reflections vision
paradigm shift in planning With the current global crisis - economic, environmental, social and health - there is a need for a new way of understanding and executing city planning. City planning needs to move away from traditional master planning with a fixed result, where the development of infrastructure and transit is separated from the quality of the public realm and the public life of cities. Instead there is a need to think holistically about mobility, flexibility, sustainability, and proximity and start identifying frameworks and qualitative tools to steer the process of developing our cities.
public space public life survey
analysis & strategy
implementation
programming
Focus needs to be put on people first and only when that is fully understood and implemented can we move away from the modernistic mindset of separating functions and users, where the car becomes king, and towards cities that are attractive and livable for people. sense of urgency The time for this paradigm shift is now and we need to be able to see the effects of this within the next five to ten years, to keep our cities as preferred places for people to live, visit and enjoy, and just as important to be able to attract a valuable workforce and businesses to our cities. Most urgently, the time for a change of mindset is now, in order for our cities to be sustainable – not only in environmental and economic terms, but also in social terms. The cities need to be able to sustain a healthy and attractive way of living.
design
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GEHL ARCHITECTS • SEATTLE PUBLIC SPACE & PUBLIC LIFE • REFLECTIONS