My Danish Pinups
Ok, so I don’t actually have their pictures on my bedroom wall, but there are two Danish men that keep popping up in my life during this project and while writing my dissertation last year: Jan Gehl and Mikael Colville-Andersen. The visions they’ve been fastidiously working on from one of the world’s smallest nations and have been playing out over the last few decades globally, provide important new narratives to unlock the true wealth of our cities. Jan Gehl At 80 years old this year (2018), Jan Gehl is the founder of Gehl Architects which now has studios in Copenhagen and New York, has completed projects across the world, and has spun off the Gehl Institute to continue its mission through research and policy work. His early revelation echoes the business mantra, we can only manage what we can measure; he realised that if we are to create public spaces for people, we need data on people. In the 1950s when he took heed on this, city planners were developing cities based on