The author of more than 30 books and a champion of cities for people, Danish architect Jan Gehl and his team of around 50 professionals have worked to free the centers of cities as diverse as Moscow, Melbourne, Shanghai, and New York from cars.
In an interview with Anatxu Zabalbeascoa for the Spanish newspaper El País, Gehl argues that since their inception, cities have been built with human beings and pedestrian movement in mind—hence his drive to pedestrianize urban centers once again, freeing them from automobiles, which he considers a "smart technology from nearly a hundred years ago" but one that "becomes a nuisance" in today's multi-million-person urban agglomerations.
Asked whether a single city model—the one proposed by his office, which aims to reclaim the city for people—can work for different cultures, Gehl responds:
"Once again, I refer to Homo Sapiens as a walking animal: something that unites us more than it separates us. If we study ancient cities in Japan or the Americas, they all have something in common: they were conceived for man. If we build by drawing closer to the human body, the foundation will be good. It was always like this until the modernists decided to question everything."
Read the full interview on El País.
This article was written by Romullo Baratto. The translation is powered by AI.
