UrbMAN Spaces: Designing With Humans in Mind

On Februrary 5th, the New York chapter of the AIA hosted, perhaps, one of the most highly regarded purveyors of public space, Jan Gehl. While his observations of the public realm are very revealing, his wit in delivering the information should not be overlooked.

Amid a brief history of urban space and its design, Jan managed to drop in such quotable phrases as " bird s*** architecture" to describe the modernist buildings seemingly dropped from the sky into empty public plazas. This urban planning method is particularly apparent in Brasilia, which was planned from above, as if from a helicopter, only for it to be realized that, "most Brazilians don't own helicopters."

The urban plan for Brasilia: planned from a birds-eye view and shaped like a bird in flight. Source: www.zonu.com

Aside from Gehl's fascinating and often side-splitting history of urban design, he had several interesting points to make about the direction of the profession. First, was the impact, or perhaps, lack thereof that technology is having on urban space. While technology increasingly allows us to collect data on the who, what, where, and why of people using space, often times this data is not distilled into any meaningful conclusion. The best tools to observe and make conclusions about public space, argues Gehl, are the rudimentary: our eyes, ears, etc. He cites a website produced in a world city that shows minute-by-minute updates of where most people are congregating in that city. In Manhattan, this information would look something like the image below: with huge spikes of people in midtown and lower Manhattan.

Source: www.allenschool.edu

This is basically a diagram of where Manhattan's tallest buildings are located, and so an increase in density would be expected. Aside from that, what does this diagram tell us? Avoid Times Square at all costs? Any Manhattanite could tell you that. As a collector of massive amounts of data, the internet is very successful, however, translating that data into a meaningful tool takes more than the hard data itself.

Lastly, a question by a starry-eyed young designer prompted the question of who's job it is to design for people in urban environments and whether a new profession was being born. Jan's answer emphasized collaboration between the design professions, namely architects, landscape architects, urban designers and planners. All of these people should be thinking about the design of public space at a human scale in their individual approaches, but it is the interaction between the professions that will create truly human, urban spaces. Or, shall we say urbMAN spaces. 

Happy City

Few books will spur me to write just out of the blue, but a recent read, Happy City, by Charles Montgomery, provided me with insights into how we view the city that altered my own preconceived notions of city living.

In his book, Charles Montgomery looks at the relationship between urban design and human psychology and discovers something astonishing: the elements we as Americans believe to make us happy in an urban environment and the elements that actually do are completely different! Whoa! How have generations of Americans been getting something as simple as their own happiness so wrong? I mean, most people have visited the doctor's office and successfully answered the Wong-Baker pain chart question fairly successfully. Why can't we do the same for our happiness in the built environment?

A simple enough chart. Now, replace "pain" with "happiness in built environment" and it becomes much more difficult to answer.

Perhaps, Montgomery suggests, it is the shallowness of the images of happiness we have been sold on for so long. Everyone is familiar with the idea of the American Dream: the separated family home with front lawn, white picket fence, and 2.5 kids (sold separately). This dream, while appealing in its guarantee of safe, secure family living is as thin as the stucco facades applied to shops at Disneyland. It is an image completely separated from the realities of the systems of transportation, economy, and environment that allow it to exist. Anyone who has sat in traffic for hours during their daily commute, or has to drive several miles just to pick up some milk knows what I'm talking about. The idea that larger distances between our homes equates to independence could not be further from the truth. Our decisions about how we live affect others no matter how far apart our houses are-in the systems they impact, such as the taxes to maintain roads, the quality of air we breathe, and, now, our use of universal healthcare. 

Disneyland's Main Street. The two-story facades give the perfect human scale but the second story is completely fake. 

Now, you try telling the average American to give up their house in the suburbs for a dense American city. Probably not gonna happen. Not today, not tomorrow. And who can blame them? As humans, Montgomery points out, we have a natural inclination to retreat from strangers and seek space that is truly "ours." Our social anxiety is hard-wired into our very being. However, what we don't recognize is that we also instinctively need interaction with other people to be happy. That guy who creepily tries to buy you a wheat grass shot at your juice bar, while seemingly annoying and uncalled for, is actually contributing to your happiness simply through social interaction. So, what we believe to make us happy and what actually does are separate entities. 

In short, we don't and cannot live completely in a vacuum as much as we may think we want to. We rely on other human beings for help, support, and basic happiness. Our ideas about ownership-of land, of space, of knowledge, of tools, just to name a few-must change. Just as the internet has changed the way we share ideas, music, markets, and constant updates about our cute cat's lives, so too must we look for ways to share resources in the physical world. This will allow for many of us to live in the physical environments of our choosing without straining the systems that sustain them. Through these shared systems, our empathy might be able to reach the high levels required to tackle some of the global-scale problems we are facing, such as climate change, dwindling natural resources, and the enlarging gap between the rich and poor. 

To close, a quote from Aristotle's Politics, "He who is unable to live in society or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god."