There are tools in Jan’s book, How to Study Public Life, but because Gehl Institute’s mission is about making public life easy to adopt, we wanted to make it even easier for people to access. We wanted to combine those two things: the data and the ways to gather it. And even if designers want to use that information, trying to figure out how to gather it themselves is challenging. Design too often happens without that information. There aren’t a lot of urban designers who are collecting data about people and public space, and we think that’s a fundamental first step. The Gehl practice has been evolving these tools for years, in many cities, using them, and helping their clients to use them. Last week I talked to Shin-pei Tsay, executive director of the Gehl Institute, about the tools and what her group hopes to accomplish with them. Recently the institute published what it describes as “tools for measuring public space and public life, in the form of free, downloadable worksheets.” The toolkit is beautifully executed. Two and a half years ago his firm, Gehl, launched a nonprofit arm, Gehl Institute, dedicated to public engagement, and the use and creation of public urban space as a tool of both economic development and political equity.
He helped his home city of Copenhagen become a kind of model for walkable urbanism and has consulted for cities all over the world. If we were setting up a related category for credentialed planners, then the great Danish urbanist Jan Gehl might just top that list inspired by the ideas of Jacobs, the architect and urban designer has spent nearly a half century studying and writing about public space. Jane Jacobs was arguably the most important “citizen” planner in the 20th century.
0 kommentar(er)
