PUBLIC SPACE, PUBLIC LIFE: AN INTERACTION

Like the weather, life is difficult to predict. Nonetheless, meteorologists have developed methods enabling them to predict the weather, and over the years their methods have become so refined that they can make forecasts with greater accuracy and reach. The methods described in this book also deal with foreseeing phenomena in constant flux, but the focus here is how life unfolds in city space. Just as with weather forecasting, this doesn't mean that anyone can develop a sure-fire method to predict how people will use a particular city space. Masses of data have been gathered over the years concerning the interaction of life and space in cities, and just like meteorologists' knowledge about the weather, this data can provide greater understanding of city life and predict how it will presumably unfold in the given framework.

This book describes the methods that have been developed over the past 50 years to study the interaction between public life and space. They are tools to help us understand how we use public space so that we can make it better and more functional. Observation is the key for most of the studies presented in the book.

It has been necessary to develop, almost from scratch, special tools for looking at people because people's use of cities has been overlooked, while abstract concepts, large structures, traffic challenges and other amorphous issues have dominated urban planning.

Public Space and Public Life – on Speaking Terms

Good architecture ensures good interaction between public space and public life. But while architects and urban planners have been dealing with space, the other side of the coin – life – has often been forgotten. Perhaps this is because it is considerably easier to work with and communicate about form and space, while life is ephemeral and therefore difficult to describe.

Public life changes constantly in the course of a day, week, or month, and over the years. In addition, design, gender, age, financial resources, culture and many other factors determine how we use or do not use public space. There are many excellent reasons why it is difficult to incorporate the diverse nature of public life into architecture and urban planning. Nonetheless, it is essential if we are to create worthy surroundings for the billions of people who daily make their way between buildings in cities around the world.

In this context, public space is understood as streets, alleys, buildings, squares, bollards: everything that can be considered part of the built environment. Public life should also be understood in the broadest sense as everything that takes place between buildings, to and from school, on balconies, seated, standing, walking, biking, etc. It is everything we can go out and observe happening – far more than just street theatre and café life. However, we do not mean city life to be understood as the city's psychological well-being. Rather it is the complex and versatile life that unfolds in public space. It makes no difference whether our point of departure is Copenhagen, Dhaka, Mexico City, or a small city in Western Australia. The nub is the interplay between life and space in all its guises.

The Missing Tools

At the beginning of the 1960s, critical voices began to point out that something was very wrong in many of the new districts being built, in record numbers, during this period of rapid urban growth. Something was missing, something that was difficult to define, but was expressed in concepts like 'bedroom communities' and 'cultural impoverishment.' Life between buildings had been forgotten, pushed aside by cars, large-scale thinking, and overly rationalized, specialized processes. Among the critics of the time were Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte in New York City, Christopher Alexander in Berkeley, and one of the authors of this book, Jan Gehl in Copenhagen.

Public life and public space were historically treated as a cohesive unit. Medieval cities grew little by little in accordance with changing needs, in contrast to the rapid tempo of modernism's large-scale planning.

Cities have grown gradually for hundreds of years, rooted in many years of experience and an intuitive feeling for human senses and scale. The organic growth of medieval cities encompassed a building tradition based on generations of experience in how to create cities with well-functioning interaction between life and space. But this knowledge was lost somewhere in the process of industrialization and modernization, which led to dysfunctional city environments for the important and yet ignored segment of city life on foot. Of course, society has changed since the Middle Ages. The solution is not to recreate pre-modern cities, but to develop contemporary tools that can be applied analytically to once again forge an alliance between life and space in cities.

The Contours of an Academic Field

The environmental design pioneers of the 1960s took the basic steps needed to better understand the ephemeral concept of public life and its interaction with public space and buildings. Their method was to study existing, and as a rule pre-industrial, cities and public space to gain basic knowledge about how we use and get around in cities.

Several books published from 1960 to the mid-1980s are still considered the basic textbooks for public life studies. Although the methods described were later refined and new agendas and technologies emerged, the basic principles and methods were developed in that period.

Up to the mid-1980s, this work was carried out primarily at academic institutions. However, by the end of that decade, it was clear that the analyses and principles regarding public life and public space should be converted into tools that could be used directly in urban planning practice. City planners and politicians wanted to make conditions better for people in order to have an edge in inter-city competition. It became a strategic goal to create attractive cities for people in order to attract residents, tourists, investments and employees to fill new jobs in the knowledge society. Meeting this goal required understanding people's needs and behavior in cities.

From about the year 2000, it increasingly became taken for granted in the fields of architecture and urban planning practice generally that working with life in cities was crucial. Much bitter experience had shown that vibrant city life does not happen by itself. This is particularly noticeable in cities that are highly developed economically, because apart from commuters, people are no longer on the street by necessity to work, sell trinkets, do errands, and so on.

However, less economically viable cities are also impacted, because the rapidly growing volume of motorized traffic and related infrastructure provides obstacles for pedestrians and produces noise and air pollution for...