Life between buildings by jan glen pdf download

This organizational principle can be traced throughout history, from traditional tribal camps to contemporary campsites. The town that is a street. All units placed along a glass covered street. Architect Peter Broberg. Architects T.

Bjerg and P. Dyreborg The buildings, entrances, tents, and so on are assembled around a public space and turn toward one another like friends around a table. Building projects oriented around a square are characterized by having a limited number of inhabitants.

If the population becomes too large, there is not enough room for everyone around the square — if the square is to retain dimensions that permit the visual assembly of activities.

When activities are assembled along a street, the individual is able, merely by taking a short walk, to establish what is going on in the area.

This building principle is found in its simplest form in towns built up around a single street. Traditional villages, which developed along a main street, have been mentioned already. The principle of creating a linear structure has made it possible in this case for the street to be roofed with glass to assure climate protection year-round.

Competition project for La Villette, Paris, Architect Leon Krier [30]. The principle is occasionally found in suburban areas and functionalistic building projects.

In this way the individual activities have been dispersed in time and space because of overdimensioning and an unnecessary doubling and spreading of the access roads. It is not the lack of pedestrian trafic and residents that has prevented the establishment of more intimate and better-used public spaces, but rather the decision to have many dispersed roads and paths instead of a more concentrated street network such as that found in the old cities. In the entire history of human settlement, streets and squares have been the basic elements around which all cities were organized.

In more recently built communities, an equally careful handling of the spatial dimensions is indeed rare. Nevertheless, a number of exceptions from this general rule can be found. Top left: Marken, Holland. Left: Access street 4 meters 12 feet wide in a recent housing project in Copenhagen.

A width of 4 meters permits a pedestrian low of 50 to 60 persons per minute. More space is seldom needed! The space creates a seemingly unbridgeable void between the houses. Individual functions and activities should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis and allotted street frontage in accordance with their value as attractions and their importance for the functioning of the outdoor space.

Twenty-, thirty-, and forty-meter-wide , , and ft. Not only is there a long distance between people from one side to the other in such spaces, but the possibility for those walking through of experiencing simultaneously what is going on at both sides is more or less lost.

Conversely, an attempt can be made to assemble events by dimensioning both streets and squares realistically in relation to the range of the senses and the number of people that can be expected to use the spaces. Street market, Singapore. The usual distance between stalls in the marketplace and in Throughout the world the department stores is 2 to 3 meters 6 to 9 ft.

In Venice the average street width is a good 3 meters 9 ft. That the intensity of experience also is increased with reduced size often will be an additional incentive to careful dimensioning of spaces. It is nearly always more interesting to be in small spaces, where both the whole and the details can be seen — one has the best of both worlds. Venice and other places with very narrow streets should not necessarily be used as direct models for new streets, but they serve to underline the fact that so many spaces in our modern cities are grossly oversized.

It is as if planners and architects have a strong tendency, whenever in doubt, to throw in some extra space, just in case, relecting the general uncertainty concerning the proper handling of small dimensions and small spaces. Whenever in doubt, leave some space out. Small spaces with tall buildings also mean dark and sunless spaces. In southern Europe, it is reasonable and comfortable to have shade and subdued light, but in the north, both light and sun are highly valued qualities.

The wish for light and sun, plus a modest-sized space in which people can congregrate, can, how- ever, be combined. The terracing of buildings is one possibility; another is building up small spaces within the large ones.

Street spaces with rows of trees demonstrate the value of the principle of small spaces within large ones. Comparably, front yards in front of rowhouses assure both wide, sun-illed spaces and a reasonably narrow, intimate street. A small space in a large one. Above: Rows of trees introduce an intimate scale in the open landscape. The concen- tration of activities depends on active and closely spaced exchange zones between street and facade and on short distances between entrances and other functions, which contribute to activating the public environment.

Big buildings with long facades, few entrances, and few visitors mean an effective dispersal of events. The principle, in contrast, should be narrow units and many doors. Street life is drastically reduced when small, active units are superseded by large units.

In many places it is possible to see how life in the streets has dwindled drastically as gas stations, car dealerships, and parking lots have created holes and voids in the city fabric, or when passive units such as ofices and banks move in. In contrast, examples exist of careful planning in which holes and voids are not accepted, where large units are situated behind or above the small units along the facade. Only the entrances to all functions and the most interesting activities take up space in the facade.

This principle is demonstrated in movie theaters, for example, where only the entrance with the ticket Narrow units and many doors are important principles for concentrating events. Java Island, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Narrow street frontages mean short distances between entrances — and entrances are where the majority of events nearly always take place.

This should be the standard solution when banks and ofices must be located on city streets. To counteract the problem of the dull and dying facades, many Danish cities have passed building codes to restrict the establishment of banks and ofices at street level. Other Danish cities very successfully have allowed banks and ofices to be established on city streets, but only as long as the street frontage is not in excess of ive meters 15 ft.

Not surprisingly, the practice of giving each unit the shortest possible street facade is found in all new suburban shopping malls. Knowing that pedestrians generally do not wish to walk very far, shopping mall designers logically use narrow frontages, so that there is room for as many shops as possible in the shortest possible street distance. This is also true in residential areas.

Good examples of such site plans are found in many traditional rowhouse projects and in a number of building projects, such as Siedlung Halen in Bern, Switzerland see illustration on page 84 and more recent residential areas on Java, Borneo, and Sporenburg Islands in the Harbor of Amsterdam. In city streets, the length of frontages should be carefully dimensioned.

Street from the old town in Stockholm, Sweden. Pedestrians tend to use the ground level only. In streets with low buildings, everything is visible as far as the eye can reach. The problem is very simple. Activities that take place on the same level can be experienced within the range limitation of the senses, that is, within a radius of from 20 to meters 65 to ft. If something happens on a level that is only a short distance up, possibilities for experiences are greatly reduced.

Crawling up a tree always has been a good way of hiding. The problem is less pronounced when something occurs on a lower level — one can often have a ine overview from the higher position — but participation and interaction are still physically and psychologically dificult. The effect with regard to use of the elevated public spaces is clearly seen in William H. If people do not see a space, they will not use it.

With two or three Street scene, Los Angeles. Between the third and fourth loors, a marked decrease in the ability to have contact with the ground level can be observed. Another threshold exists between the ifth and sixth loors. Anything and anyone above the ifth loor is deinitely out of touch with ground level events. Lookout points can be placed high up, but not activities that one wishes to assemble. If this is attempted regardless, the result is often disappointing because functions located 50 to meters to ft.

These experiences can be transferred meaningfully to the discussion of low versus tall buildings. Low buildings along a street are in harmony with the way in which people move about and the way in which the senses function, as opposed to tall buildings, which are not. Tall buildings are not. Street scene, Singapore. Skywalks, found in city centers as well as in residential areas, are, as a rule, a questionable idea in both situations.

If an assembling of events and people is desired, a better solution is found in, for example, the three-story residential areas in Montreal in Canada. All activities and residents are led by balconies and stairs down to one level. In addition, a living, inspiring street facade is created, as well as good opportunities for outdoor stays directly in front of the individual homes.

Skywalks and balcony access disperse people and events, while access stairs bring the inhabitants together, in the streets. Below: Residential area, Montreal. Integration of various activities and functions in and around public spaces allows the people involved to function together and to stimulate and inspire one another.

In addition, the mixing of various functions and people makes it possible to interpret how the surrounding society is composed and how it operates. With regard to this issue as well, it is not the formal integration of buildings and primary city functions but the actual integration of various events and people on the very small scale that determines whether the contact surface is monotonous or inter- esting. In the old medieval cities, pedestrian trafic dictated a city structure in which merchants and craftsmen, rich and poor, young and old, necessarily had to live and work side by side.

Such cities embody the advantages and disadvantages of an integration-oriented city structure. Comparably, segregation-oriented planning is illustrated by functionalistic city structure, in which separation of unlike functions was the goal.

The result was a city divided into monofunctional areas. In these areas a single group of people, a single occupation, a single social group or age group has been more or less isolated from the other groups in society. The beneit perhaps has been a more rational planning process, shorter distance between similar functions, and greater eficiency, but the price has been reduced contact with the surrounding society, a poorer and more monotonous environ- ment.

An alternative to these planning models is a more differenti- ated planning policy, in which social relations and practical advantages are evaluated from function to function and in which separation is only accepted when the disadvantages of assembling clearly outweigh the advantages. For example, only a very small group of the most annoying industrial activities is unsuitable for integration with residences. An integration-oriented city plan can do this by describing growth directions or areas to be extended at various times, rather than by various functions, specifying growth segments for the years to to instead of residential, industrial, and public service areas.

Urban plans can, for example, use a new university as an obvious occasion to place a sizable number of residences and businesses in an integrated city structure — a university city with residences and businesses. That old, inte- grated city structures still exist side by side with new, monofunc- tional areas makes it possible to study both planning principles.

The University of Copenhagen is predominantly placed in the center of the old city. The main building is situated centrally, and spread out around it in the city are schools, colleges, and depart- ments in a number of different locations that were found as space became needed. The streets of the city are part of the university and function both as internal and external connecting corridors.

Without doubt the scattering of the university throughout the city causes a number of disadvantages to the institution as an administrative unit. But for those involved, the near contact with the city creates innumerable possibilities for using the city and participating in its life.

And for the city the placement of the university means a valuable contribution of energy, life, and activities. Organized around the central parking lot. Campus of the Technical University. Plan , There is no basis for many resulting activities. There are only few cafeterias and newsstands, and all who use the area constitute only one category of people: students and faculty.

The education of one-sided, overspecializcd technicians is nurtured under the best possible conditions — a one-sided, overspecialized environment — as the direct daily connection between the study environment and the society in general has been severed.

Three city functions that together could have formed the basis for a lively city, if the planning concept had been to create cities instead of isolated, monofunctional areas. Upper left: A high rise housing area with 7, inhabitants, surrounded by parking lots and lawns. Below left: The Danish national broadcasting and television complex.

Fifteen hundred people, surrounded by parking lots and uninhabited green lawns, work here on the production and administration of television programs. Below right: School and teacher training college with 1, students, in similar isolation.

If the possibilities are to be redeemed, planning and design work at the medium and the very small scale are decisive factors. For example, schools can be located in the middle of a housing development and still be effectively separated from the sur- roundings — by fences, walls, and lawns. But schools can also be designed as an integral part of housing. Commercial and other city functions can be located similarly along the street or in the public area itself, so that the borders between different functions and groups of people are removed.

Each activity is given a chance to work with another. The architect F. The city center has become a covered square, provided with sports equipment, movie screens, spectator stands, chairs, and so on, so that it can be used in a multitude of ways. In principle the square functions exactly like a traditional square. The ensuing result has been a much higher level of overall participation of the townspeople in the various activities than is customary in other comparable Dutch towns.

Integration has also been the key word in many improvement projects in monotonous multistory residential areas built during the s. In such a renewal project in Sweden, several former apart- ment buildings have been renovated to house light industry, ofices, and residences for the elderly, to give the area greater diversity.

This integration policy has achieved remarkably positive results. In the living room all members of the family can be occupied with various activities at the same time, but individual activities and people can also function together. Below: When all trafic is on foot, as in Venice, the separation of trafic from other city activities never becomes an issue.

In an ordinary trafic pattern, in mixed streets, where trafic is divided between pedestrians, bicycles and automobiles, a pronounced spreading and separation of people and activities results. When those in transit are further dispersed through a differentiated road system, in which each type of trafic has its own route, the separation is complete. It becomes duller to drive, duller to walk, and duller to live along the roads and streets because a signiicant number of the people in transit are now segregated from other city activities.

As an alternative to the differentiated street systems, other ways of using cars and the other rapid means of transportation can be envisaged. For example, greater portions of the individual trips can be transferred from automobile systems to combined networks of public transit, pedestrian, and bicycle systems. The importance of an integrated transportation system to city life can be observed in those cities in which transportation has always been on foot. In Europe there are a modest number of old cities in which trafic and city life have never been split up into motor and pedestrian trafic.

This is true of a number of hill towns in Italy, the stairway cities in Yugoslavia, the Greek island cities, and Venice, which has a special place among pedestrian cities, both because it is by far the largest, with over , inhabitants, and because it is the most thoroughly worked-out and reined exam- ple of this type of city. Here life and trafic exist side by side in the same space, which functions simultaneously as a space for outdoor stays and a connecting link.

In this context trafic presents no security problems, no exhaust fumes, noise, and dirt, and therefore it has never been necessary to separate work, rest, meals, play, enter- tainment, and transit.

Venice is a living room with integrated processes enlarged to city scale. This same concept explains the civilized Venetian practice of arriving late at prearranged meetings, because people inevitably meet friends and acquaintances or stop to look at something while walking through the city. The streets are unusable for anything but vehicular trafic. Radburn Trafic separation system introduced in in Radburn, New Jersey: a complicated, expensive system involving many parallel roads and paths and many costly underpasses.

Surveys of residential districts show that this principle, which in theory appears to improve trafic safety, functions poorly in practice because pedestrians follow shorter routes rather than safer, more lengthy, routes. When cars must be driven up to a building, this system of integration is by far superior to the two systems above. Venice The pedestrian city.

A straightforward and simple trafic system with a considerably higher safety level and greater feeling of security than any other system. The principle of leaving cars at the city limits or at the edge of residential areas and walking the last 50 to to meters to to ft. This is a positive development that permits local trafic to become integrated again with other outdoor activities. This principle was irst terms introduced in Holland, where local areas have been designed or renovated for slow automobile trafic.

In these Woonerf areas, automobiles are permitted to drive right up to the front doors but the streets are clearly designed as pedestrian areas, in which cars are forced to proceed at low speeds between the established staying and play areas. The concept of integrating automobile trafic on pedestrian terms offers considerable advantages over methods that segre- gate trafic. Even though completely car-free areas have both a higher degree of trafic security and a better design and dimen- sioning for outdoor stays and pedestrian trafic and so offer an optimal solution, the Dutch concept of trafic integration in many cases offers a very acceptable alternative, the second-best solution.

When trafic consists of pedestrians or of cars moving at slow speeds, the arguments for separating staying and play areas from the areas for trafic lose their validity.

The fact that trafic to and from houses in nearly all instances is the most compre- hensive of all outdoor activities in residential areas is good reason for seeking to integrate as many other activities as possible with the trafic. Trafic speed is further reduced by low ramps and other restraints. Many activities — play, outdoor stays, conversations — get started when one is actually involved with something else or on the way somewhere.

Outdoor stays and transit are not inite, sharply demarcated activities. Their limits are lexible; the same people are involved in both. Different categories of activities have a strong tendency to weave themselves together — if they are allowed to do so. Conversely, public spaces can be designed so that it is dificult to get out into them, physically and psychologically. Sharply demarcated borders — such as those found in multistory residences, where one is either in a completely private territory indoors and upstairs or in a com- pletely public area outside on the stairs, in the elevator, or on the street — will make it dificult in many situations to move into the public environment if it is not necessary to do so.

Flexible boundaries in the form of transitional zones that are neither completely private nor completely public, on the other hand, will often be able to function as connecting links, making it easier, both physically and psychologically, for residents and activities to move back and forth between private and public spaces, between in and out. This very important issue is exam- ined in more detail in a following section see page They then are more often motivated to go out and play, in contrast to the children who cannot see what is going on because they live too high up or too far away.

Numerous examples that emphasize the relationship between being able to see and the desire to participate can likewise be found among adult activities. Top: Semiprivate front yards in rowhouse area.

Right: Gradual transitional zones in a multistory residence — but only for the ground loor. Almere, The Netherlands The street as invitation. Mer- chants, incidentally, have always known that it is all-important to be located precisely where people pass by and to have display windows facing the street. Many examples illustrate the great inluence of factors such as dis- tance, route quality, and mode of transportation on the connec- tions between people and between various functions.

Small children seldom move more than 50 meters ft. It is also common that family and friends who live near one another see one another more than they see acquaintances who live farther away. This again can have a positive inluence on other contact forms. Public libraries, too, have noted a direct relationship between distance and book borrowing.

Those who live nearest to the library and who can get there most easily also borrow the most books. These belong to the group of psychological needs. Satisfying these is seldom as goal-oriented and deliberate as with the more basic physical needs, such as eating, drinking, sleeping, and so on.

For example, adults seldom go to town with the expressed intention of satisfying the need for stimulation or the need for contact. Regardless of what the true purpose may be, one goes out for a plausible, rational reason — to shop, to take a walk, to get some fresh air, to buy a paper, to wash the car, and so forth.

Perhaps it is wrong to speak of the shopping excursion as a pretext for contact and stimulation, because very few people out shopping will accept the fact that the need for contact and stimulation plays any part in their shopping plans.

The playground provides a place where children can always go, and the play equipment provides opportunities for passing the time alone until other children arrive and more worthwhile activities can begin. It is a general characteristic that basic physical and psycho- logical needs are satisied at the same time, and that the basic and easily deined needs often serve to explain and motivate the satisfying of both sets of needs.

In this context the shopping excursion is both a shopping trip and a pretext, or occasion, for contact and stimulation. Destinations can be outings to particular places, lookout points, places to watch the sun set, or they can be shops, community centers, sports facilities, and so forth.

In a village society, with a communal well and washhouse, it may still be possible to see these two facilities function as the all- dominant catalysts for informal contact situations. In southern Europe the bars also play an important role as destinations.

One goes to the bar for a glass of wine, but one also is sure of meeting friends. In new residential areas, mailboxes, newsstands, restaurants, shops, and sports facilities must assume the role of acceptable pretexts for the individual to be in and stay in the public environment. For children, the playground is the place where one can always go. Whether or not others are outside playing, children can always go to the playground, and there is always something to do — as a start.

Left: Minigarden in English multistory housing area. Below: Lane maintenance day in a Danish residential area. All generations are involved, and a neighborhood party often crowns the day of group activity.

When the weather is good and it is pleasant to be outdoors for a while, the garden provides meaningful activity, something to do. If the garden is located where people pass by or where there is a good view of other activities, work in the garden is often combined with other, recreational and social activities.

The useful is combined with the pleasurable. A closer study of front yard activities [21] shows that in many instances there are such subtle combinations of purposes and that gardening serves as a pretext for being outdoors.

It can be noted that many people — not least the oldest residents — spend If there is something to do, there may also be something to talk about afterward. Necessary, optional, and social activities are interwoven in countless subtle ways. This emphasizes how important it is that in public spaces in residential areas there are not only opportunities for walking and sitting, but also opportunities to act, things to do, activities to be involved in.

This should be supplemented preferably with possibilities for taking small, daily domestic activities, such as potato peeling, sewing, repair jobs, hobbies, and meals, out into the public spaces. If facilities are provided for bringing ordinary domestic activities — repairs, hobbies, meal preparations, and meals — out on the public side of the residences, life between buildings can be substantially enriched.

Top: North Toronto. Below: Brooklyn, New York. To open up for a two-way exchange of experiences is not only a question of glass and windows but also a question of distances. The narrow parameters of human sensory experiences play a part in determining whether an event is opened up or closed in. The library with large windows, with a to meter to ft. In one case it is possible to see a building with windows; in the other, a library in use.

Many activities are closed in, apparently without any obvious motive other than because a swimming pool, a youth center, a bowling alley, or a waiting room is usually closed in. In other instances considerations of eficiency appear to have played an important part. Schoolchildren are not able to look out of the windows, and may not be seen, in order not to be disturbed. Factory workers must, with regard to productivity, manage with luorescent lighting and carefully monitored public address system music.

Ofice workers in a high-rise building may look out at the clouds but not at the street, and so on. Only where openness and accessibility may directly assist in promoting commerce is the view opened up to merchandise and, if necessary, human activities. Adelaide, Australia. Below: An exciting contribution to the street environment: glass between the pavement and a swimming pool.

Vesterbro, Copenhagen, Denmark. Often it will be natural to differentiate subtly between the open and the closed. It might be advantageous to be able to see from a retirement residence or hospital the activities taking place in public spaces, but the opposite is not true. Some rooms in a nursery school perhaps should be open toward the street, but not others; the public swimming pool or badminton court perhaps should be placed so far below street level that people who look in through the windows cannot disturb the activities because the windows are placed high up, and so forth.

Perth, Western Australia. The city thus becomes depopulated, duller, and more dangerous, when instead, the same functions, now closed in, could have enhanced many public spaces and the city as a whole. Hotel complex, Los Angeles. In residential areas where cars are parked some distance away rather than next to the buildings, the walk through the neighborhood to and from the car constitutes an important and pleasant part of every trip. When cars are parked at the entrance, only cars will be found in the street.

When cars are parked at the curb, people as well as cars will be found in the street. Greater opportunities for neighbor contacts will materialize. When cars are parked at the end of the road, pedestrian trafic replaces vehicular trafic.

From street studies in Melbourne [21]. In pedestrian cities people move through their city; in auto- mobile cities only cars are on the streets. People and events are, to be sure, present in cars, but seen from the sidewalk, the picture is both too fragmented and too brief for one to be able to see who is moving and what is going on. The movement of people has become automobile trafic. The many cars, movements, variations, and the many little glimpses of people can nevertheless have a certain attraction, as evidenced by benches along the streets, spectators at road intersections, and the tendency to prefer walking in streets with automobile trafic to walking on deserted paths.

But the pleasure of watching cars is limited and is only observed in situations where there is no more worthwhile offer of experience around.

This can be seen, for example, in Italian cities with and without piazzas. If there is a well-functioning piazza, people congregate there, but if there is no piazza and no city life, then street corners at trafic intersections become meeting places, where at least there is something to look at. The opposite of this situation is again the old pedestrian cities, like Venice, where the offer of experiencing the movement of people and merchandise plays a crucial part in reading and interpreting how the city is put together and how it works.

When a bridal couple leaves the church they do not get into a black limousine but continue on foot through the city followed by the wedding guests. When musicians go to work, they walk through the city with their instruments under their arms, and when people dressed in their best are on their way to parties or to the theater, they too are on foot.

Valuable in this context is the trend in recent residential building projects to park cars up to to meters to ft. Streets in these areas are more populated and more entertaining to be in and look at, and chances for frequent, informal meetings of neighbors are increased. That the risk of vandalism and crime is also reduced is yet another positive consequence of trafic being opened up rather than it being enclosed in cars or hidden away on separate road systems or in underground access roads and parking facilities.

Thus, primarily the incidence of activities is inluenced: that is, how many people actually come. But the activity level and number of events do not in themselves describe the quality of the public environment. That people and events are assembled in time and space is a prerequisite for anything at all to occur, but of more importance is which activities are allowed to develop.

It is not enough merely to create spaces that enable people to come and go. Favorable conditions for moving about in and lingering in the spaces must also exist, as well as those for participating in a wide range of social and recreational activities. In this context the quality of the individual segments of the outdoor environment plays a crucial part. Design of individual spaces and of the details, down to the smallest component, are determining factors.

Conversely, it has been noted how these very activities tend to disappear where the quality has been reduced. In this section, where the subject is not the number of events but the character and content of outdoor life, it is important to note that these activities, which make it particularly attrac- tive and meaningful to be in public spaces, also are the activities that are the most sensitive to the quality of the physical environ- ment.

When carefully detailed, outdoor spaces stand a good chance of being functional and popular. If detailing is careless or absent altogether, the battle will inevitably be lost. Left: Residential area, Milton Keynes, England. Below: Residential area, Sandvika, Sweden.

It is, the small scale however, only through careful consideration at the detail plan- ning level that the potential possibilities can come into their own. Or, if such work is neglected, the potential can be wasted. The following section discusses a number of quality demands on the outdoor environment in more detail: some are general demands and some are more speciic demands that concern simple, basic activities such as walking, standing, and sitting, as well as seeing, hearing, and talking.

These basic activities are used as a starting point because they are a part of nearly all other activities. If spaces make it attractive to walk, stand, sit, see, hear, and talk, this is in itself an important quality, but it also means that a broad spectrum of other activities — play, sports, community activities, and so on — will have a good basis for development.

This is the case partly because many qualities are common to all activities and partly because larger, more complex community activities can develop naturally from the many small daily activities. The big events evolve from the many small ones. Cities designed to the speed and distances of walking are friendly and warm whereas cities designed for motor traffic are large scale and impersonal.

To Assemble or Disperse: City and Site Planning Thus far in the book, Gehl stressed the importance of assembling people in public and communal spaces. In this chapter, he also notes that in certain situations dispersal of people and events is also important to establish peaceful, quite places as supplements to more lively ones. However, as current urban situations demand, more emphasis is given to assembling than dispersing throughout the book. Gehl stresses that it is not buildings, but people and events that need to be assembled.

In this chapter, he uses the concepts established in the previous sections to derive the necessary actions.

Effective dispersal of people is achieved when residences, public services, industries and trade functions are placed separately on large acres of land with the automobile as the mode of transport between these established zones. City structures that give emphasis to public spaces as the most important elements in the city plan, where all the functions are facing communal spaces and streets, effectively assemble people and events using a clear pattern.

These cities are friendly and inviting and induce people to go out and about and engage in activities that otherwise they may have not done optional activities. At the medium scale of site planning, people and activities are dispersed when buildings are placed at great distance from one another, oriented away from each other. Large buildings need more streets and squares, side streets, primary squares and secondary squares.

The immediate environment should take into account, the sensory reception of the human being that was discussed in the previous chapter. Planners tend to leave large open spaces for city gathering activities that tend to be cold and impersonal.

In cases where large spaces are unavoidable, light and ventilation requirements etc. The facades of the streets should attract an influx of activities and people.

Reduced street frontage for each building, many shops and keeping passive activities such as banks away from street frontage are some of the steps that Gehl has identified to be effective. Transportation and traffic is the most comprehensive activity in the public domain because outdoor stays and transit are not finite and sharply demarcated. Their limits are flexible and the same people engage in both. Therefore segregation of traffic can affect the activities of streets.

When different modes of transport such as pedestrians, bicycles and automobiles have their own routes, cities tend to be more chaotic as different scales are applied.

Instead, cars can be kept away at the city limits or allowed in to pedestrian friendly areas, forcing the speed of cars to reduce and perceive the city much slowly. Traffic integration in this manner, will enable different activities to support and stimulate one another.

If there are more inviting spaces in cities, if routes are manageable and short and people can see what is going on in the streets and communal spaces, optional activities will automatically take place.

Meager functions such as grocery shopping will translate to just more than getting supplies and people will have somewhere to go and something to do. In that case they will also have something to talk about afterwards. The character of life between buildings changes with changes in any given social context, but the essential principles and quality criteria to be employed when working with life between buildings has proven to be remarkably constant.

Though this work over the years has been updated and revised several times, this version bears little resemblance with the very early versions, however there was no reason to change the basic message: Take good care of the life between your buildings. In its exploration of how spaces become places, The Spaces between Buildings invites readers to see anew the spaces they encounter every day and often take for granted. The rich field of urban law has thus far lacked a holistic and concerted scholarly focus on comparative and global perspectives.

This work offers new inroads into the global and comparative streams within urban law by presenting emerging frameworks and approaches to topics ranging from urban housing and land use to legal informality and consumer financial protection. The volume brings together a group of international urban legal scholars to highlight emergent global, interdisciplinary perspectives within the field of urban law, particularly as they have import for comparative legal analysis.

The book presents a timely addition to the literature given the urgent legal issues that continue to surface in an age of rapid urbanization and globalization. For more than forty years Jan Gehl has helped to transform urban environments around the world based on his research into the ways people actually use—or could use—the spaces where they live and work. In this revolutionary book, Gehl presents his latest work creating or recreating cityscapes on a human scale. He clearly explains the methods and tools he uses to reconfigure unworkable cityscapes into the landscapes he believes they should be: cities for people.

Taking into account changing demographics and changing lifestyles, Gehl emphasizes four human issues that he sees as essential to successful city planning. He explains how to develop cities that are Lively, Safe, Sustainable, and Healthy. Focusing on these issues leads Gehl to think of even the largest city on a very small scale.

For Gehl, the urban landscape must be considered through the five human senses and experienced at the speed of walking rather than at the speed of riding in a car or bus or train. This small-scale view, he argues, is too frequently neglected in contemporary projects. In a final chapter, Gehl makes a plea for city planning on a human scale in the fast- growing cities of developing countries. Simon Life between buildings people and public space in Frankfurt's banking district Author : Nora A.

The upsurge in interest in public spaces and public life over the past twenty five years has generated an impressive array of city plans, public space strategies, and designs. This book presents an overview of this development and provides a detailed description of architecturally interesting and inspiring public space strategies and projects from all over the world.

In addition, thirty nine international public space projects are presented and discussed. Drawings, plans and photographs illustrate city strategies and public space projects in detail.

How do we accommodate a growing urban population in a way that is sustainable, equitable, and inviting? This question is becoming increasingly urgent to answer as we face diminishing fossil-fuel resources and the effects of a changing climate while global cities continue to compete to be the most vibrant centers of culture, knowledge, and finance.

Jan Gehl has been examining this question since the s, when few urban designers or planners were thinking about designing cities for people.

But given the unpredictable, complex and ephemeral nature of life in cities, how can we best design public infrastructure—vital to cities for getting from place to place, or staying in place—for human use?