The Urban Sketch Writer

Tag: Jan Gehl

  • Cool streets, Trump and Walkability

    Cool streets, Trump and Walkability

    [This content first appeared on LinkedIn on 22 January 2025]

    In the news this week: Cool streets! Trump! Walkability! 

    What a difference a Monday in January makes. While President Trump has just withdrawn the US from the Paris Climate accord and intends to “drill, baby, drill”, there is still good news for environmentalists and those with a general interest in the ongoing survival of the human project from elsewhere in the world. 

    In Seoul, the Cheonggyecheon stream has been successfully released from its concrete prison beneath an elevated highway and turned into a highly loved and popular space for pedestrians and cyclists.

    While we aren’t likely to see anything like this occurring in the US anytime soon, the Cheonggyecheon project was one of the first to start a trend of cities turning car dominated spaces into oases for walkers and wheelers. See also New York’s High Line, Utrecht’s city moat and the Paris Plages on the banks of the Seine.

    As Jan Gehl has always said: you get what you invite. And these projects are certainly doing much to invite people on foot or bike back into the city centres.

    In addition, the Seoul Institute has reported that the area around the stream is now 3.6oc cooler than surrounding streets and nitrogen dioxide levels have fallen by 35%. The stream supports 174 animal species and 492 plant species. Further, the Cheonggyecheon has been designed to handle 200-year flood events.

    As Cheonggyecheon is seasonal, it unsurprisingly costs quite a bit of cheddar to keep it wet year-round. But the benefits to the environment, residents and visitors can’t be underestimated. You get what you invite.

    So, let’s stick with the walkability theme for a moment. 

    In what feels like 27 years ago, ARUP published their ‘Cities Alive – Towards a walking world’ report. At the time, the report was picked up by Fast Company, who published a handy synopsis of the ’50 Reasons Why Everyone Should Want More Walkable Streets’ on their website in 2016.

    My angle is street safety and the urbanism of Jane Jacobs – if people feel safe in a place, they’ll use it. Not all walkable environments achieve this, so let’s take a quick run through some of the benefits on offer if you can get it right:

    • Eyes on the street – which I’ve commented on before…
    • Crime reduction – e.g. 74% drop in one Kansas City neighbourhood when some streets went car-free on weekends…
    • Universally accessible – not everyone can or wants to drive, enabling everyone to visit can only be good for diversity and safety
    • Social interaction – trivial interaction with strangers creates a web of trust…
    • Public transit – a pleasant, safe walk to the transit stop will… wait for it… encourage people to use public transport

    These things are not complicated. This is Urban Design 101 for placemakers. We get what we invite.

    #placemaking #cheonggyecheon #walkability #janejacobs #jangehl #ARUP #urbanism

  • Manifestos, mental health and five-minute cities

    Manifestos, mental health and five-minute cities

    [This content first appeared on LinkedIn on 11 December 2024]

    A trio of stories for you this week! First, the Labour Party Manifesto is championing the ambition to “… raise the healthiest generation of children in our history.”

    This follows an inquiry into children and young people by the House of Commons Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee that found the built environment has a ‘critical role’ to play in the creation of child-friendly places. Who knew?

    Why then is the dilution of placemaking by over-zealous highway engineers and volume housebuilders, that have ensured child-friendly places are often designed out of schemes at the first opportunity, allowed to continue?

    A LAP, LEAP or NEAP in a new scheme that’s tucked away in an unobserved corner of a site to minimise noise to residents and give tick-box compliance to a local plan play policy is essentially meaningless. Meanwhile, the over-provision of car parking is often enabled and junctions and turning heads are designed to accommodate the largest and most infrequent vehicles that will visit a site.

    We won’t be able to raise healthy children if they can’t walk to the LEAP because the streets are designed as roads with no continuous pavements at junctions and sweeping radii that enable drivers to take turns at speed… and then park on the pavement.

    The inquiry report found that “One in five children aged 8-15 have a mental health disorder – and by the time they reach 15 years old, the UK’s children report having the lowest average life satisfaction compared with their peers in 26 other European countries. Too many of our children are unhappy, and too many are growing up in unhealthy environments that stifle their opportunities to develop well and thrive.”

    This. Is. Shameful!

    And this at a time when, secondly, the government has closed the Office for Place. The OfP was on track to create digital design tools to help cash and resource-strapped Councils create the very design codes that would support placemaking for children and young people. Is the government actually clear on what it wants and how to create it? Has it read the Equality Act?

    And thirdly, I note that in the Nordhavn district of Copenhagen, they are now championing the five-minute city. Yowza! The design philosophy here is “… now that we have all this infrastructure for walking, biking and public transit, is there still some room for cars?” In other words, the exact opposite of how we go about placemaking here in the UK.

    Do some people need to drive? Yes. Should they be prioritised at all times over everyone else? No.

    I suspect there are a lot of children out and about in Nordhavn. As Jan Gehl says: “… you see many children in a city like Copenhagen… if you see a city with many children and many old people, using the city, the public spaces, then it is a sign that there is a good quality for people in that particular city.”

    Enough said. You get what you invite.

    #placemaking #walking #cycling #larsriemann #jangehl #nordhavn #mentalhealth

  • Car dependency, sustainability and cycling in Copenhagen

    Car dependency, sustainability and cycling in Copenhagen

    [This content first appeared on LinkedIn on 4 December 2024]

    I note this week The New Economics Foundation have recently published a report entitled: Trapped Behind The Wheel – How England’s New Builds Lock Us Into Car Dependency.

    The UDG have conveniently summarized some of the main findings in their latest Urban Update. The drivers (no pun intended) behind this trend include:

    • Land value and condition, which favour cheaper greenfield land in a profit-driven housing development system
    • Relatively lower levels of local political opposition to new developments in more remote areas
    • A lack of early, integrated planning of transport, housing, and development sites, reinforced by substantial underfunding of public planning departments
    • Top-down local housing targets that act in combination with the factors above to produce development in the wrong places for sustainable transport

    To my mind, the third bullet is the kicker. 

    You simply cannot retrofit joined up active travel or public transport provision into a development. It has to be done upfront, at pre-app, in collaboration with all the relevant placemaking specialists who have hopefully read and understand Manual for Streets.

    There is clearly a huge disconnect between the incessant call for sustainable development and the regular use in a DAS of the words ‘active travel’ on the one hand and, the fact that, on the other, despite all the rhetoric, we still keep building in unsustainable locations, that are first and foremost car parks with houses squeezed in between. Any DAS that proudly proclaims a dual carriageway into a site as a ‘… formally designed… gateway’ is *checks notes* missing the point.

    Too much of what we’re approving and building just isn’t fit for sustainable purposes.

    I remember Jan Gehl in his ‘How to Build a Good City’ interview explaining how his then seven-year-old granddaughter, living in Copenhagen, could walk on her own all the way from home to school without ever having to step on a road due to the installation of continuous footways across side streets. What freedom and independence!

    Also, that his ten-year-old grandchildren are: “… allowed to go from one end of the city to the other because it is deemed safe for a little one who is ten and who has been bicycling around with mum and dad since they were five, now they can do it themselves. And that is very nice that you can be mobile early and also you can stay mobile a long time after the doctor has taken away your driver’s licence.” Something to ponder.

    Yet seven years on from his interview, we still can’t negotiate a dedicated cycle lane or 3m radii on a side road junction or a 20mph design speed (BfHL) let alone a continuous pavement, because a driver might get mad or a bin lorry might have to *gasp* cross into the opposite lane to make a turn.

    We have a long way to go, folks. Or maybe we should just move to Copenhagen.

    #placemaking #streets #streetdesign #cycling #cyclelanes #publictransport #jangehl #udg