Jan Gehl's belief in ‘cities for people’ is now internationally recognised. This unusual paperback from Danish Architectural Press pays tribute to the urbanist and his vision of cities in a very personal way – namely through his own stories.
Text: Sandra Hofmeister
Jan Gehl is a philanthropist. The Danish architect and urban planner is now 89 years old; his theories are internationally recognised and respected. Finally, because that wasn't always the case! As a pioneer of the ‘city for people’, Gehl opposed the influential concept of the car-friendly city. Even in Europe, many cities still suffer from a naïve fascination with cars, which was often implemented in the 1960s and 1970s using a clear-cutting approach. Instead of noisy and exhaust-filled traffic corridors, Gehl advocated lively public spaces that offer qualities for pedestrians and cyclists – as places for social interaction and lingering. Short distances without the car are crucial because they organise everyday life in a people-friendly way.
Urban quality of life
The quality of life defined by urban planner Jan Gehl can be clearly measured in the age of KPIs: How long do people linger in a square? How long do they use the seating in public spaces? How many social contacts do they have there and which different population groups use the space? The goals that Gehl had in mind for urban planning for people should apply today to every investor, every municipality and every urban planning office. Unfortunately, however, the reality is different in many places.
Pioneer with a fan base
´s a pioneer in urban planning, Gehl has a large international fan base. This is partly because he has advised over 250 cities, including Stockholm, Moscow, São Paulo and Singapore. The urbanist taught at Harvard and Berkeley, was a professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen for many years and has influenced an entire generation of urban planners and architects. His firm, Gehl Architects, is now simply called Gehl and continues its work.
Gehl's theories transcend generations. Some of his former partners and students now hold influential positions. Camilla van Deurs, who co-authored the book ‘A Good City. The Short Story’ with Jan Gehl, earned her doctorate under Gehl, later became a partner in his office and was Copenhagen's city architect from 2014 to 2019. Today, she is a partner at Nordic Office for Architecture.
Nordic sagas
In her foreword, she recalls Jan Gehl's popular and entertaining lectures. He used anecdotes and stories from his everyday life to sharpen understanding of the interplay between urban everyday life and public space. ‘Jan's stories are like Nordic sagas,’ says Camilla van Deurs. And since they had only been passed down orally until now, she and Jan Gehl himself took it upon themselves to write them down. ‘The time has come to put them into print, so that even more people can enjoy them.’ says van Deurs. That may sound strange at first: can lectures even be ‘enjoyed’? But when reading the short anecdotes and stories from the Gehl family's life, published in this 84-page book together with personal photos from the urban planner's private archive, this is exactly the effect they have. ‘A Good City. The Short Story’ is not specialist literature for urban planners, but an exciting collection of everyday memories and life experiences, told vividly and without technical jargon in short texts. ‘Literature for people,’ I thought as I read it. The principles of urban planning can be explained in such an exciting and simple way, and they are so impressively anchored in everyday life!
Anecdotes from everyday life
There is, for example, the story of the young Gehl family, who moved to Toronto in the 1970s and discovered how important a veranda is for getting to know your neighbours – a community into which the Gehls were quickly accepted. Or the dinner clubs and orchestra in Vanløse, a suburb of Copenhagen, where the Gehls later lived. After a fire at the daycare centre, 60 children had to be cared for privately overnight – this emergency gave rise to numerous neighbourhood initiatives that are still alive and well 40 years later, such as the neighbourhood orchestra in which Gehl played the trombone.
‘A good city is like a good party’
Personal experiences – such as planned and unplanned everyday life – are mixed in this collection of short observations from Jan Gehl's life to form an explosive mixture of universally valid observations of everyday urban life. ‘Something happens because something happens because something happens’ is one of the bon mots that Jan Gehl picks up on, and another is ‘Walking can be much more than going for a walk’. ‘A good city is like a good party,’ says Gehl elsewhere. ‘People stay longer than planned because they feel comfortable.’
Social interaction
This unusual and highly recommended paperback is a compendium of observations of everyday life, but much more than just experiences in urban spaces. They reveal the central principles of social interaction in the city and thus the basis for a quality of life that had been lost sight of for too long.
Camilla van Deurs and Jan Gehl, A Good City. The Short Story, Danish Archictural Press, 84 pages, paperback, Kopenhagen 2025, ISBN 978-877-407-330-7
