that Copenhagen is the most beautiful city for living in the world! That’s no kind of lo- cal patriotism, nor unrealistic love. My city is one of those that has been developing in the right direction for a very long time and that’s why we’re where we are today. I was invited way back in 1962 to first join the planning of the city, and we’ve been working with smart people from the city government for over 50 years to ensure we live in a safe, healthy and green city, where the streets belong to us and not to machines – Gehl tells us while we drink coffee in his huge office in Copen- hagen city centre, where he still comes reg- ularly despite being officially retired – given that he is already 81 years old. Everything actually started when Jan met Ingrid, his future wife, a psychologist and a woman who viewed the world from a human perspective and posed him ques- tions he was unable to answer. Specifically, in the 1950s the power of modernism struck and infiltrated architecture, such that build- ings became ever taller and architects be- gan viewing the world from the perspec- tive of a bird’s eye. - We all looked downwards from above, building more and more floors. Ingrid sim- ply asked me why we architects love build- ings more than people, why we build cities for buildings and not people ... I didn’t know the answer, but that was the moment I started uncovering it... – says Jan, who spent the next few travelling the world with his wife. They spent the most time in Italy, sitting in squares, watching people and what they do, in or- der to reveal what it is that they really need. - We started to systematise the knowl- edge we had gained and to put people ahead of machines and buildings. That was a real sensation in Denmark at that time, marking the first time someone had written about people in a magazine for architects. I asked the people in the city government – how long will you count cars?! Because they did that to see if we needed more road lanes. Cars were at every turn, and everybody was trying to make those cars happy! In the meantime, the people remained invisible. We wanted to make them visible, to tell the politicians – hey! Start counting people, see what they need. And we’ve all been doing that in Co- penhagen for more than 50 years. There was a fear that Danes are not Ital- ians; that they would not go out and walk aroundbecausetheclimateisdifferent.When pedestrianzoneswerecreatedinthecitycen- tre, Danes started walking, and then riding bikes. This is today the normal state of affairs: Danes walk and pedal bikes... Because, as Jan wrote in his famous book Cities for People, which has been translated into over forty lan- guages, including ours – when you build cit- ies, you should always be careful to ensure
Moskva nije mogla da se vidi od automobila i sivila, a sada je grad koji se najbrže razvija Moscow once couldn’t be seen for cars and greyness, but now it’s the fastest developing city
Kada gradite gradove, uvek se morate starati o tome da mačke budu srećne. Ako uspete u tome, možete biti sigurni da će i ljudi tu biti srećni
When you build cities, you should always ensure that
cats are happy. If you succeed in this, you can be sure that people will also be happy
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