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Life Between
Buildings: Using Public Space by Jan Gehl.
This classic book looks at the spaces between buildings,
the streets, plazas, and other open spaces of the city and
how their design affects people and vice-versa. Given that
Gehl is Danish, much of the many illustrations and studies
focus on Copenhagen and other cities in Denmark, though
this relationship can be inverted, as the quality of public
space in the country is so high that a book devoted to improving
public space seems almost inevitable.
Like Oscar Newman's Defensible Space, Gehl's book
is both a reaction to Modernist principles and their failures,
and an application and synthesis of data culled from observation.
But unlike Newman's book that proposes surveillance as a
means to safety, Gehl proposes that the design of public
spaces themselves can create safe urban places by making
them desirable and therefore occupied rather than abandoned.
What makes his recommendations especially pertinent is that
they start from the simple premise of asking why people
go outside and what they do outside. At the root of his
research and conclusions is the human condition, the desire
to interact with other people, even if only indirectly via
looking and listening. Which leads to the fundamental consideration
that designers must have: people's interaction with the
environment. If we think of public spaces as separate from
people, as formal exercises, then we are heading towards
creating more failures. But if we think of these spaces
in terms of their access, use, and the relationship between
the person and the built environment, then we are on the
road to success.
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