Jan Gehl.

• Author: Law, Violet
• Position: THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW - Interview

For Danish architect and planner Jan Gehl, human-focused urban planning is as simple as making a city a welcoming host.

"A good city is like a good party," Gehl wrote in his most recent book, Cities for People. "The guests stay because they're enjoying themselves."

For the past two decades, Gehl has been sought after by officials around the world to redesign their cities. From New York City to Melbourne, Gehl has been refashioning urban cores using his native Copenhagen as a model, where pedestrians and cyclists are respected and enjoy the same rights to roadways as drivers.

To "Copenhagenize" a city, says Gehl, all it takes is the understanding that humans, not buildings, come first when designing a city. It is important for urban planners to take into account psychological and physiological factors in their grand plan, he says. For example, humans have a field of vision limited to a radius of about 110 yards. That's why, Gehl observes, many ancient town squares throughout Europe are not much longer than this. People don't feel comfortable in spaces much larger than that.

Although Gehl now sees his commonsense approach to urban planning widely embraced, at seventy-six, he has been around long enough to have lived through the time when Copenhagen was like Los Angeles and cars were kings.

Even after the publication of his influential book Life Between Buildings in 1971, for the longest time Gehl's remained the lone voice for sensible, sensitive design of urban space. But today he is all too glad to jet to any corner of the world and help reshape cities--and lives.

"First we shape cities," Gehl says, "then they shape us."

Q: American cities are currently strapped for cash, if not on the verge of bankruptcy. Doesn't it cost a lot to redesign with human needs in mind?

Jan Gehl: It's the cheapest thing you can do. Compared to all the other investments you can think about, it's really peanuts to make wider sidewalks, better pedestrian crossings, and bicycle lanes. It costs next to nothing to do improvements in this area. And the maintenance is very cheap.

Some of the cities that have done remarkably, like Copenhagen, Leon, and Barcelona, they made a big leap forward when they were down and out economically. In Copenhagen, we had a period in the 1980s when the city was broke, and that was the time when they really went forward with the cheap things. The city's officials said: "We need something that is fast, visible, cheap, and for everyone." In...