Gehl’s consulting firm, Gehl Architects, founded in 2000, has already completed projects in New York, Melbourne, Sydney, Moscow, San Francisco, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and many other places. Photo: Bruno Felin / WRI Brasil Sustainable Cities Jan Gehl during his talk on the Frontiers of Thought.

“My wife and I realized that the great gap between architects and sociologists was that no one was on the streets observing how the format of cities was impacting people,” he said at the Frontiers of Thought event in Porto Alegre. They studied cities by counting the number of people walking, noting their movements and their habits. In 1965, Gehl and his wife traveled to Italy to investigate the interaction of people with public spaces. Instead of prioritizing form, architecture must create the best habitat for people. Gehl and Mundt organized weekly meetings with colleagues in sociology, psychology and architecture to identify opportunities for joint research, when Gehl came up with a simple but vital insight that defined the rest of his career: Urban planning should create cities for people at the human scale. It wasn’t until he met his wife, the psychologist Ingrid Mundt, however, that everything changed.

Upon graduating from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Denmark in 1960, he felt ready to put into practice what he had learned from the modernist school. Gehl has spent more than 50 years in academia and the professional world becoming a different, and unconventional, architect. Photo by Bruno Felin / WRI Brasil Sustainable CitiesĪt 80 years old, Danish architect and urbanist Jan Gehl shares his ideas on how to build a better future for global cities.

Cities for People by Jan Gehl