Posted Aug 18, 2016, 4:48 PM
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Copenhagen Needs More Jane Jacobs, Says Jan Gehl
Copenhagen Needs More Jane Jacobs, Says Jan Gehl
Aug 15, 2016
By Feargus O'Sullivan
Read More: http://www.citylab.com/design/2016/0...an-gehl/495854
Quote:
Don’t believe everything you read about the influence of Jane Jacobs. When it comes to constructing new neighborhoods, her ideas are largely being ignored. So says Jan Gehl, the groundbreaking Danish architect, urbanist, and self-confessed Jacobs disciple.
- “Jane Jacobs’ ideas are widely used in the existing fabric of cities among old structures, where they are used to clean up after the automobile,” says Gehl. --- “Much has been done, but an area where this knowledge for how to make good structures for people is absent—in Copenhagen or anywhere else—is in new construction. I sometimes make a joke that if we were making a book about great new towns in the 21st century, it would be the thinnest book you’d ever seen.”
- Local voices, among them the newspaper Politiken, have noted that new development plans for the city’s South Harbor are being watered down to create an indifferent, developer-driven final product. For some time, the South Harbor has been a major construction hotspot for new homes, some of them built on former dockland brownfield sites and some on artificial islands jutting out into the harbor water.
- But while the area’s development plan started out as a model project—one section of which Gehl oversaw as an adviser—it has since been significantly diminished. According to Politiken, a theatre, sports hall and a flea market have all been dropped from the plans. --- These negative tweaks risk turning what could have been a vibrant quarter into a luxurious but life-lorn dormitory. --- “The idea of underground parking and a car-free surface, which we nicknamed ‘Little Venice,’ has been sacrificed and replaced with surface parking.
- The fine-tuned hierarchy of private, semi-private, semi-public and public spaces has also been very watered down. Instead of making a number of courtyards, there is now one very long building.” It’s the place-making failures of these buildings’ external layouts that’s the most pressing problem, according to Gehl. --- “In many of these developer-driven projects they almost don't give a damn about making a good area. They put almost everything into making a fast-selling commodity,” Gehl says.
- It’s not that Copenhagen is especially bad, Gehl insists. It’s more that it is not immune to a general sea change across the West where the quest for short-term profit is allowed to override any longer term place-making goals. In fact, Copenhagen already contains perhaps the supreme example of this trajectory in Northern Europe: the entirely new, high-income neighborhood constructed at Ørestad.
- Given Copenhagen’s international reputation, the recognition that there may be something rotten even in this urban paragon might seem dispiriting. If they can’t do it right, how can we? Gehl nonetheless sounds hopeful, pointing out how well-targeted public pressure can often succeed in re-shaping official priorities. --- Still, as Copenhageners know all too well, just because a project starts with plans to build something great, doesn’t mean that that’s what the city eventually ends up with.
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Copenhagen’s Orestad: visually striking apartments placed in a windy, unpeopled environment. (Rob Deutscher/Flickr)
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