5 Aspects of People-Friendly Cities
By: Gabi Zinum
Tags: Sustainability, City Planning, City Living, Design, Cities

It’s a fact that most of our cities are planned around cars, highways, and parking lots while the most important element of urban planning is callously put in the back burner: people.

Having cars as protagonists is inadequate, seeing that the social functions of the city are completely disregarded, resulting in cold and uninviting spaces that lack human life.

Cities are supposed to be a place of encounters, spontaneous conversations, or to relax and people watch. Cities should invite us to sit and enjoy ourselves for a while. They should be a place where we can create new experiences, or to simply take a nice walk.

For an urban setting to be planned around people’s well-being and social needs, it is key to pay attention to the human dimension. To accomplish that, some aspects — that often intertwine as you’ll see — are of crucial importance. Here are 5 of them:

1. Places to Sit and Enjoy

Once, when I went to Germany for a college workshop at a university in Oldenburg, I spent a few days in Frankfurt before heading north. It was my first time in Germany and I was the core definition of a foreigner — I was alone and couldn’t speak a word of german. As soon as I left my suitcases at the hostel, I went out to explore the city. That’s when I came across the street in the photo below. I felt compelled to sit and watch people walk by while listening to a guy playing the piano right next to where I was sitting. Somehow I felt like I belong there. That’s a people-friendly place.

Liebfrauenstraße, Frankfurt. Image credit: My own

Spaces to get-together with friends, meet people or just enjoy the city are vital for an active urban life. To achieve that, it’s necessary to have well-thought-out urban furniture, as well as a plan that is based on the human scale.

Concrete benches scattered around a huge square is not the urban furniture I am talking about. Well-thought-out urban furniture is comfortable and stimulates conversations and is also strategically-positioned in a way that takes advantage of city life.

Which bench would you rather sit on with your friends?

A plain concrete bench. I doubt someone can withstand sitting on it for a long period of time. Image credit: Forms+surfaces

A people-friendly bench in London, England. The curves are a strategy to stimulate conversation. Image credit: DesignBoom

Also, in places that we feel invited to sit for a while and enjoy, like that street in Frankfurt, the human scale is strictly taken into account, creating a space full of detail, such as different textures, colors, decorations, smells, and sounds. That’s what makes an urban setting people-friendly.

2. Walkability

This is the foundation of a lively city.

Short distances are one factor that certainly strengthens walkability, however, how interesting the trajectory is also has a great impact.

Shopfronts, people to watch, friends to run into, spontaneous conversations with strangers, the richness of details in the urban space, great sidewalks are a few traits present in cities that regard its social functions as essential — that’s what makes walks interesting.

According to Jan Gehl — author Cities for People — cities that invest in creating better conditions for pedestrians, as a result, see significant improvement and growth in social activities. To illustrate this, Gehl mentions Melbourne, Australia. In the 1980s, the central area of Melbourne was nicknamed “donut”, owing to the fact that it was an empty space. Between 1994 and 2004, the city underwent a series of improvements to intensify city life. People-friendly squares were created, many of the city’s neglected lanes were incorporated as staying space for pedestrians, sidewalks were widened and new urban furniture was created. In consequence, the city grew from 1,000 people living there in 1992 to 10,000 in 2002. Besides, pedestrian influxes during the day increased by 39% and during the night by 50%, since they also elaborated a great lighting system.

This example makes it clear how walkability is in direct relation to the social role of cities.

Melbourne, Australia. Image credit: Cox and Kings

3. Mixed Uses

The mix of residential and commercial use is essential for people-friendly cities, for it shortens the distances, making the city more walkable. But also, it makes the streets safer.

As put by the brilliant Jane Jacobs in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, on successful streets, people must appear at different times. The mix of uses ensures precisely that. Restaurants, shops, and residential uses all have different operating times. Restaurants and businesses that stay open until late at night are especially important, since streets tend to be less safe at night. That guarantees more “eyes upon the street” — as Jacob calls it — which means people occupying the street, and that’s what makes them safer.

Think about it, would you feel safer walking on an empty street or one filled with people?

4. High Density

Hight density is directly linked to short distances and optimizing resources, which make the cities not only more walkable and more lively, but sustainable as well.

Although, as Jane Jacobs points out, the development of modern city planning has frowned upon high density — based on an erroneous relation between high density and slums — this trait is a crucial source of vitality.

Take Vancouver for example, the downtown area is very dense, it has a mixture of uses and is very bike-friendly. As a result, the streets are always filled with people. Also, housing prices are incredibly high.

This example emphasizes that the relationship between high density and problem, or undesirable is one that has to be deconstructed.

Vancouver, Canada. Image credit: Pexels

Besides, the lesser use of resources and the depletion of pollution are other advantages of high-density urban settings. This configuration allows people to walk or bike to work, school, shops, or other places in the city. Cars can almost grow into obsolescence in this context, especially if it is thought-out alongside great public transportation infrastructure. Consequently, air quality improves, as well as urban mobility, and, of course, carbon dioxide emissions decrease.

5. Bike-Friendly

Investment in cycling infrastructure means more than just caring about the environment, as I brought up previously. It means caring about city vitality, for it creates more “eyes on the street”.

Also, bikes are a tool we can use to reclaim our space back in our cities.

But how can we break free from the car culture that is so entrenched in our society?

As stated by Jan Gehl, the more highways are built, the more cars appear, but — fortunately — the same goes for bikes. The more cycling infrastructure, the more people will feel invited to bike. He demonstrates this point by referencing the process that’s been happening in Copenhagen for the past few decades. The city’s been removing car lanes and parking lots to create better and safer conditions for bikes. The population, year by year, is increasingly invited to use their bikes.

The result? Bike usage doubled from 1995 to 2005.