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.