Collective Vision

Danish architect and urban designer Jan Gehl pioneered a new anthropology-based approach to analysing the movements of the city, which became the foundation for the studio’s work.

Jeff Risom is chief innovation officer at Gehl, and tells us how that approach is evolving and expanding in the digital age.

From industrial and product design to website UX, embedding the ‘human experience’ has become central to the thinking of process engineers, salespeople and marketers and corporate boardrooms the world over. For many years the complex business of urban development has flirted with human-orientated design thinking, but it’s always remained a niche; a ‘little brother’ to the embedded forces at play across cities and regions.

Whilst the pioneering urban theorists and thinkers of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s – Jane Jacobs, William Whyte, Christopher Alexander and the founder of our practice, Jan Geh – pointed a way forward, the knowledge they exposed has proven difficult in practice. The human-orientated design of cities is a messy affair, and not one that is suited to the pressures of client deadlines and constraints of hourly consulting rates.

Nevertheless, for almost 20 years Gehl has made its way, crafting a methodology and tactics to measure people’s movements and behaviour in cities, and using that data as valuable evidence towards urban strategy, design and policy. Bolstered by technological advancements we now find ourselves grappling with ‘big’ data and the Internet of Things as tools that have the power to transform urban planning. We know that, alone, these tools might do more harm than good, but if used with people-orientated design intentions, we have a chance to promote a design practice that is based on the fundamental human needs we all share.

People-orientated design has made a comeback. But it’s a big leap from advocating, to doing, in the complex arena that is the built environment. Nevertheless, we see its potential to not only remedy past urban design failures, but provide the foundation for novel urban strategy and design that more accurately addresses the needs of people and planet.

We study public life. And this is difficult – hence the lack of real progression in this area since its original pioneers in the ‘70s and ‘80s. To understand a place, you have to collect data systematically from several locations, at different times and under different conditions. This is fine if you’re studying for the sake of studying, but it’s less practical under the constraints of commercial pressures.

Gehl’s anthropological approach shows that residents of Toronto prefer their public space to be active

© Gehl

Ours is a people-first approach, using everything from hand-held clickers to GIS layering, social media analysis, Streetview, AI and advanced sensor technology. It’s our job, as urban design and landscape professionals, to put tools together to uncover hidden patterns. These technologies and the layering of data sets gives us the opportunity to uncover connections between different systems and individual behaviours at a variety of urban scales.

Knowing what behaviour to study and where to observe it is a major barrier to new advances in the field. Over the years we’ve explored lowtech and, later, higher-tech ways of knowing where to look and what to look for. Inspired by work the City of Copenhagen undertook to examine citizens’ favourite places, we began to develop tools to more systematically measure people’s most treasured and travelled spots in their communities.

It’s both more positive and constructive than typical engagement – firstly by asking people what they love and want more of (rather than what they dislike and want to change) and because it asks citizens questions in which they’re the expert. Other forms of engagement often expect people to do the work of city officials and designers in project programming or prioritising design tradeoffs.

Our work is often district or even city-wide and the ‘favourite places’ approach gives us a map of places to explore in a community. After learning what places people love and why, we deploy our design team along with local volunteers, stakeholders and members of the client team to study those places and learn more about the spatial and social characteristics they have in common, and what are best suited to different contexts.

This creates a ‘user-generated quality criteria’ – effectively a citizen-led design brief full of values and principles, rather than prescriptive design traits and one that is authentically rooted in place. We learned, for example, that in Charlotte, people prefer laid back places to relax and unwind – much more than Torontonians, who prefer places to be active.

This gives us a method for constructively gathering individual preference – as applied to collective issues – more successfully than traditional approaches.

Planning a new São Paulo

© Centro Aberto, Gestão Urbana SP, Prefeitura de São Paulo

We meet citizens where they are – in the bus stations, beer gardens and dog parks, where people spend their time. We can speak and meet with people who have never previously attended official ‘citizen engagement’ meetings nor been asked asked their opinion of their community in a systematic way.

More recently we’ve turned to higher-tech tools such as social media analysis, layered with sophisticated GIS mapping. Given the need for privacy, these assessment tools allow us to break out of the stereotypes so dominant in traditional community meetings. Working with TANT Lab, a digital anthropology department at Aalborg University, we’ve been able to conduct post-demographic studies focusing on what people have in common or differ on in their digital lives, rather than making tired assumptions of people’s needs and concerns based on biased stereotypes of ethnicity, gender and age.

We paired people with differing political sentiments (individuals who responded positively and negatively to the same political statement) and gave these political antagonists unique user numbers. Then we analysed when and where people who tend to disagree on Facebook, actually might meet in the same physical place and might share the same interests in real life.

This macro scan revealed ‘bridging’ places that seem to invite for diversity that then allowed us to target our more time-consuming, in-person anthropological studies to these locations, to find out if these places really are bridging or not. When studied in person, we can ask more qualitative questions like: Are there different types of groups there? How can we apply post-demographic neutrality when we’re seeing people in real life and keenly aware of their ethnicity, age, and gender?

Plotting ‘favourite spots’ in Charlotte, North Carolina

© Gehl

While previously our focus was limited to public space and public life data, we’re adding these new layers of data insight to our arsenal. We’re building on this core and extending it to other layers including economic, spatial and social. We’ve partnered with UK-based RealWorth, which has devised clever and insightful metrics on social return on investments in the public realm, monetising the impact of improving people’s health and wellbeing, alongside the turnover of shops and restaurants.

Spatially we’re partnering with Harvard and Cornell based A-stra, which has devised machine learning algorithms and AI to analyse mass amounts of Streetview photos, providing city-wide insights into urban qualities such as human scale, sense of enclosure and visual connectivity to green space. And we’re partnering with camera vision company Numina, which has developed GDPR privacycompliant sensors that monitor both flows of modes of traffic and stationary activity – places where people spend time and the types of activities they partake in, whether sitting, standing or laying down. These partnerships blend our design sense with economic modelling, AI and machine learning. But they also give us a more holistic, complete and nuanced understanding of how well the public realm meets the needs of citizens.

Community planning in Charlotte, North Carolina

© Gehl

In the future, we plan to utilise more multi-disciplinary and holistic approaches to better understand how people interact with systems that we share in cities. From food systems and energy networks to water resources, there are numerous shared systems where landscape architects – and designers and anthropologists – will benefit from understanding how people interact with them.

Currently, most of these interact in the thinking, research and work being done in the field of circular economy. We see a huge opportunity in this field, where momentum from across the public and private sectors is gaining steam. Yet we can also see that the movement is prioritising micro-technology (nutrient looping and material science innovation) and the macro-biological understanding (material flows at a regional scale), leaving the human scale of people and their behaviour largely out of focus.

We’re plugging this gap by developing an innovative experiment with new ways of promoting sustainable food systems (production, distribution and consumption) in dense urban areas in Copenhagen. We’re using social media, socio-demographic and public life data to map patterns of food consumption and behaviour to produce leading edge entrepreneurial prototyping and citizen engagement.

Residents of Charlotte, North Carolina, want their public space to be a laid back place where they can relax and unwind

© Gehl

Our vision is of a future city where people’s everyday behaviour contributes to regenerative economies, where individual actions positively contribute to collective flourishing. New forms of production – like food, and more – might shape new inclusive micro-economies and bring people together in places previously only thought useful for consumption activities, like high streets. Distribution can be channeled through excess capacity in existing systems, enabled through high-tech means like distributed web (blockchain) and lowtech means, like community hubs for reuse and exchange of goods.

We envision a city where urban culture is like bike culture in Copenhagen today: where the most convenient, accessible and affordable options for the individual are also the ones that are the most sustainable and beneficial for the collective.

Partner and Chief Innovation Officer at Gehl, Jeff Risom is also an active teacher and lecturer, speaking at conferences around the world.