Madness to rebuild cities because of a virus – urbanist

SS: No, I agree with you that we will eventually go back to the way we were because the pandemic is not here to stay forever. But that period of time, you said, three years - that's still a long period of time for things to change around. For instance, cholera and typhus in the 19th century when there were outbreaks, they led to the development of water supply and sanitation systems in Europe. Le Corbusier took the tuberculosis epidemic into consideration when creating his landmark objects. What effect will the coronavirus pandemic have on architecture and urban planning? Because we'll go back but not tomorrow, it's still going to take some time, at least until a vaccine is there and then we have to test it. It's 2-3 years, like you’ve said. 

JG: I think the doctors will be much faster and we will have some medical solutions to the problem much faster than three years, but it will take time for us to relax and return to our normal ways. I see that this pandemic is very different from the ones you are mentioning because in those cases something could have been done about the sewers and the running water and washing your fingers. And, but this one is a virus and actually I can see some people say that we shall all move out of the cities and live separately in the countryside and I think that's completely stupid because the main problem we have as human beings are not the virus. That is really the climate challenge and we have to do something about it, that’s more important. And to do something for the climate, we actually have to gather together so we can have more practical solutions to energy and to pollution. Okay, we will have to make lifts in buildings 16 square meters, we will have to make stairs which are very wide, we will have to do a lot of things which is against all the good things we have learned to enjoy. We know that if we are closer we are more intimate. If we are some distance away we can be more personal, then it's more social. And the bigger distance means more official distance and a public distance. And we as human beings cannot live without being intimate and being close to other people, only for a little while. Then we go back to the way we have developed for many years for our communication. 

SS: But I have a question regarding people living outside the cities. You've mentioned, it's completely stupid. I can talk from my personal experience now that I have lived in a big house outside of the city for four months, I would like to stay outside of the city and I know so many of my friends, who never before considered living in a village or in like, a nature landscape outside the city. And now, at least 50% of them are considering moving out of the city. It's almost like this pandemic has been changing the landscape of the world. 

JG: We're not talking about you, and we are not talking about you and your friends. Where I see the major problems are the great expansion of the population of the world. We know that if, like in China, they've started to move into the cities, that has enabled China economically to be able to lift the living standard of the people. And if we have this explosion of more people in this world, we will have to move together where we can produce more efficiently, where we can solve the transportation problems most efficiently, where we use less energy, where we can have better training systems, better warming systems. So we know that to do something for the climate, it's much better that we live close together and that we actually have a situation where we can get a better economy to solve the problems of mankind. So spreading the whole world's population out on the fields will be a disaster for the climate and for the resources. So it may be a solution for you, but not for the mankind. 

SS: I hear you, I never looked at it this way because I thought I would be happy helping villages and regions to develop and stay alive, but I never looked at it this way from the climate point of view.  

JG: You should also think about how one day, maybe many years from now, you will be old and you will need some service from the community. They will have to send you a nurse three times a day and they will have to bring you the meals and whatever. And the more spread out you live, the more expensive and the more difficult it is to give you a necessary service when you are old or if you're sick or if you are disabled. So this solution you mentioned is for the young and fresh, and for a period, but if we look at the whole life, we can make a much better service if we live together. I think we've learned something from this epidemic. Maybe we've learned to wash our hands - that will be good in the future also because we always had a bad hygienic situation, with hand washing it could be better. We’ve also learned that some of the jobs we have we can do on the computer and that could be fine if people stay two days a week to work at home, and three days a week only go to the city, that will reduce transportation and traffic for 40%, that's great. But we should also remember that we cannot say now, everybody can work from home because not everybody can. There are so many jobs that need you to be there. If you are a nurse, if you are a doctor, if you collect the garbage or if you are in a hospital, there are so many jobs in society, which you cannot do on a screen, you have to be there, you have to leave the bags and you have to do this and that. So it is again a very limited solution to say everybody can work at home. Some of the most better-off and the most educated can work at home. But we can't work at home all our lives, we will go crazy because we are so dependent on working with other people and meeting other people. And the office is not only a place where you meet other people. When the households are smaller and smaller, the offices and the workplaces are also functioning as sort of a family for you. That's in the office, you show pictures of your boyfriend or your little child. That's in the office you cry with your friends if you have bad luck in love. It's in the office, you celebrate your birthday, because in many of our cities, many households are very small. In a city like Copenhagen, every other unit is only inhabited by one person. All these single-person households, they need to come out and meet, or they go crazy. I’m looking at you, I would much rather sit in a room with you than looking at you on the screen. 

SS: Mr. Gehl, you're saying that it is silly to change the construction of the world because of the pandemic. It's silly to make staircases now four meters wide. It's silly to make really wide elevators, it's silly to make very wide sidewalks right now. That's what you're saying because it's going to come back to normal, even though now a lot of people when they're polled, they're saying they don't feel safe in public places unless there's a lot of space around them. But there are things that will still change. For instance, hand washing. I wash hands every five minutes. Do you think we'll have hand-washing stands in the streets like we have, for instance, trash cans? Or elevators with no buttons so you don't have to push a button?  

JG: Maybe, maybe. But I think we have to look at it... You don't make your house so it's big enough for the daughter's wedding. You make the house so it's comfortable for your life. And if your daughter is going to be married, either you squeeze together and have a fantastic party anyway, or you go to another place for the wedding. You think about a world where everything is too wide and too big and whatever. Think about what you like yourself. You like very much the narrow streets, you might like the intimacy of the village. You like the small dimensions, you don't like to be in a place with a number of high-rise towers and the wind is sweeping between the towers and everything is cold and wide. Because our senses and our way of conceiving space is so that if you have big spaces, you pick them up as cold and impersonal. If you have small spaces, you pick them up as warm and cozy and personal. When you go on holiday, you go to places where there are small dimensions. When you go to a camping place they are small dimensions, when you go to a summer cottage place they are small dimensions. When you go to Southern Europe you seek out cities with small and nice dimensions. You don't go to the places which are blown up in space, like Dubai or things like that with silly modern architecture where everything is too big and too wide. You don't feel comfortable there, you feel that sometimes it's nice that things are big, but you are more comfortable with the human scale. And we cannot leave the human scale behind to have a special Corona scale, which we build. We won’t be comfortable. We’ll regret it. And we cannot understand why we did it. We have vaccines for tuberculosis and measles and a number of other things, and we don't think about it anymore. 

SS: Just to summarize, what you're saying is that people right now should just wait out for Corona to disappear for a vaccine to appear because otherwise if you put major changes in the way we live in our cities, in our villages, then we're going to regret it afterwards. I’m just summarizing what you've said. So we just have to wait out Corona, right? 

JG: Yes and be patient. And we have found that we can easily live in the conditions we have, we can keep these distances and we can wash our hands and we can go on either side of the sidewalk, it works well. So it's been found that, say, in Denmark nothing has been done, but people have been asked to behave differently for a while. And I think that shows that the same city can be used also in a more healthy way in this condition. We don't have to rebuild the city. In any way we only build a little portion of the city every year. So if we should rebuild the city it will take a hundred years and we'll have many other things to think about before these hundred years over. And as far as I'm concerned, we have two more important things to think about. One is this climate situation where we have to do something radical rather fast, or we will have very severe conditions in many parts of the world. The other thing is what the doctors called the sitting syndrome. That is that people are driving too much and sitting too much and are not using their own body and their own muscles enough. And that's why we say in city planning today that we shall make places so that people walk and bicycle as much as possible and actually spend much time outdoors. 

SS: I want to talk about transport in general because we had this idea that cities around the world are considering their relationship with a car focusing on public transport, cycling instead because a lot of people are saying, we don't need cars anymore. But now, I'm sorry to bring you back to Coronavirus reality which I don't like either, but it is what it is right now, - Coronavirus shows that your car right now in these new circumstances is the safest transit option. Do you think the trend of getting rid of cars is being reversed? 

JG: I've heard that before, but I don't think that we will see that. Because the major problem again is that we will need mobility systems which are much more sustainable, and which will help us to combat the climate crisis. I think that the major issue is that our cities do not have enough room for all of us to go around with four rubber wheels, this was never possible to have room for everybody in a car. It will be a privileged transportation means. So that's why I think that in the long run we'll see much more very smart and very attractive public transportation. And we'll see city planning along the transportation, public transportation routes, rather than this very privatised way of mobility. 

SS: So cars will become somewhat like horses now for privileged people who can have those horses on their ranchos or on hippodromes?  

JG: Motor boats.  

SS: Okay, but not everyone lives in Amsterdam, remember. Some people don't have rivers in their cities, or canals. 

JG: Yeah, there will be a need for cars. But I do think that if we really look at the transportation problem, there is a lot of private driving, which could be done in other ways, that we’ll need ambulances and fire brigades and garbage trucks and delivery in various ways, but there's a lot of especially commuting, which can be done in other ways when we start to think, more smart and more sustainable city planning. I think that we are actually looking at the end of the era of the fossil fuel fired motorcar. In Denmark after 2030, that's 10 years from now, you will not be able to buy any vehicle which is running on gasoline or diesel. You will have to buy electric cars, and more and more will be running on electric. And also everything is done to have more people bicycling and have more people using public transportation. And this is done for the climate and this will not change because of a little virus for a period. 

SS: So let me ask you something, everything that we're discussing right now, like you're saying cities should be vibrant, they should be dense, people are fine, they learn how to live at social distance within the reality that we have today, electric cars - are these recipes that we're talking about equally applicable to cities like Copenhagen or Delhi or Hanoi? I mean, it would be nice to have all these things - public piazzas, clean storefronts, neighborhoods. But do developing countries have enough resources to spare to spend on this? 

JG: I have written about it, and I have been in all these places. And I think that in developing countries, walking, bicycling and good, cheap public transportation will be the way which could be able to solve in a sustainable and economically feasible way the mobility problems in the growing cities around the world. I think that we can never imagine 7 billion people living in cities based on motorcars. Not at all, there's no room for that on this globe. The globe is too small. So we'll have to fight pandemics and viruses, and bacteria whatever we have as challenges, and then we have to solve the major problems of urbanisation, of bringing up the wealth in the world so that more people can be lifted away from poverty into a better lifestyle. And we found in China and other places, that in the cities, you're able to have the production, which can bring the economy to raise lifestyle, and that is very important in the world that the number of poor people is reduced. And the cities are actually one of the ways this is being solved. 

SS: Mr. Gehl, thank you so much for this amazing view of the world because not everyone has such a precise and well-argued view of the world and why things should be the way that they should be. It's been a breath of fresh air talking to you. Thank you so much for your perspective and for your thoughts. I wish you all the best of luck and I do hope that we meet in person soon to talk more about what we're talking about right now. 

JG: Now you're talking.  

SS: Thank you. Thank you so much.  

JG: Thank you. Bye.