In the 1960s, urban planners began designing cities for cars, as a result of the increase in car ownership, mainly because of the advance of technology-reducing costs and the over-existence of banking credits. The structure of cities had to respond to this increase in traffic. This meant creating more capacity for parking, building new highways, and increasing the lanes on the streets in order to reduce travel time. People on the streets were forgotten; pedestrians started to walk between cars, and the use of bicycles in most major cities became impossible.
The consequences of the “car invasion” for big cities were very serious, making cities more dangerous, grayer, less healthy, and, in the end, less livable. Jan Gehl is a Danish urban planner and researcher who has worked in many cities, thinking about how we can make them more sustainable, while at the same time developing them for people. Here are some of Gehl’s ideas:
People Cities = Sustainable Cities
Gehl uses the metaphor of “killing two birds with one stone,” but amplifies this to five birds, with livable cities for people the metaphorical “stone” and the birds representing more lively, attractive, safe, sustainable, and healthy cities (it’s a crude image, but functions to show how the idea works). If we achieve these five goals, we’ll start turning cities into more livable places where you meet and see people in the streets.
Gehl’s theory is based on increasing a city’s ease of movement and viability for pedestrians and cyclists by connecting the city with a good public transportation network, provoking less stress, less noise, less pollution and more interaction among people.
Jan Gehl’s Principles of Places for People
Rio + 20 Summit Conference findings
I recently attended the Rio + 20 summit conference: “the Sustainable City; expressions of the 21st century”, where Gehl spoke and used the example of Copenhagen to show his ideas and theories. Since 1962, the city of Copenhagen has been making its main streets more pedestrian friendly, resulting in an amazing 2 to 3 percent reduction in parking per year. Such actions were effective because the authorities listened to the people on the street. They started to use the model of two sidewalks, two bike lanes and two two-way car lanes.
The results from Copenhagen’s success:
- 37 percent of people use bikes
- 27 percent of people use cars
- 33 percent of people use public transportation
- 5 percent of people walk
The success has been amazing, and these ideas have been emulated in numerous cities all over the world, including Melbourne and New York, with similar results. How can we take these ideas and implement them in the cities of developing countries like México City or Rio de Janeiro?
The success has been amazing and these ideas have been emulated in numerous cities all over the world, like Melbourne and New York, with similar results. How can we take these ideas and implement them in the cities of developing countries like México City or Rio de Janeiro?
Activists paint guerrilla bike lane in Mexico
In many cases, disused train tracks in urban areas are often converted into bike lanes (such as in Mexico’s Federal District a number of years ago). As such practices gained popularity, doubts arose because most of the bike lanes were in marginal neighborhoods and many didn’t implement a security plan. In the end, it turned out that almost no one used such bike lanes because of the danger, unlike in Copenhagen, where it is probably easier to get struck by a lightning than to be robbed on the streets.
How Rio de Janeiro solved their planning woe
In Rio de Janeiro, we face a very similar problem: It’s one of the most beautiful cities in the world, known as “A cidade maravilhosa”, and it’s perfect to walk through and to find some places for relaxing or to contemplate the landscape, but creating little spots to sit and to gather people together often creates hot spots for pickpockets, and having bike lanes through the city’s tunnels is just the way to enter into the wolf’s mouth.
As citizens of these cities, we can see that municipalities are not doing the research needed and they are implementing many measures without exploring society’s needs. In Rio, we find a city projected for the foreign visitors and not for the Cariocas (native inhabitants of the city of Rio de Janeiro), letting small elements of change inside the city to appease the voters, and in México City just to create impressive numbers to show off in international conferences to keep the budget for urban projects, without doing the research to relieve all the problems that Defeños (people from Mexico City’s Federal District) have to face every day.
Famous yellow tram going up the hill in the Santa Teresa neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro
We are learning and experimenting; nobody knows the correct answer, but we can see that the same mistake is being made: Projects from different places were copied without thinking about the place that would receive them, because of the success they achieved in the first city. We must take into account the environmental, cultural, political, and social characteristics of each place to understand the problems; the differences between them are crucial to generate better cities for people. That’s why I like the idea of Gehl’s birds: He crosses a lot of variables to resolve the problems and thinks in the long term, not in a political period (from four to six years), listening to the people who live in the cities, the actual citizens — the ones who will ultimately be affected by such measures.
No comments:
Post a Comment