Jan Gehl needs no introduction as the author of many books including “Cities for People” and an architect who is the global leader in connected people focussed urban design.. His career started in the suburbs of Copenhagen where he met and married a psychologist. She challenged him to look at architecture and planning with a more synergistic approach, advising to blend in sociology and psychology in his practice. He never looked back.
The firm Gehl People.com now has studios in Copenhagen, New York and San Francisco. Jan Gehl usually takes a back seat these days with his very competent and talented staff taking on the global speaking engagements. But in this Covid year of change, Jan Gehl is making an exciting exception and will be available via webinar as leading off the talk during Toronto’s virtual Jane’s Walk taking place this Saturday and Sunday May 2nd and 3rd.
You can sign up for this Keynote webinar on “Covid-19 and Public Spaces” which is on Saturday May 2nd from 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time here.
There are other webinar events too, including “Crowdsourcing and Technologies for Communities”, “Moving through Space”, and “Public Space and Reclaiming Space”.
You can find out more information about these free events at the Toronto Jane’s Walk home page here.
Hi Sandy, these webinars you have been posting have been extremely beneficial! I appreciate them and hope to see more context like this.
Can we operate the commuter economy in the post covid-19 world? The modern city with it’s dense compact core of high rise office towers, residential towers, underground malls, shopping streets, public institutions and its supporting mass transit system is not designed to defend against covid-19.
People have to fend for themselves with masks, social distancing, hand sanitizing, staying home. Health authorities have to contact trace outbreaks with testing and quarantines. There is always hope for treatments and vaccines, but none has yet been shown to be safe and or effective.
And so the city is shuttered for now to prevent the spread of covid-19. The city feels empty as folks stay home and shops are boarded up. Assembly events are canceled each day. Line-ups form for groceries and medicines. Newly installed plexiglass shields appear at cash counters. A new familiar takes hold. Less people, less cars.
The space between people has changed, people are holed up in their rooms, staying home, working remotely when they can. The arts, culture, and recreation industries, the society parties and fund raisers, the schools, the restaurants and pubs, churches and mosques, race tracks and casinos, they are all closed, the crowds gone, the workers and volunteers dismissed. A large slice of the economy lies idle for the foreseeable future. A large segment of the population is not moving around, not congesting modes of transport anymore. The commuter city has ground to a halt.
Yes.
It surely is difficult in the *current* covid-19 world. We’re soon going to experience the slow loosening of business shutdowns and it will be a long process to figure out what works and what doesn’t. If this process takes an entire year we will have lived with our evolving state of cities for 99% of the time in the last hundred years. Why fixate on the 1%?
But to answer your question about the post covid-19 world, the answer is Yes. The post covid-19 world is one which has safe and effective treatments and/or a vaccine. It will probably take years to recover and I expect transit might take longer. That is unfortunate; but if the city is to function, transit must play a significant role. Humans are pretty forgetful though. Five years after the threat has been eradicated people will have slowly gravitated back to many of the ways of doing things as if it never happened.
What is your solution?