Jan Gehl And His Study To Raise The Quality Of Life In Cities

Jan Gehl and his study to raise the quality of life in cities

Introduction

Jan Gehl, architect, has focused his career on the study to raise the quality of life in cities. Inspired by this, the documentary (The Human Scale) is a reflection of life in cities. The cities remain attractive spotlights in search of a better life, it is estimated that in 2050 up to 80% of the world’s world population in cities (compared to current 50%), but cities also have great problems of pollution andlack of communication.

His ideas are inspired by architects, urbanists, politicians and thinkers around the world. Thinking about a science fiction film of the twentieth century, where the mega city is already a reality, there will soon be gigaciudadas. The human being does not fit the click of modernity, it is warm, intimate, social. In search of opportunities, we migrate to cities, weighing as we lived formerly, speaking of small cities, villages, the natural state of man is to relate to people

Developing

Le Corbusier was the father of the modern movement, China is the country that in terms of economy grows faster than the rest of the world. In the last 30 years it changes very quickly, as the doors are opening, the people who migrate from the villages to the cities must be adapted to the lifestyle. At present it is known the growth it is having, the homes are in the periphery of the cities, which indicates that people must move daily to their work that are in the center of the city.

Traditional Chinese housing had large courtyards, here question is how it affects daily life that changes the aspects that we are accustomed to seeing. Vehicle consumption makes growth exaggerated. As the city becomes bigger, that requires moving longer from one place to another, this causes tiredness and that people do not relate, reaching the point of even knowing the neighbors.

The housing of the 60s were designed so that it would return to the isolated human. People’s behavior patterns were noticed when street traffic was eliminated. The more roads are built, the more traffic there are, then they concluded that if the different types of citizens were made more pedestrian space.

Copenhagen has 350km of bicycle lanes, 35% of pedaling citizens and 24% drive. New York, the method of studying the human living was applied in NY in 2007. The image of NY always has been that of a taxi, those who made traffic had become the most powerful people in the city. 90% were dedicated to cars and 10% to people, but here the problem was that 90% was used by pedestrians and 10% of cars then should be recalulated. The plan was to define a bike road network for the surroundings. Although there was denial. In Los Angeles 100,000 people a year claim circulations for bikes.

Everyone likes to live in houses with garden, but people end up understanding that the investment of a home outside the cities was an extra expense. Can you redesign a living city?, The streets became a living room where people like to go out to live together.

50 years ago the city of Daca was like Venice, but Daca has been growing over the years, it is the fastest city is growing in the world, every year half a million people move to Daca, follow a model basedIn housing tower, impressive energy consumption, vehicles and large buildings. When the government removes the rigshows, but because of this many people are left without employment, believing that this would cause the city to decongest without taking into account the percentages of people who need them, only 5% of the population occupy their cars their carsindividuals and 35% use the rigshows. Here people manifest them so that there are fewer cars, free themselves from economic colonialism forces. It is located in a highly seismic area, if an earthquake occur.

In 2011 he suffered a devastating earthquake, most victims were in towers and skyscrapers. The impulse after the earthquake was to rebuild everything again, lift the buildings, leave them as they were before. But what happens after a disaster, requires a lot. The city center is called the red zone, nobody has access to that area, it is so serious that all that area must be demolished. Approximately 1500 buildings were there, so they must disappear.

The idea of a program in which everyone could share ideas helped rebuild a new future. People wanted a low height city, spaces where they could relate, bike lanes and gardens, they wanted a city for people, not for cars, they didn’t want more buildings. There were only emotional memories, the inhabitants were filled with stories. The reconstruction plan has become a problem since landowners did not want to sell. The ideal were 6 floors which was the best performance, since that helped the foundations. The higher you are in a building, people have less social life. The new opportunity to build a city that reflects the needs of the inhabitants is lost. The dilemma was complex, the cities get up to last 100 or 1000 years. The government thought of turning Christchurch a new angels, to attract the economy.

Developing

The growth of cities in the second half of the twentieth century was based on providing adequate homes, work spaces, transport networks, leaving aside the basic human needs of interaction, which happens on the floor of cities outside thebuildings and cars.

Jan Gehl is undoubtedly one of the current Copenhagen parents. Today, 37% of the population uses the bicycle as the main means of transport, thanks to policies that facilitate the mobility of the pedestrian and bicycles and restrict the access and movement of cars. Copenhagen is European Green Capital 2014 and has obtained innumerable recognitions in ecological urbanism, Greenitie.

People must take the street, claim what is theirs, make the street the living room of their home, where all relationships are possible. The documentary gives Manhattan’s example, after an management plan and transportation plan, it is decided, through small ephemeral interventions, to invade the road with public spaces, so that Broadway, one of the busiest streets in New York at the level at levelof transport (but also of people) ends up returning to the population the space that by law belongs to an inhabitant of any city since the city is for people.

In Copenhage something similar happens, the last surveys conducted date a higher percentage of people pedaling the percentage of people who drive, but after surveys they did not take into account any type of bicycle, so that only the streets were drawn up according to thecars. You measure what you care and that is that the private transport business would not give in to the use of the bike as well as.

Jan Gehl admires the comfort found in the old town of Italian cities, compare the speed with which you move in those spaces with the speed of any modern city of today. Maybe there is something in the stagy-dynamicity of the cities that it makes the first much more comfortable to travel than the latter.

In cities like Melbourne, a virtue is made of the defect;The Australian capital was becoming a ghost city, people avoided the center of the city and was isolated on the periphery, forming their life around their home and at most its garden. It is then that, of the most feared and dangerous spaces of Melbourne, the alleys, the city is reborn, using the spatial qualities of these areas always protected and in shadow, coffee shops are formed that invite the citizen to interact. The alleys become the hall of our houses.

We must examine our cities in detail and reuse and reconvert what we already have in something productive and functional, something according to the human scale.

The capital of Bangladesh currently experiences alarming growth figures, of the 170 million inhabitants (and increasing) that the country has, 1000 people a day emigrate to the capital. The mass of inhabitants is accommodated as can be overwhelmed by the automobile industry, which gradually eats the main means of traditional transport, the Rickshaw, which generates a large amount of employment in the capital. Without rickshaws, unemployment and use of private transport increases. The quality of life decreases considerably by increasing pollution and reducing the salaries of the inhabitants.

The city is not for cars to live, there are already manifesters in Daca who are aware that cars cannot invade the space where they should be living in. It is not a city to survive, but a city to live. Favor public transport and allow the construction of more sidewalks is a key factor in the human scale.

After the earthquake in the New Zealand city of CC, the city inhabitants had two options. The first one, rebuild the city as was before the earthquake. The second, take advantage of the catastrophe to improve the standard of living of Christchurch inhabitants. Therefore, those who lived in the city were asked, as they wanted it to be in the not too distant future, and thanks to a member of Jan Gehl Architects this could be done more or less reality. A city customized by its inhabitants;Low height, with bike lane, small shopping centers in favor of an increase in public spaces ..

The documentary shows reflections of people concerned with improving life in cities, Copenhagen (Denmark), New York (USA), Chongqing (China), Melbourne (Australia), Daca (Bangladesh) or Christchurch (New Zealand) are some of thereference cities to analyze and reflect on the documentary.

Today, the economic stagnation surrounded by a sea of poverty and social exclusion is debated in underdeveloped countries, otherwise, countries developed from the 1929 crisis show their growth from models of models ofEconomic development as theoretical support of administrative thinking captured for management practices;It was useful.

Methodologically the investigation was oriented in the qualitative approach to the phenomenological analysis of the data found in documentary reviews. The results determined that management practices are based on classical and contemporary organizational theories focused on efficiency and productivity principles.

From contemporary theories, a dynamism with social and environmental approaches, its foundation the human scale with thinkers: Weber, Elton Mayo, reformists and other thinkers, which taken into account for management practices focused on sufficiency manifest interest in the approachdevelopment at human scale

Surely we have rarely stopped to think about how cities condition our life, our habits, our relationships. Currently 50 percent of the world’s population lives in urban areas, and by 2050 that percentage will increase to 80 percent.

The architect Jan Gehl has been studying human behavior in cities for 40 years, documenting how modern cities repel human interaction. Its conclusion is that we can build better cities that serve our needs and not on the contrary. And he is not any architect, but the one who inspired the modern planning of Copenhagen, the creation of pedestrian or lanes-bici streets in the Nordic country.

conclusion

In short, what the documentary wants to convey is the claiming spirit in the people who inhabit a certain city, how we should fight for the place where we live and not show ourselves indifferent to the changes that multinationals do by business in them. Remind us that the city is for us, that despite its dimensions, it must accommodate our needs and maintain the human scale.