Name: Brainstorm Design 2019: Making Cities For and With People
Uploaded: 2019-03-05
Duration: 11 min 26 s
Description: Helle Søholt, Founding Partner and CEO of Gehl, presents on stage at Fortune's Brainstorm Design in Singapore.

Gehl, that I helped shape about 19 years ago, is an urban strategy and design practice based out of Copenhagen, New York and San Francisco. We focus on making cities for people. We work globally with challenges that cities and communities face Like we just heard, and really working with quite diverse set of clients, from foundations to cities and mayors, to the World Bank and developing banks, private companies, developers and NGOs, on strategies to reach their goals while improving quality of life for people in those places. Now, cities are diverse, but yet they share some of the same challenges across the globe. Just to name five of them, transportation, employment, migration, population growth, governance and finance. Not to mention climate change and social disintegration. All these various issues share the same denominator, people. So we really need to understand the needs of people and the behavior of people in those places. So culture is really, really important, and that's why every project we do at [ UNKNOWN ] We start by analyzing the public life of a city. What is happening in the public spaces? How are people behaving? When we look at climate, of course that is very different in every place as well. And many city leaders are telling me that, Hellen we cannot bicycle, for example, in this city because it's too hot or too cold. Just to mention one topic, but in Copenhagen over the past 25 years, more than 50 % of the population, now, is bicycling, and that's not becuase we are different species than anyone else in the world. It's not because we have biking blogs running in our veins But basically because the design of the streets are compelling people to do so. So design does change culture over time and we need to understand how people in those spaces are seeking comfort and how that design can enable health and diversity and inclusion of all people. We do see a paradigm shift in planning happening globally I would say. Where we are moving away from this transportation led approach to planning that we saw back in the 50's and the 60's. To understanding that people really do need to be at the center of those processes enabling pubic spaces for all. So the way that we approach it again is to have a systemic approach to this by combining urban strategy with future mobility thinking about master planning with an outset in public spaces and then focusing on people first assignment. We use public life data to support the decision making process, and really focus on change over a period of time, engaging the political leadership in stepping up for those changes. So the approach here is combining social science With design. So really understanding the needs of people as the first and the baseline for any design that we do. Now I wanna share a few cases with all of you. Starting with New York, Times Square, that a lot of you have probably visited. We began looking at Times Square, way back, about ten years ago, really mapping how that space was laid out and how it was used. 90 % of the space at the time was road space, so really, there was no square on Times Square So we were able to consider these different teachers and get the politicians in the city to reimagine what that space could look like. So over the course of two months, we transformed a lot of different public spaces on Manhattan and in the neighboring burrows. To enable a completely new imagination of what the spaces of New York could be like in the future. We also engaging in big transportation corridor projects such as this one in George Street in Sydney transforming what was a crowded very trafficated street in the future, in the past. To a future that is much more oriented towards inclusive design and integration of new public transportation as light rail. This project is being implemented as we speak and opening up this year. Now this project takes a long time to implement. Usually ten to 15 years. So in the interim period, we are engaging communities in pilot projects such as this one, Market Street, where we introduced living innovation zone in San Fransisco to start help people imagine, how they could engage differently in that space. This intervention is a speaking bowl where basically when you sit in the very center of this bowl, you can speak to the person on the other side of the sidewalk. Now this was an engaging design where all of a sudden we saw people of different race, different economic background, different age groups that for all of a sudden engaging In that street that they had never done before. And we made it open source, so that that enabled this young fellow to come with his own device so that he could plug into this bench, enabling music to play whenever people were holding each other's hands, and touching the two sides of every part of the bench. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] Another project in Shanghai, we have introduced a 45 kilometer long new pathway along the river by introducing four very simple strategies. That you were able to move along the river. That we could connect the connecting communities to this new place. Creating new meeting places along the river, and not least opening up the ground floors of every building connecting to this space. So the vision was really to create a much more inclusive and healthy place for people to meet, where they could breathe healthy, new fresh air down to this natural river. Turning what was before an industrial sight that was not used and providing a public space where people all of the sudden in the evenings could go here and meet each other and just relax or take a stroll in a place where they were not able to have access to public space before. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] And we are turning the side streets into from used to be just a street and a road space into connecting and prioritizing walking and cycling and public transportation so that people can easily get from where they live to this new fantastic public space experience. And it's not just cities that are moving towards public space. It is really also companies, it is museums, it is universities, it is institutions that are turning towards public space and thinking about the surrounding neighborhoods and communities. Now, we have been working for the company Ikea, to rethink their sites, going from just deserted parking lots to people places, and connecting what used to be a disconnected, suburban place, to a much more integrate urban area. Really thinking about how to turn very siloed areas into a mixed use development. Introducing housing, introducing creative office facilities, integrating everyday life experiences, and programs. And really turning the IKEA sites into a community and not just a store. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] So to wrap this up, it's all about the experience. It's about how we as human beings from an eye level perspective walking in the streets, we are considering all these different things and how they come together. We don't think about the disruption of different agencies. And what it is owned by whom and so forth. But unfortunately, this is the way that the city is unmanaged today. The city as high load into transportation departments, open departments. Cultural departments social departments social departments health departments and we have and we need design to join not the thinking across all these various agencies and to re- think what cities can be like in the future and that is circularity but at a city scale. Not just thinking about the resources but thinking about the whole city. As a place that we need to develop further. We see a process happening right now where policy makes at a national level are moving from thinking about themselves as regulators to enablers. We see a process in the municipalities where the municipalities are no longer just thinking about themselves as. at proving mechanisms for building approvals. But really thinking about themselves as facilitator's of change over time. And even businesses are moving from just thinking about themselves as business or the building and the facility that they are in, to thinking about real impact, place impact. And longer term value. And I would bet that everyone one of you in this space, you are at different stages of this development, moving forward. So wrapping this up, I think we need to focus on what we share in order to develop the future. I think we need to integrate human behavior in order to create places that are healthy, that are diverse, that are inclusive. And I would go this far, I've never spoken at a design venue before, but I don't think it's the design itself that matters. I think its the design, what the design actually does. It is about the quality of life that that design enables. And in our case that quality of life is public life. How that public life can be healthier, more inclusive, more dynamic. And how that enables everyone in cities to live a healthier life in the future. Thank you so much. [ APPLAUSE ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Brainstorm Design 2019: Making Cities For and With People

Design

Helle Søholt, Founding Partner and CEO of Gehl, presents on stage at Fortune's Brainstorm Design in Singapore.