If You Build It, They Will Come -- on Foot

By Jay Walljasper, Ode. Posted February 18, 2006.

It's a dark and wintry night in Copenhagen, and the streets are bustling. The temperature stands above freezing, but winds blow hard enough to knock down a good share of the bicycles parked all around. Scandinavians are notorious for their stolid reserve, but it's all smiles and animated conversation here as people of many ages and affiliations stroll through the city center on a Thursday evening.

A knot of teenage boys, each outfitted with a slice of pizza, swagger down the main pedestrian street. Older women discreetly inspect shop windows for the coming spring fashions. An accomplished balalaika player draws a small crowd in a square as he jams with a very amateur guitarist. Earnest young people collect money for UNICEF relief efforts. A surprising number of babies in strollers are out for a breath of fresh January air. Two African men pass by, pushing a piano. Several stylishly dressed women sit at the edge of a waterless fountain, talking on mobile phones. Candlelit restaurants and cafes beckon everyone inside.

"Cultures and climates differ all over the world," notes architect Jan Gehl, "but people are the same. They will gather in public if you give them a good place to do it." Gehl, an urban design professor at the Danish Royal Academy of Fine Arts and international consultant, has charted the progress of Copenhagen's central pedestrian district since it opened in 1962. At that time cars were overrunning the city, and the pedestrian zone was conceived as a way to bring vitality back to the declining urban center. "Shopkeepers protested vehemently that it would kill their businesses," he recalls, "but everyone was happy with it once it started. Some now even claim it was their idea."

The pedestrian zone has been expanded a bit each year ever since, with parking spaces gradually removed and biking and transit facilities improved. Cafes, once thought to be an exclusively Mediterranean institution, have become the center of Copenhagen's social life. Gehl documents that people's use of the area has more than tripled over the past 40 years. The pedestrian district is now the thriving heart of a reinvigorated city.

Copenhagen's comeback gives hope to growing numbers of citizens around the world who want to make sure that lively public places don't disappear in this era of rampant traffic, proliferating malls, heightened security measures, overpowering commercialization and the general indifference of many who think the internet and their own families can provide all the social interaction they need.

While only a century ago streets almost everywhere were crowded with people, many are now nearly empty -- especially in the fast-growing suburbs sprouting all over the globe, but in some older towns and cities, too. Walking through the center of certain North American communities can be a profoundly alienating experience, as if the whole place had been evacuated for an emergency that no one told you about.

Even in the crowded urban quarters of Asia and Africa, public spaces are suffering under the onslaught of increasing traffic and misguided development plans imported from the West. The decline of public places represents a loss far deeper than simple nostalgia for the quiet, comfortable ways of the past. "The street, the square, the park, the market, the playground are the river of life," explains Kathleen Madden, one of the directors of the New York-based Project for Public Spaces, which works with citizens around the world to improve their communities.

Public spaces are favorite places to meet, talk, sit, look, relax, play, stroll, flirt, eat, drink, smoke, peoplewatch, read, soak in sunshine and feel part of a broader whole. They are the starting point for all community, commerce and democracy. Indeed, on an evolutionary level, the future of the human race depends on public spaces. It's where young women meet and court with young men -- an essential act for the propagation of the species.

Numerous studies in fields ranging from social psychology to magazine cover design have proved that nothing grabs people's attention more than other people, especially other people's faces. We are hard-wired with a desire for congenial places to gather. That's why it's particularly surprising how much we overlook the importance of public places today.

"If you asked people 20 years ago why they went to central Copenhagen, they would have said it was to shop," observes Jan Gehl, sitting in the former navy barracks that houses his "urban quality" consulting firm Gehl + Associates. "But if you asked them today, they would say, it was because they wanted to go to town." That small change of phrase represents the best hope for the future of public spaces. Historically, Gehl explains, public spaces were central to everyone's lives. It's how people traveled about town, where they shopped and socialized.

Jay Walljasper is the executive editor of Ode magazine.

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