Another benefit is social.3 As cars were discouraged, the heart of the city was used by a much wider band of ages-more children and older people. And with the streets evolving into centres of recreation, places to be enjoyed in themselves rather than being seen simply as points on a route to destinations that people actually needed to get to, so they have come to feel safer.
How has all this been achieved? It took a vision. That was supplied by a Danish architect and professor of urban design called Jan Gehl, who has become the global leader of a movement to improve the quality of life in city centres. But it has also been driven by the long-term, market-friendly, practical backing of the city authorities in Copenhagen since 1962, when the main shopping street, Stroget, was pedestrianized. Successive municipal leaders have followed a cautious, step-by-step process, making the series of incremental changes to the streets and buildings that have, over a generation, transformed the city.4
As streets were changed from cars to people, Copenhagen found that all sorts of activities sprang up. Cafés and restaurants opened; small, specialist shops started selling antiques and handicrafts; the streets themselves became filled with café seating. Sometimes this happened quickly, as with Stroget. In other places, for example some of the large city squares, it has taken a while for people to learn how best to use the newly available space.
Gradually, the pedestrianized area has been extended: it was 15,000 square metres in 1962, 95,000 by 1995.5 This has not been the rather token exercise in traffic-free high streets and shopping centres seen in some other European towns and cities; bit by bit, the car has been taken out of the equation so that the two-kilometre-long Stroget now serves as the central artery for a whole network of pedestrianized blocks, with more than 100,000 square metres set aside for walkers.
As this has happened, not only has the number of people shopping increased so, too, the number of people carrying out some kind of stationary activity, such as having a cup of coffee at a pavement café, watching buskers, sitting down on a bench or simply standing chatting. This has all been measured. So we know that on a typical summer day in 1968 there would at any one time be an average of 1,750 people involved in one of these stationary activities; by 1986 this had risen to more than 4,500 and by 1995 to nearly 6,000.6 As a result, the streets in the centre of the city are being used in a different way. They are no longer just a way of getting from one place to another; they are in themselves a destination.
But does this really indicate a rise in the quality of city life?7 In their book Public Spaces, Public Life (Danish Architectural Press, 1996), Jan Gehl and Lars Gemzoe, a senior consultant at the firm of Gehl Architects, make the distinction between two types of activity: necessary and optional. The first are things people have to do and most walking belongs to that. The second are things people want to do-various forms of recreation-and are mostly stationary. People will only make the choice to linger in city streets if those streets are pleasant and safe places. So the extent to which the city centre has people doing some sort of stationary activity is a measure of its health.
In an interview, Lars Gemzoe pointed to the seamless manner in which the city’s way of life has been transformed-to the extent of being an invisible revolution.8 ‘The character of Copenhagen has changed very much,’ he explained. ‘People sometimes talk about how nothing has changed for a long time in Copenhagen, because there have been no new buildings for a long period. But everyone was thinking about that so much as a symbol of change that they forgot that we have, in fact, changed urban culture completely. Before, we did not have the space for outdoor activity or indeed the culture for it.’
Just shutting off streets from cars, however, does not in itself guarantee that the urban environment will be safer or more pleasant. There are plenty of examples of pedestrianization creating urban wastelands, deserted after dark, with graffiti-scrawled walls and abandoned shops. Getting rid of cars has sometimes meant getting rid of business activity. Copenhagen has taken a number of steps to avoid this fate.
First, there has been a lot of attention to the detail of the planning so that traffic is not simply pushed from one street to another. Developing the project very slowly, over more than forty years, has meant that each new phase can build on the lessons of the previous ones and, where necessary, avoid evident mistakes.
Second, the street furniture and paving have been improved. More seating is provided, both formal (park benches, for example) and informal (raised kerbs, steps, edges of fountains etc.). Paving seems to matter enormously: squares paved in granite attract activity whereas those covered in asphalt do not.
Third, Copenhagen has looked at the street facades and encouraged owners and tenants to make these people-friendly. For example, bright shop fronts attract window-shoppers in the evening, whereas shuttered fronts are threatening. Streets with doorways and steps are more interesting to walk along than those with solid glass or concrete walls.
Finally, the city has encouraged the use of bicycles as a way of getting about, including dedicated cycle-ways and a special rental scheme, which has enhanced its ability to function while it goes about cutting car use. By 1995, as a result, more people were cycling to work or school, 34 per cent, than driving, 31 per cent-the rest going by train or bus. Even on wet days, 60 per cent of those cyclists still used their bikes. More recently the proportion of ‘two-wheel’ commuters has risen to 36 per cent (with car journeys decreasing proportionately) and, through improvements to the bike network, the municipal authorities plan to increase this figure again to 40 per cent by 2012.9
No city is perfect. Cyclists are not perfect, and can behave just as selfishly as other citizens. Copenhagen has its social and economic problems. The key point is that by thinking carefully about the purpose of a city centre as a cultural and social magnet, as well as a business one, it has managed to cope more effectively with pressure from traffic than any other city on the planet.
2. WHAT ARE THE LESSONS?
The first conclusion is that it is possible, over time, to make radical improvements in the quality of life of a city by looking at the space between buildings rather than the buildings themselves. Unsurprisingly, what has happened in Copenhagen is studied by urban planners the world over. Gehl Architects has been commissioned by many other organizations, including Transport for London and the Department of Transportation in New York, to see what part of that experience can be applied elsewhere.10
But all cities are different. They have different histories, a different balance of activities and differences in basic layout. Copenhagen itself has a number of unusual features, some of which have made things easier, some harder. For example, it has a medieval core,11 with a street pattern originally based on pedestrian traffic-plus perhaps some handcarts. It is largely a single-level city in the sense that there is no underground railway system, no underground shopping malls, no pedestrian footbridges. It has very few privately owned shopping arcades attracting people away from the streets and squares. It is also flat, making bicycles a much more attractive prospect than in hilly cities.
In a sense Copenhagen has been forced to use its street-level public spaces better-but it has also taken the opportunity to do so.
For lessons, though, it is best to start with the medieval core-even though few non-European cities have a similar central zone laid out hundreds of years ago. The most important lesson here is that where it is practicable to turn that core back into a place where people walk there are huge advantages in doing so. For any journey of less than about one kilometre, a little over half-a-mile, walking is the most efficient method of transport. It uses by far the least road space per person and, with