Jan Gehl
2022 Urbanism Fall Lecture Series
Monday, 24-October 12:30 – 1:30 PM EST
Co-hosted by the City Design & Development Program (CDD), SMArchS Urbanism Program and Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism at MIT.
The lecture, The people dimension in city planning: what you count you care for, will be virtual; please register for zoom link here.
Jan Gehl is a practicing Urban Design Consultant and Professor of Urban Design at the School of Architecture in Copenhagen, Denmark. He has extensively researched the form and use of public spaces and put his findings to practice in multiple locations througout the world.
His company, Gehl Architects -- Urban Quality Consultants, creatively reimagines the multiple ways in which communities use the public realm. For Gehl, design always begins with an analysis of the spaces between buildings. Only after establishing a vision of what kind of public life is desired in a given space, can attention be given to the surrounding buildings and the ways the spaces can productively interact.
While Jan Gehl's research on public spaces and public life began in Copenhagen, it was quickly applied to many other cities throughout Europe, North America, Asia, and Australia. His ideas and approaches to design for public spaces incorporate the cutting edge of technology without losing sight of what best supports and enhances people's experience of everyday life in the public realm.
In 1960, Jan Gehl earned his BA and MA in Architecture from the School of Architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and began practicing as an architect. In 1966 he received a 5-year research grant from his former school to study the form and use of public space. This work spawned his first book, Life between Buildings (1971, trans. 1987). From 1971 onwards he has worked at the school as Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and Professor of Urban Design. In 1998, he became director of the institution's newly-established Center for Public Space Research. Other publications describing Gehl's intensive research on the social uses of public space include Public Spaces- Public Life (1996, 2004), and New City Spaces (2008), which have been translated into multiple languages. These and many other publications offer a method for evaluating city quality, designing for to encourage active use of outdoor space, and discussing the ways our sensory abilities affect our use of space.
In 1992, Gehl received an honorary Doctor of Letters from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. In 1993 he won the Sir Patrick Abercrombie Prize for exemplary contributions to Town Planning and Territorial Development from the International Union of Architects, and in 1998 he received the EDRA/Places Research Award from the Environmental Design Research Association. He is also on the editorial board of Journal of Architectural and Planning Research, Urban Design International, and Town Planning & Architecture.
[Image Credit: Gehl Architects]