Jan Gehl: Human Centred Planning

Jan Gehl was instrumental in developing the idea of planning for cities and urban areas from a person perspective, putting people at the heart of architecture, urban design, and planning. His work involved studying the city from walking around it, addressing perspectives from a human-centered perspective and on a human scale. In sustainable planning, he was one of many planners, architects, and designers from the 1960s onward to worry about the huge impact of the increasing number of motor vehicles on human life in urban areas and addressed methods to try and reduce their impact. Much of his work looks at designing a city at a scale for walking between buildings, so he favored mixed use cities, with people coming together from different backgrounds, cultures, and for different reasons to create a bustling, thriving city. He said for a city to work it must entice people to it, people need to want to go out and spend time there, and it should be made as easily as possible to do so. These propositions are more important than ever, a climate emergency has made reducing the domination of vehicles in city centers even more of an issue, increasing inequalities and socially excluded groups means better planning for integration is needed, and increasingly highquality technologies means cities are competing with an online world when encouraging people into them.