going to be in a couple weeks and you can register and there's three days of conversations on uh social issues equity physical environment and a lot of advice for just about anyone who's interested in the inbuilt environment and how to improve it so thank you and thank you young [Music] you almost welcome greetings to everyone goodbye from good meeting thank you