Designing the Human City
In this guest blog, Gehl Architects explores how to make cities for people. This include working with a range of clients and collaborators to ensure that cities not only ensure that people get to where they need to be, but also are places of equitable access, affordable living and offer a diverse and vibrant public life.
Public life is what we create collectively when we meet outside of our homes, cars, and offices out in the public realm. Yet, in order to deliver a thriving public life, as practitioners we need to collaborate at an interdisciplinary level and create tangible solutions for the largest challenges facing cities today such as climate change, growing rates of lifestyle diseases and affordability.
Like you, we attend many conferences and to address these seemingly impossible challenges we wanted to do something a little different. We were invited by Techfestival in Copenhagen to facilitate a one-day summit for conference participants. Techfestival’s ambition is to break away from the typical conference mold, and in doing so, we created a facilitated forum for a multi-disciplinary group to make action-oriented solutions for human cities.
Interdisciplinary groups from public and private sectors with different skillsets and backgrounds such as architecture, technology, behavioral economics, and public health gathered to create tangible solutions for cities based on business model thinking, resulting in solutions that could be ready to prototype and scale. We partnered with urban experts from TANT Lab, InBetween Economies, Demos Helsinki, StudioWeave and Copenhagen Municiaplity to explore the themes of affordable housing, non-demographic sentiment metrics, food system impact on healthy neighborhoods and innovation within smart city technology.
Based on the outcomes of the Human City Summit, Gehl will continue to explore each of these themes in our own work and will be using insights from each group to help orient our direction. Here is a quick recap of what each group discussed:
· Healthy Neighborhoods · The group aspired to zoom in on at least one aspect of the food system that can create local value. Through analyzing the food system at a local context, they broke down what kind of activities at a group, organization or individual level we can influence through either our behavior or entrepreneurial service in the surrounding food system. They challenged how we interact with the food system and what choices people make — because in order to influence people’s bevaior we must make healthy choices easy. The three groups proposed Airbnb style community kitchens, local seasonal campaigns to raise awareness to reduce production of carbon, and connecting shops directly to farms in a closed circular system.
· Anti-Fragile Cities · The group wanted to make cities resilient to the concept of shocks. It questioned the rate of change of technology and the rate of change of human needs and psychology. In the era of increasing volatility, it is important to engage more people in decision-making and increase urban flexibility. They proposed inclusive public consultation toolkits and ‘Innovation Plots’ that could be municipally owned and used on temporary construction sites for local engagement. Creating value for leasers, universities and researchers, and the public sector. Trying out new concepts for building, design, and businesses at a low cost, whilst generating knowledge, testing policy ideas and an innovation-led increase in tourism.
· Inclusive Urban Development · The group discussed the major challenges facing life in the city of the 21st century. Finite, exclusive and expensive land is making it impossible for smaller developers to invest in developments and are not responsive to current individual or collective citizen needs. The group found that the proposed social impact of trust, that instrumentalizes a wider range of values such as health, togetherness, and education, is incredibly important to consider, rather than just housing.
· Post Demographic metrics in the Human City · The facilitators started out by introducing the group members to post-demographic data. The rest of the day was spent on developing and discussing research questions and possible protocols to answer them. Focus was spread through the three topics of the summit, where group members tried to make lists of keywords to search for, and ways to combine the data to make meaningful visualizations. Ultimately, the group settled on one protocol to be further explored by the facilitators in the months to come. The ambition was to create a loneliness/happiness index based on what users write in Facebook posts and comments, and then tie the index to physical locations in Copenhagen by comparing the lonely/happy users with attendees of events.
We want to thank all who participated in this event. We were equally inspired and enthused.
