Jan Gehl is a renowned Danish architect and urban designer who has played a leading role in developing people-centred urbanism across the world. In this interview he talks about Australian cities, but also more broadly about making cities for people. His focus on planning and architecture is perhaps a little further from our normal posts, yet very pertinent through the discussion’s considerations for human scale urbanism, old cities vs new ones, and Gehl’s take on the impacts of COVID, which are worth the read on their own.

This week I happened to find new articles about three of my favourite measures to transform cities, make them more resilient, reduce CO2 emissions, and make them more liveable. Each of these could be a separate post but they also make sense together as examples of how to achieve large impacts without having to invent anything, simply changing how things are done.

Sometimes, you find articles that have a certain twist of phrase or formula that you know you’ll use again and again. This short piece on the benefits of ‘slow cities’, by the authors of a book on the same topic, includes such a phrase. Instead of “mobility” (how far you can go in a given time), the goal of the “slow city” is accessibility (how much you can get to in that time).

Even though humans build cities, in a way creating our own habitats, we don’t completely understand the interactions of this built environment with nature and how much comfort or discomfort we might experience. Throw in the climate weirding, which brings more frequent extremes of heat, precipitation, as well as quick variations, and you quickly see how this understanding must be much more detailed and the lessons applied. The Science Museum of Virginia and the Portland State University SUPR Lab teamed up with a network of local collaborators, volunteers, and newscasters to measure Richmond’s heat island effect.

What would be your ideal city? There are likely as many answers as there are people but also likely to be a lot of common ground. The team at SPACE10, IKEA’s innovation lab have written a book on the topic, appropriately titled, The Ideal City.