The Human Scale

This blog is based on the video film "The Human Scale' by Andreas M. Dalsgaard and presented by 'Final Cut for Real'. The architect Jan Gehl has studied and written about cities for people for 40 years. I came across this video through my Urban Studies class and was so moved by it that I couldn't waste the opportunity to write about it. This blog will just be a narration of the video and nothing more. The lines and quotes in the movie are really inspiring so might as well help me remember if I write them here. You could watch the video to relate to it on a much different level. It's available on YouTube under the name  'The Human Scale'. 

Imagine a science fiction film in a cold distant Urban landscape. Imagine that we live in that future right now. The mega city is the reality, giga cities are soon to be. Amidst this cold bleak vision of the future, we have the human being. It doesn't fit the cliche of modernity. It is personal, warm, intimate, and social, in our search for opportunities, money, and a better life we move to the cities but just the way we built cities invades human interaction, inclusion, and intimacy. What is the scale for measuring happiness in a city? 

Chapter 1: First we shape our cities then our cities shape us. 

Around 1960 where the economic boom and the industrial age in the Western countries really took off and people started moving from the countryside to the cities and there was a housing shortage. 

China- This country was more about agriculture but in the last 30 years the doors have been opened to the entire world and the Chinese people are moving to the cities therefore urbanisation is a real challenge and it is changing very fast. All the people moving into the city have to customize themselves according to the city and have to change their living styles accordingly. Today we can see the process of urbanisation most strongly in China. Here, people undergo the same modernization as the Western countries but in a lesser timeframe. New Housing Developments are built on the fringes of the city and people commute to work in the centre. The high-rise business districts drive the economy and have become the signature image of a modern Chinese city. This change also lost a lot of older city characteristics such as the small neighborhood concept. Traditional Chinese houses, the hutong were arranged around courtyards and Louise. How does it affect us as people when a physical landscape changes? When a social corridor, a neighborhood corner, or an occasional meeting corner disappears. The consumption of cars and real estate is the main generator of growth worldwide. It's the national Chinese policy to build roads and highways to maintain high growth. In the coming decade, the number of vehicles is expected to multiply by fivefold. In this growth it is really important to look at how those things support people and if this is the right thing to help Chinese people. Despite the disappearance of traditional lifestyles, big modern cities are successful growth engines that have helped 300 million Chinese out of poverty and into a better living standard. When the city becomes bigger so does your commute. You have to spend more and more time on your commute because you're traveling such long-distance every day and that takes so much time out of your day. When you get home it is already dark and you are so tired that you have hardly any energy left to socialize. Nowadays, people don't even know their neighbors well. One could do more human-oriented planning. You should think from the first-person perspective, if you were to live here what kind of life would you want, and how much time you would like to spend on commuting, your hobbies, meeting people, and socializing. 

Chapter 2: You measure what you care about 

Copenhagen, Denmark- In 1960 Copenhagen went through the same modernization as China today. The setting of the residences was very boring, there were lawns but there was no activity, no shops, or anything. Just you, and the grass, and the sky. It was made so you could have isolation perfectly. Since the 1940s city planning had been structured around the motor car. The traffic flow was documented systematically to improve the speed and efficiency of cars. Yankee decided to develop a different set of data that could challenge the single-minded focus on traffic flow. After the study, people's behavior patterns in public spaces became obvious when cars were pushed out of the main street of Copenhagen. As more and more streets were pedestrianized over the years. Yankee studies how these changes influence people's behavior. As more streets were pedestrianized, he documented systematically how public life multiplied. If there are spaces we feel invited to, it becomes our space. Then there's the possibility of meeting people from different layers of society and from different lifestyles. Being urban is to be able to cope with the meeting of strangers. It is seen that in cities, where there is a lack of public spaces, people are very interested in refining and rekindling the idea of public space and doing things when they are not in their private homes. The cities have completely privatized their lives.

New York - Like many other North American cities, New York had focused entirely on traffic efficiency and built a gigantic system of highways that connected with suburban homes hours away. While planning, separating a city into work, play, life, and leisure is not what makes a city great. Building highways and highways for the convenience of transportation isn't what makes a city urban. There was a need to make New York a greener city. The image of Times Square was also fast-moving taxis. New York City had a very dominant car culture. The DOT had never measured pedestrian traffic, they'd only been counting cars. There was no quantitative tool to measure the pedestrian experience. To study how they're spending time in the streets and what type of activities they are engaging in. 90% of the roadway was allocated to cars while only 10% was allocated to pedestrians. Whereas only 10% of cars use this roadway and about 90% of pedestrians. So, the math needed to be changed. There was no seating space on Broadway and a lot of these problems could have been solved by just simple observations. The streets were underperforming and were not worthy of world-class cities. The plan was to define new ways to move traffic. To pedestrianize Broadway and Times Square, a network of bike lanes would be built to connect other streets. Overnight, the streets were closed and chairs were put in and there was a huge latent demand that just swooped into this area. New York has 50 million visitors now and Times Square is a tourist favorite. There are bike lanes everywhere that are being used daily. The idea of city or city streets had been transformed forever. A good city has an organic connection between people and infrastructure.

Chapter 3: How do you do more with less? 

Chongqing, China- One of the many cities known for its skyline. The downtown area of Chongqing is defined by a peninsula much like Manhattan, here the roads follow the lengths of the peninsula rather than cross it. A new plan for a new pedestrian network to crisscross the downtown area was developed. 

Sienna, Italy- Documenting and counting people and studying them as where they were standing, whether they preferred the sun or shade to figure out why was Italy so famous for being such a nice place for people. While walking, you can see all the details, colors, smells, acoustics and everything is always very interesting. 

Melbourne, Australia- In the suburbs, most of the stuff is made so that the cars would be happy, so you need big roads, big signals, big turning radius. That is a different scale as compared to the scale of a walking man. I think everybody would love to live in a house with a garden and a yard but when it comes to how much it costs you and how much time and energy you have to put in, you start to rethink the choices. Living in a suburb is not anymore a good investment because what used to be the elder generation's idea of investment is not our idea of investment. There is a study that says that rolling out houses like carpet is actually going to create ghettos of the future which will make people ill, which will have poorer health outcomes. In the 1980s the city of Melbourn was dying so they asked the people what they wanted in the city. Why would they choose to walk, if they had a car, why would they choose to socialize and not isolate? Rob Addams discovered the solution to the problems. The laneways were the crappiest places. It felt unsafe and it was the backside of buildings with air conditioners popping out and dumpsters but it had a nice human scale to them. So by opening up the building to the side and adding cafes, pubs, and shops, it completely changed the life of the city. So the streets were transformed into living rooms. Now, how do you cater to the increasing population? How do you locate more than a billion people in an already crowded place? What is the consequence of this urbanization in 20 years? So there is nothing to fear from growth there is from unplanned growth and if we start to address how we make people happy, how do we make the city financially viable. To plan for this and build infrastructure, we neither have that time nor money so we have to consider how to do more with less. 

Chapter 4: Walking towards chaos created by yourself. 

Dhaka, Bangladesh - If you could just control and conserve our potential resources, Dhaka could be a wonderful city. Dhaka is the fastest growing city in the world and to adapt to the situations it is adopting the concepts of highways, high rise construction, but why do we have to copy a Western world and paste it into a planning process. This notion destroys the original flavor that the particular city could have. In 2005, the government banned rickshaws from certain roads to reduce the traffic on that street. Not realizing that 37% of people use rickshaws while just 5% of people use private cars and without the convenience of rickshaws, people will eventually start buying their own private cars resulting in more traffic than before. This also destroyed the opportunities for employment leaving 6000 rickshaw drivers unemployed. The main reason for traffic was the absence of parking facilities which was still unresolved. The planning and policies are friendly only to the rich and upper-middle class but fail to understand the lower-class people which are the majority of the population. So, you are walking towards the chaos created by yourself. Now, we are starting to realize the problems with planning and urbanization so what if we started all over?

Chapter 5: It's very cheap to be nice to people

Christchurch, New Zealand- In 2011, Christchurch underwent a devastating earthquake. The inner city suffered the most damage and most casualties there happened in high-rise buildings. What happens after a disaster is your quality of life is destroyed and then you kind of have the choice to try and get back up to where you were or try and improve the quality of life beyond what was before. The centre of Christchurch is named Red Zone and the public is not allowed to access it. The structural damage that happened to the city is still so great that the entire city has to be demolished. The city was in such a major shock that it needed therapy just to open up about what had happened. How do you start rebuilding a city from scratch, the big thing was it had to be inclusive to everybody's project. The people of Christchurch were asked how they wanted their city to be rebuilt and the 106000 ideas that came in were almost identical, they wanted low-rise structures with plenty of public spaces. An architect can talk about a building in terms of Gothic style or Victorian style but for ordinary people, a building where me and my granny used to go shopping, where my dad bought me a pair of shoes, where I met my wife. Those stories are much more interesting because they are connected emotionally and by memories. What of our past do we leave for our future if we don't conserve our heritage buildings. When a building goes so do the memories with it. The city is never just bricks and mortar but it is the people in it.