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Danish architect Jan Gehl is respected around the world for his
humanistic approach to city design. In Adelaide briefly last month, he
spoke to Amanda Ward about his passion for getting people out of their cars and back on their feet.
Jan Gehl is happy to be in Adelaide and relishing the chance to co-present with Thinker in Residence Laura Lee. Whereas Lee is focussed on interdisciplinary relationships and strategy to draw together the threads that will lead to intelligent development, Jan’s passion is on the pavement and in the bicycle lanes.
“I envisage that Adelaide will be one of the cities that is overripe for a bicycle culture. Many cities have a policy of saying, blatantly, that in this city everything will be done to encourage people to walk or ride as part of their everyday movements so they won’t have to go to the fitness centre. It is very good for sustainability, Co2 emissions and personal health,” says Gehl.
“I worked with improving cities for many, many years. I worked here (in Adelaide) in 2002 and we are going to start a new study shortly to pick up on the old ones, to build up the momentum like we have done in Melbourne, Perth and Sydney. Next thing we can see is that cities are really turning around and realising that 50 years of cheap petroleum is over and we cannot go on. We have to do something else.”
Gehl is currently consulting to New York City which, despite not having a bicycle culture, has set itself a goal to exchange one million cars a day in and out of the city limits for one million bicycles. According to Gehl, this decision solves four problems: increasing sustainability, improving health and safety and adding to the social atmosphere of the city, making it a more pleasant and inviting environment for people who live and work there.
In Adelaide, Gehl points out our prioritising of vehicles, both moving and parked, as a major stumbling block to improving the ambiance of the city. However, with a quick diagram, he demonstrates that the solution is as simple as painting the lines on the road in a slightly different order.
“Instead of having cars that arrive at angle to curb, change to parallel – not as many parking spaces- good. Then you can have a bicycle lane. I talked today about the Copenhagen style bicycle lanes,” he explains. He goes on to point out that by working with the cars as being the immovable element in the equation, the attempt to incorporate bicycles into the city was doomed to failure.
“The good mayor painted a line here and a line here and painted a bike sign here,” he says, drawing a diagram of our current bike lane system. “In Copenhagen we use the parked cars to take care of the bikes,” he says, drawing an alternative streetscape where the bike lane runs next to the footpath and parked cars parallel to that.
“That is what is happening in many other cities. This (Adelaide’s bike lanes) is a token gesture because whenever (a car) is backing out, they cross the bike lane. It is because first they had the parked cars and then they thought about the bikes. They have not really thought it out. In Sydney they are doing it this way (Copenhagen style) now.”
Gehl’s next consultancy is in Asia. “A big challenge is with developing cultures and these answers are very applicable to them too. The next city I am going to work for is Hanoi. They have regretted that they let the bicycles go and let everyone have motorbikes. They want to stop the move from personal energy to fossil energy.”
Gehl’s enthusiasm for human-powered transport is tangible and as he points out in reference to his New York project with a laugh “If they can make it there, they can make it anywhere”.
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