Public Space, Public Life: an Interaction
Like the weather, life is difficult to predict. Nonetheless, meteorologists have developed methods enabling them to predict the weather, and over the years their methods have become so refined that they can make forecasts with greater accuracy and reach.
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PUBLIC SPACE, PUBLIC LIFE: AN INTERACTION
Like the weather, life is difficult to predict. Nonetheless, meteorologists have developed methods enabling them to predict the weather, and over the years their methods have become so refined that they can make forecasts with greater accuracy and reach. The methods described in this book also deal with foreseeing phenomena in constant flux, but the focus here is how life unfolds in city space. Just as with weather forecasting, this doesn’t mean that anyone can develop a sure-fire method to predict how people will use a particular city space. Masses of data have been gathered over the years concerning the interaction of life and space in cities, and just like meteorologists’ knowledge about the weather, this data can provide greater understanding of city life and predict how it will presumably unfold in the given framework. This book describes the methods that have been developed over the past 50 years to study the interaction between public life and space. They are tools to help us understand how we use public space so that we can make it better and more functional. Observation is the key for most of the studies presented in the book. It has been necessary to develop, almost from scratch, special tools for looking at people because people’s use of cities has been overlooked, while abstract concepts, large structures, traffic challenges and other amorphous issues have dominated urban planning.
J. Gehl and B. Svarre, How to Study Public Life, DOI 10.5822/978-1-61091-525-0_1, © 2013 Jan Gehl and Birgitte Svarre
Public Space and Public Life – on Speaking Terms Good architecture ensures good interaction between public space and public life. But while architects and urban planners have been dealing with space, the other side of the coin – life – has often been forgotten. Perhaps this is because it is considerably easier to work with and communicate about form and space, while life is ephemeral and therefore difficult to describe. Public life changes constantly in the course of a day, week, or month, and over the years. In addition, design, gender, age, financial resources, culture and many other factors determine how we use or do not use public space. There are many excellent reasons why it is difficult to incorporate the diverse nature of public life into architecture and urban planning. Nonetheless, it is essential if we are to create worthy surroundings for the billions of people who daily make their way between buildings in cities around the world. In this context, public space is understood as streets, alleys, buildings, squares, bollards: everything that can be considered part of the built environment. Public life should also be understood in the broadest sense as everything that takes place between buildings, to and from school, on balconies, seated, standing, walking, biking, etc. It is everything we can go out and observe happening – far more than just street theatre and café life. However, we do not mean city life to be understood as the city’s psychological well-being. Rather
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