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 vehicle traffic data and engineering cities accordingly, which has produced the car culture we have inherited in cities today. It is no coincidence that Copenhagen is world famous as a people and bicycle friendly city - Jan Gehl initiated this through his grassroots work with students at the Danish ... of Architecture in the 1960s, when together they began counting people in public spaces. With this data they were able to make the case that people come where people are: if we design spaces for people, then people will come there. This insight is beautifully elaborated with international case studies in his documentary Human Scale, several books and ongoing papers published by his studio and the Gehl Institute.
Unlike most architecture practices, Gehl confidently design the spaces in between buildings rather than the buildings themselves. The spaces for public life to thrive.
Most interestingly they have this year started to work with Ford Motor Company in the United States, reframing what the role of the corporation might be in the future as we graduate from the era of the private car. Compared to other 'innovation' initiatives by other motor companies such as Jaguar Landrover who have set up InMotion to explore how the car can remain relevant to people, I feel this is a much more interesting and enlightened proposition, rather than desperately clutching at straws.
Mikael Colville-Anderson
Originally a film and screen director, the Danish-Canadian urban designer and urban mobility expert Mikael Colville-Andersen has been strategically banging the drum for the bicycle as a conduit to evolve human-scale, healthy and safe cities for our future. He speaks across the world about the benefits of bicycles and how to redesign cities to allow them to thrive as a mode of personal mobility.
It is perhaps the story-teller and cinematographer in him that has allowed him to create such an inspiring vision of what this future can look and feel like. He doesn’t just focus on the tangible, measurable benefits of cycling - less congestion, better health, reduced air pollution, cheaper - but leverages the nuanced, subtle and human atmosphere that the bicycle effortlessly brings to cities.
It all began with his Cycle Chic Flickr account in 2007, where he posted this photo of a women at a traffic light in Copenhagen which proceeded to go viral. Since then his Flickr account has amassed some 4.1K followers with multiple albums categorising the subtleties of bicycle culture across the world, from Musical Instruments on Bicycles, to Cycling with Infants and even Cyclists yawning. In 2007 he galvanised his vision, setting up Copenhagenize, an urban cycling consultancy which works with cities around the world to design environments that are a pleasure to cycle in. Quite simply, Mikael Colville-Andersen describes cyclists as faster moving pedestrians, producing symphony of people-powered movement across the city-scape.
For me, the way he speaks about the more nuanced benefits of the bicycle are the most interesting and underated impact of people on bikes (as opposed to inside cars) can have when scaled up across a city. In his TEDxZurich talk he describes the experience of riding with his 3-year old daughter in the front part of his bike and her observations of the theatre in the city. She summed up the social exclusion and anonymity of cars, noting simply that, “cars are silly because you can’t see the people in them.”
These thoughts echo the recent writings of planner and urban scholar, Richard Sennett in his book Building and Dwelling: Ethics and The City, where he argues that the relationship between speed and space are inherently linked: “You move through a space and you dwell in a place.” Combined, Sennett and Colville-Andersen’s observations illustrate how the bicycle also makes a strong case for building the social fabric of cities and neighbourhoods.
Mikael Colville-Andersen makes a very compelling case for the bicycle in the city, and refreshingly is not afraid to eloquently call out the forces on the couter arguement from the motor and oil industries and some of the higher echelons of city planning departments, whose motivations do not fit with thevision of a democratic, liveable city.
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
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 vehicle traffic data and engineering cities accordingly, which has produced the car culture we have inherited in cities today. It is no coincidence that Copenhagen is world famous as a people and bicycle friendly city - Jan Gehl initiated this through his grassroots work with students at the Danish ... of Architecture in the 1960s, when together they began counting people in public spaces. With this data they were able to make the case that people come where people are: if we design spaces for people, then people will come there. This insight is beautifully elaborated with international case studies in his documentary Human Scale, several books and ongoing papers published by his studio and the Gehl Institute.
Unlike most architecture practices, Gehl confidently design the spaces in between buildings rather than the buildings themselves. The spaces for public life to thrive.
Most interestingly they have this year started to work with Ford Motor Company in the United States, reframing what the role of the corporation might be in the future as we graduate from the era of the private car. Compared to other 'innovation' initiatives by other motor companies such as Jaguar Landrover who have set up InMotion to explore how the car can remain relevant to people, I feel this is a much more interesting and enlightened proposition, rather than desperately clutching at straws.
Mikael Colville-Anderson
It is perhaps the story-teller and cinematographer in him that has allowed him to create such an inspiring vision of what this future can look and feel like. He doesn’t just focus on the tangible, measurable benefits of cycling - less congestion, better health, reduced air pollution, cheaper - but leverages the nuanced, subtle and human atmosphere that the bicycle effortlessly brings to cities.
It all began with his Cycle Chic Flickr account in 2007, where he posted this photo of a women at a traffic light in Copenhagen which proceeded to go viral. Since then his Flickr account has amassed some 4.1K followers with multiple albums categorising the subtleties of bicycle culture across the world, from Musical Instruments on Bicycles, to Cycling with Infants and even Cyclists yawning. In 2007 he galvanised his vision, setting up Copenhagenize, an urban cycling consultancy which works with cities around the world to design environments that are a pleasure to cycle in. Quite simply, Mikael Colville-Andersen describes cyclists as faster moving pedestrians, producing symphony of people-powered movement across the city-scape.
For me, the way he speaks about the more nuanced benefits of the bicycle are the most interesting and underated impact of people on bikes (as opposed to inside cars) can have when scaled up across a city. In his TEDxZurich talk he describes the experience of riding with his 3-year old daughter in the front part of his bike and her observations of the theatre in the city. She summed up the social exclusion and anonymity of cars, noting simply that, “cars are silly because you can’t see the people in them.”
These thoughts echo the recent writings of planner and urban scholar, Richard Sennett in his book Building and Dwelling: Ethics and The City, where he argues that the relationship between speed and space are inherently linked: “You move through a space and you dwell in a place.” Combined, Sennett and Colville-Andersen’s observations illustrate how the bicycle also makes a strong case for building the social fabric of cities and neighbourhoods.
Mikael Colville-Andersen makes a very compelling case for the bicycle in the city, and refreshingly is not afraid to eloquently call out the forces on the couter arguement from the motor and oil industries and some of the higher echelons of city planning departments, whose motivations do not fit with thevision of a democratic, liveable city.
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