Yesterday we visited the headquarters for Gehl, a highly respected and influential international consulting and design firm focused on helping cities be better designed for people.  The concept seems intuitive, but for 70 years, most cities in most “developed” countries have been designed for cars – how to move them and how to store them.  This takes a tremendous amount of land, costs so much it can’t be paid for, socially divides communities, undermines economic vitality, and makes it so that most of us won’t let our 10 year olds bike or walk to school.  Gehl has reminded cities around the world that they should be built for people first.

We had a great talk and Q&A session with Karolina Petz at Gehl headquarters (which is a cool place to be as well) and then we went out for a walking tour for a few hours with Andreas Røhl.  Both provided different kinds of insight.  For Karolina’s talk, we heard the basic framing of Gehl’s approach – start with people and what they want, then identify and design the public realm for them (plazas, parks, streets, etc.), and once that skeleton is in place, think about the buildings that help frame the public space.  With this approach, public life can be maximized.  They have a very sophisticated method for observing and documenting how people use various spaces and one of our students was actually a student data collector for a Gehl project that happened on the University of Oregon campus this past year, a cool connection.

Andreas Røhl from Gehl sharing his insights with students.

Following this amazing morning, we had a whole group dinner at Puk, a 500 year old bar and subsequent restaurant as well.  The room we gathered in was about half below ground level, but when the building originally was built it was at ground level.  Over the years, the outside ground got higher due to layers of trash, pavement, trash, pavement, etc.  The evening was very very nice – students dressed up, we had a traditional Danish meal, had amazing insightful and funny commentary and information from the owner the whole evening, and students just had a lot of fun conversations.  Our professional participants were there as well, so there was additional community building and connections happening with them as well.

One thing that we try to do in this class is to treat students like the adults they are, which is rarely how they are treated at the university, sometimes by their parents, and often by society as a whole.  But if we treat them as adults, I’ve found they respond in kind by generally acting like adults, taking responsibility for their own and their community’s actions.  And once that reciprocity is established, almost everything is better – the learning, the relationship building, the fun, the flexibility, and more.  So far, this group of students seems to appreciate and respond well to this approach, although i think it has caught a few off guard (in a good way!).

Finally – apologies for not so many pictures of actual infrastructure. This is my sixth time to Copenhagen and almost every picture looks like every other picture – masses of normal looking people (although often nicely dressed as it is Denmark) moving every which way on bike.  It is really hard to convey in an image just how ubiquitous and normal bicycle travel is. So, rather than taking more pictures that look like all my old pictures, I’m spending my time on a bike just being present in the moment.