WALK DOWN EAST LONDON’S famous Brick Lane, pulsing with life and energy at the intersection of the worlds of art and fashion and music and tech startups and waves of immigrants who have made this incredible place their home over the centuries, turn into Hanbury Street, and soon you’ll come to a building as intriguing and important as any that have been created in the world these past few years.
The first things you’ll see are trees—carefully selected to make sure one of them is flowering, whatever the season. Then you’ll notice a strange, bubble-shaped orange wall emerging from the side of the building. Go in, and you’ll be struck by the colors—amazing, bright colors. Poke around a bit. There’s a café, desks, midcentury furniture, offices. But everywhere there are plants—not just stuck in pots, as you’ll find in the beige-topia office buildings the world over, but plants that are actually growing up and along the walls and columns. Hydroponically, if you please. What is this place?
I’m so proud to say that it’s the first Second Home, a business that Rohan started as an expression of his belief that our physical surroundings have a huge part to play in the quality of our lives—our personal lives and, as in the case of Second Home, our working lives. With his business partner Sam Aldenton and two thrillingly inventive Spanish architects, José Selgas and Lucía Cano, Rohan is showing in a practical way what we can achieve by aiming higher when it comes to designing our surroundings. (The Architectural Review asked rhetorically whether Second Home is “the best office in the world.”1) According to Selgas and Cano, “Everything for us is related to how the brain works, whether that is a homespace or a workspace. The brain is more related to nature. If you are in an artificial rectangular space, your brain is restricted.”2 As a result, Second Home is full of nature, and to reflect the natural world, there are no right angles in the whole building. As Rohan says, “We didn’t evolve with straight lines.”3
But Rohan’s vision is not simply about melding nature and people. In his original building in London as well as in future Second Homes planned in America and around the world, it’s also about making people more comfortable in their environment. “Space is not just a commodity,” he says; it’s about “community and serendipity.” It has to be “curated.” People want to interact with one another, so Second Home works to ensure a diverse community where people and ideas can cross-pollinate. But Rohan and Sam also understand that people want time and space for themselves. They’ve designed Second Home for both, enabling members to regulate their own social interaction. For example, side entrances and exits allow you to avoid seeing others if you just want to slip in and out.
Second Home is a living, contemporary manifestation of a phrase that has come to capture the essence of why spaces matter. In 1943 Winston Churchill was asked to comment on the design of the new House of Commons building in Westminster. He explained his view that the physical characteristics of the building would have a major influence on how the politicians who used it would behave and, ultimately, on the policies that resulted. He quipped, “We shape our buildings, and afterward our buildings shape us.”4 Far too many architects and city planners have forgotten this essential truth—despite how obvious it seems. In Chapter 2 we looked at the idea of human-centered design in the context of government and public policy; in this chapter we’re going to apply the same principle—human-centeredness—to the design of the physical space around us.
PARADOXICALLY, THE MORE sophisticated we’ve become, the more our physical interactions with the world have become thoughtless and unnatural. Look at the buildings and public spaces we use every day. Why are so many of them so terrible? Why is so much of the man-made world seemingly designed without any regard for us, the people who actually have to live in it? We have settled for industrially designed and manufactured homes and offices, suburbs that are ‘good enough,’ but our inhuman attitudes toward the built environment make many aspects of our lives, from education and health care to childhood play, much worse. We need places that work on a human scale and a human level.
In 1931 German psychologist Kurt Lewin proposed what would come to be known as Lewin’s equation: B = f (P, E)—that is, human behavior is a function of a person and his or her environment. This was groundbreaking at the time: most psychologists assumed a person’s habits and behaviors were a result simply of the type of person they were. Lewin thought otherwise. “Only by the concrete whole which comprises the object and the situation are the vectors which determine the dynamics of the event defined,” he remarked when the theory was first proposed.5 Several decades later psychologists would coin the term situationism to describe the overwhelming influence that external factors have on a person’s behavior, as opposed to internal characteristics like mood, personality, and preferences. In the ensuing decades experiment after experiment in the lab as well as in the real world has proved this to be the case, lending even more weight to those wartime words of Winston Churchill. Our surroundings play such an important role in determining how happy, healthy, and productive we are. It’s time we made them more human.
SPACE AND THE QUALITY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
Home might be where the heart is, but when it comes to the communities in which we live and work, many urban planners and architects seem to have followed only their heads. Obsessed with their own notions of how a perfectly rational society would look and function, they spent the twentieth century experimenting with our neighborhoods, often with awful results. There is no more iconic example of inhuman architecture than the work of Swiss architect Le Corbusier, who inspired many of France’s urban housing projects in the mid-twentieth century—high-rises that have mostly served to isolate poor individuals from the rest of the community. The very term he used to describe his buildings is exactly what’s wrong with them: “machines for living in.” It’s hard to imagine a less human approach. One of this architecture’s best critiques was offered by Jane Jacobs, who had studied social housing as a reporter for Architectural Forum in the 1950s. As Canadian journalist Robert Fulford reports,
On paper [the housing developments] looked fine, but when Jacobs visited them she discovered that the open spaces were empty of people. Planners had segregated residences, retail stores, business offices, and schools, an arrangement that was tidy but also inhuman and uninteresting. An environment created out of goodwill and careful thought had turned out to be boring, dangerous, and ultimately unliveable. The new developments had literally been planned to death: they left no room for happy accidents, and no room for life.6
If ever there were an advocate of human-centered design, it was Jacobs. In her classic—and now thankfully influential—book, The Death and Life of American Cities, she lays out both her critique of and antidote to the ‘visionary’ planning that typified public projects in the mid-twentieth century (and government programs more generally today). Jacobs’s legitimacy derived not from theory, which she ignored, or any advanced degree, which she lacked, but from street-level observations of people themselves and how buildings and streets influenced their interaction. She was only concerned about how cities worked ‘in real life,’ as she put it, because that was the only way to understand how to plan, rebuild, or develop a neighborhood for economic and social success.7 For ‘planners’ to be captivated by their own visions of order and beauty was to forget about how people actually lived. If you pick up her book, which reads as much as a work of literature as an urban planning guide, you might be surprised at the simplicity of many of her suggestions and the length she devotes to each. There’s an entire chapter discussing the need for short street blocks (with many possible routes to any given destination, an area “opens up”), another on old buildings, and four chapters on sidewalks. To many these are trivial features that merely enhance a city’s functions; to Jacobs they were central to its fundamental vitality. These issues are brilliantly brought to life in that most iconic of cities, Paris. It is a place that tells a powerful tale of contrasts, providing a juxtaposition between a human, Jane Jacobs world and an inhuman, Le Corbusier one.
When he seized power as emperor in 1852, Napoleon III had an almost ‘messianic’ plan for Paris.8 To build his vision, he appointed Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, a Parisian native who had been prefect in various other French cities, to be the new “Prefect of the Seine.” Paris had many ills. The medieval streets were difficult to navigate and often impassable, paved with stones that “offered an uncertain footing for pedestrians and horses alike” and made of dirt that the “slightest rain . . . turned into black mud.”9 Paris was, according to French writer Maxime du Camp, “on the point of becoming uninhabitable. Its population [was] suffocating in the tiny, narrow, putrid, and tangled streets in which it had been dumped. As a result of this state of affairs, everything suffered: hygiene, security, speed of communication and public morality.”10 Much of this stemmed from lack of good plumbing and sanitation; sewers overflowed and emptied into the Seine, which was in turn a source of drinking water.
Napoleon and Haussmann were determined to modernize Paris. They knew that a city, as a physical space, encompassed a complex ecosystem. Accordingly, writes historian Colin Jones, they “saw themselves as physician-urbanists, whose task was to ensure Paris’s nourishment, to regulate and to speed up circulation in its arteries (namely, its streets), to give it more powerful lungs so as to let it breathe (notably, through green spaces), and to ensure that its waste products were hygienically and effectively disposed of.”11 Haussmann channeled his patron’s dictatorial powers by aggressively attacking the city in order to change it. In one sense his reforms were the epitome of inhumanity: instead of rebuilding piecemeal, he demolished whole neighborhoods to recreate Paris in a neater grid, building wide avenues on straight axes to ease movement in the city. The new apartments that lined them were uniform and modern, in the now-famous Haussmannian style. But they were in the service of human outcomes: Haussmann created wide avenues so pedestrians could have spacious promenades, he built new buildings to modernize living spaces and allow light to come to the streets, and he constructed several huge new parks to give all Parisians access to green space, “green lungs” for the overcrowded and polluted city.12 He fulfilled some of Parisians’ most basic human needs—creating a modern plumbing system that brought fresh water from outside the city while disposing of waste in a sanitary manner—but he also promoted their aspirational ones by building the Opéra Garnier as a monument to culture. There’s no doubt today that Paris is a beautiful, modern city.
That is, at its center. When you contrast the center of Paris with its banlieues, or suburbs, full of housing projects (called Habitation à Loyer Modéré, or ‘rent-controlled housing’) inspired by Le Corbusier, you find a different, sadder story. These built-up ‘utopias’ are cruel traps: residents have sunlight and fresh air but are left in thrall to whichever gang controls the elevators. More fundamentally Le Corbusier forgot that as people move through life, they want different kinds of residences—urban apartments for young people, then space for raising a family, and then a pleasant retreat for retirement. “If you don’t vary the housing units in a given neighborhood—if you fill entire quarters of the city with standard-issue monoliths—you condemn upwardly mobile people to constant movement,” observes American journalist Christopher Caldwell, who has studied the banlieues in great depth. “The only people who develop any sense of place are those trapped in the poverty they started in.”13 At first glance Haussmann’s Napoleon-era reforms and the construction of the Le Corbusier–inspired high-rises seem similar: both stemmed from the top-down visions of hubristic planners, but both, too, had ‘more human’ goals at their centers.
However, despite the inhuman process, Haussmann’s vision in Paris worked. The banlieues did not. Central Paris is beautiful, with plentiful transport connecting mixed-use buildings everywhere. On almost every street the ground floor is a shop or business with offices and housing above. The banlieues, on the other hand, have become synonymous with disaster, most recently burdened by massive riots in 2005. The rioters, mostly first- and second-generation North Africans, had plenty of grievances: unemployment, racism, France’s failure to integrate them into society. But their grievances were exacerbated by the inhuman architecture of the banlieues. By concentrating the city’s poorest, most desperate, and most violent residents, French planners inadvertently created a powder keg that duly burst when three youths from a banlieue, thinking they were being chased by the police, hid in a power station and were electrocuted. Two died, a third was gravely injured, and an entire community of young people rose in rebellion against the society they felt was responsible. Neighborhood design did not cause the weeks of ensuing riot, but the daily indignities of inhuman architecture and planning certainly contributed to them.
The reason central Paris ‘works’ is because with different types of people using the same streets at all times of day, Haussmann inadvertently created a ‘Jacobsian’ city: there are always, in her famous phrase, “eyes on the street” to watch over it. The banlieues, with their isolated, single-use buildings dominated by gangs, are the precise, inhuman opposite.
ONE OF THE marks of a great, human neighborhood is that you can’t really tell where it begins or ends—one area just flows into the next. Sooner or later you know you’re somewhere special, but the precise moment never really announces itself.
For decades it was pretty easy to know when you had entered St. Lawrence, Toronto. Situated close to the bustling downtown, Toronto Harbor, and the Canadian national railways yard, the neighborhood had once been a busy port area, but by the 1960s it had grown blighted and vacant. But affordable housing was high on the agenda of 1970s mayor David Crombie, and despite its grittiness, St. Lawrence offered prime real estate in the heart of the city. The city-hall bureaucrats were nervous about any sort of large new development; prior years and decades had already been scarred by grand efforts at urban renewal in the style of Le Corbusier and like-minded city planners around the world. Toronto’s leaders had fresh memories of their own: Regent Park, a 1950s ‘tower in the park’ housing project near downtown, had fallen into disrepair and crime after ten years, and the 1960s high-rise development of St. James Town just to the north is ridden with crime to this day.
But 1970s Toronto would be different. Jane Jacobs moved there from New York in 1968 and had already begun influencing its activists and politicians alike. Mayor Crombie and Michael Dennis, the city’s housing commissioner, were eager pupils of her ideas and prepared to throw out the existing textbooks on urban planning in favor of a completely new approach. Their first move with St. Lawrence was to bring in an outside architect, Alan Littlewood, at Jacobs’s recommendation (perhaps his appeal was precisely that he had no formal planning degree). From the start he saw the project as a process of “invisible mending”14; that is, rather than raze entire city blocks and rebuild a ‘utopian’ community, Littlewood kept as much of the neighborhood’s original features—and historic brick character—as possible, tucking new housing in where he could among its existing roads and buildings as well as its treasured mid-nineteenth-century structures like the wedge-shaped Gooderham flatiron building, the Cathedral Church of St. James, St. Lawrence Hall, and St. Lawrence Market, which now houses what National Geographic magazine has called the world’s best food market.15
St. Lawrence would come to typify the recommendations Jacobs had made in her seminal book a decade before. It would be more human. To prevent the banlieue problem à la Paris, the neighborhood was built to appeal to a broad spectrum of individuals and families, using a variety of dwelling types—apartments, condominiums, houses—to meet the needs of residents of all ages and incomes, as both market and social housing were intermixed. And unlike most new developments at the time, which kept traffic strictly separated from pedestrians with long and wide ‘superblock’ roads next to large parks and plazas, St. Lawrence preserved its nineteenth-century street grid of short, frequent blocks. This allows for the type of serendipitous “street ballet” adored by Jacobs. She writes,
Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance, . . . an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole.16
St. Lawrence has been successful because the long-term realities of people were put before the—often short-sighted—needs of planners, developers, and bureaucrats. Unlike many ego-driven projects, the place is special precisely because it doesn’t immediately appear to be anything special; it’s the people who live there, flourishing, who take center stage.17 Not a machine, but a neighborhood for living.18
Toronto isn’t alone. The United States has its fair share of beautifully livable neighborhoods. Neighborhoods where architecture was clearly not just thought of as that ‘step before engineering’ but as the skill and practice necessary to give a place real character; that make their streets safe and usable for pedestrians and bicyclists, not just cars; that encourage local shops and restaurants; that integrate trees and green space into the hustle of daily life. Cities like Portland, Oregon, exemplify how thriving American urban areas can embrace more human urban design. Not only are its city blocks among the shortest in the country, but its myriad neighborhoods are all connected by plentiful public transit as well as ‘bicycle boulevards,’ which allow cyclists to avoid main arterial streets.
Of course, it’s not feasible for most cities to rebuild themselves, but municipal leaders needn’t make large changes to their civil infrastructure to make their neighborhoods more human; small improvements can have a transformative effect. Consider dense and bustling New York. Mayor Mike Bloomberg saw an opportunity to reduce traffic fatalities while improving the health and happiness of cyclists and pedestrians by adopting ‘complete streets’ through parts of Manhattan. Now not only do many streets have bike lanes, but parked cars have also been moved to their street side to serve as a barrier between auto and bike traffic.
Meanwhile his planning commissioner, Amanda Burden, approached the city with a new philosophy to “tap into [her] humanity,” asking herself of public spaces: “Would you want to go there? Would you want to stay there?” Her answer was a series of unique projects throughout the city to make it more livable and connected, transforming an old elevated railway trestle into the High Line, a one-and-a-half-mile park through the heart of three neighborhoods in Manhattan’s West Side, as well as over three hundred acres of dilapidated waterfront into dynamic new parks.19 She worked with transport commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, who took the lead in experimenting with the creation of pedestrian- and cyclist-friendly streets, even closing some to create car-free plazas. Her best tactic? Iterating with temporary materials, like paint, “so if it worked better for traffic, if it was better for mobility, if it was safer, better for business, we would keep it, and if it didn’t work, no harm, no foul, we could put it back the way that it was,” she says. There is “much less anxiety when you think that something can be put back. But the results were overwhelming.”20
SPACE AND FUNCTION
The built environment is, in a very literal way, the infrastructure of our daily lives. If we get it wrong, the consequences extend beyond mere aesthetics. Just consider many cities’ housing policies, whereby already-established residents often welcome new companies with the attendant jobs and higher salaries without allowing the necessary housing to be developed alongside. Nowhere is this more obvious than in San Francisco, my adopted home. It’s outrageous that while city officials had little difficulty finding space (and tax breaks) to house Twitter and other large tech companies, most of the people who make the city tick—not just line cooks and janitors but teachers and police officers too—must live elsewhere . . . far elsewhere. And it’s not for lack of space; it’s for lack of courage among our political leaders to stand up to their property-owning residents. One particularly illustrative example comes from the late 1990s, when the construction of an affordable apartment building for teachers was proposed, and residents in the surrounding middle-class neighborhood opposed it—“not in my backyard” they collectively asserted; city officials predictably gave in.21 Meanwhile current programs to help teachers afford to live in the city whose children they teach are drained of funds. At least teachers have a program—most workers have no support whatsoever.
UC Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti has calculated that each new tech job creates five local-services jobs.22 But in San Francisco the figure is just slightly north of two. As journalist Kim-Mai Cutler points out, if we were to ease the city’s burdensome permitting process and reform its zoning and height laws, “it would not only make living affordable for most people, it would allow a far larger portion of the population to find jobs and do things like save or spend money instead of moving somewhere distant and spending their money on driving, or even being unemployed.”23
When a large portion of a region’s workers have to commute hours each morning and evening, it isn’t just a question of personal convenience—or even the well-documented environmental or health consequences of long commutes.24 When these working parents spend their nonworking hours in gridlock traffic, they aren’t at home with their children—eating dinner, doing homework, reading stories. Short-sighted housing policies keep families from spending time together—the time we know is critical to child development—and exacerbates inequality.
As with so many other areas of policy, as we’ve seen throughout this book, the real reason for San Francisco’s housing crisis is structural: a land-use system that favors big developers and incumbent property owners. Much-trumpeted schemes from city leaders to boost housing supply are a drop in the bucket compared to what is needed. But until they are prepared to take on the special interests in the property market, nothing much, sadly, will change.
Today, even as our public spaces on the outside give the appearance of having evolved beyond Le Corbusier cubes, the facades of most buildings merely obscure the ugly truth within: that we are living and working in machines as much as—if not more than—ever before. Too much of our built environment, both public and private, is designed to maximize overall ‘efficiency’ and minimize cost rather than serve our most human needs. This is absolutely the wrong way to think about what our built environment is. Our inhuman approach to space contributes not just to public policy problems but also to poor workplace productivity. Marlon Nieuwenhuis, a psychologist at Cardiff University, found that adding plants to otherwise spartan offices increased productivity 15 percent.25 (Second Home London has a thousand of them.) A study by Northwestern University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign found that office workers with window exposure to natural light slept longer and better, were more physically active, and enjoyed better overall quality of life than their counterparts without.26 Of those spaces that aren’t explicitly ‘broken,’ many just serve their minimal function—think of windowless classrooms, soulless offices, treeless streets—processing people through the day rather than providing the setting in which they can lead happier and more fulfilled lives. In a twist of irony, the spaces we live and work in are often designed to better serve other machines—cars, trucks, computers—than humans.
According to Carlo Ratti, a designer and architect who works on the nexus of technology and the physical world at MIT, technology could help change this. The original computers were so large that to use them, people had to work in large, dark, air-conditioned rooms, often squirreled away in basements. “The machine determined the physical condition of the space around it,” he says. “It was 90 percent machine, 10 percent human.” Now technology has literally untethered us. The advent of small, powerful, and mobile devices coupled with ubiquitous wireless Internet allows us to work anywhere—even outside. And this “ubiquitous computing” marks a profound shift in how we design spaces. There is a paradox, Carlo says, in that when technology is all around us, “we can focus much more on the architecture, on the human side of things, and design offices, homes, and buildings around people instead of around machines.”27 Indeed, the whole reason we can discuss open-plan offices or flexible homes is because technology is no longer the limiting factor in building spaces. We can focus on our environments in other ways, like helping us to be healthier, more productive, more creative—in short, more human. And we are getting better and better at it.
Around the world school administrators, factory owners, and office managers observe firsthand the difference that can be made by space designed with people in mind. It can even be a competitive advantage: Steve Jobs famously insisted that the bathrooms at Pixar Studios (creator of hits like Toy Story and Finding Nemo) be located in the center of the building so people from different departments would run into each other throughout the day, sparking spontaneous human interaction and creative collaboration.
If any company understands the importance of putting people at the center of the design process, it’s furniture manufacturer Herman Miller, which makes some of the most ergonomic furniture in the world. For many years, though, the human-first principles they applied to their furniture making didn’t extend to their workers. After a transformative factory redesign—infusing both the manufacturing and office areas with natural light; connecting different parts of the building by an indoor, bamboo-plant-lined “boulevard”; and adding and expanding operable windows throughout the plant—they saw employee happiness and sense of belonging skyrocket and productivity significantly improve.28 The executives of SnowPeak, a Japanese camping-gear company, thought they would create better products if they could observe their customers using them. So the company adapted the concept of a factory store: they created a “factory camping ground.” When they built their headquarters, they sacrificed large amounts of land around the building so loyal—and, perhaps, curious—customers could come and camp in view of the windows. As a result, product designers and makers can see exactly how their equipment is used and better understand what works and what doesn’t. SnowPeak’s commitment to transparency works both ways. There are no opaque walls or doors—all is glass. No space is off limits, so staff and customers can fully see what’s going on and can give feedback. And although everyone can see in, all you need to do is turn toward an outside ‘wall’ to see the beautiful mountains beyond, a constant reminder of the company’s mission to connect customers with nature.29
Although some aspects of space design are unequivocally ‘better,’ different spaces suit different needs, especially in the workplace. Companies that want internal groups to work together effectively and creatively will likely want an open plan; those that want to mix up employees from different departments might add flexible seating. But where individuals need to be productive on their own, companies might want to keep the traditional model, or at least a more enlightened variant of it.30 That means considering employees’ needs, not just the corporate view. Open-space offices might boost creativity, but they can also create anxiety, with employees paranoid that their bosses are watching what they’re up to. Balancing open and private space is critical; employees need room for themselves, whether to think, work, or simply have a phone call without fear of eavesdroppers. In one recent survey 88 percent of the most satisfied workers were those who could work where they wanted.31 The key, as Rohan is showing in Second Home, is to give workers a choice so they can adjust to their own preferences.
The power of space to enhance creativity, productivity, or employee health needn’t be limited to the workplace, though. Thoughtful architects have shown that extending more human design to our schools can improve pupils’ performance as well. In Finland, whose excellent schools we discussed in Chapter 3, it should come as no surprise that educators are equally thoughtful about school design. School architects in Helsinki consider questions such as whether the structure allows pupils and staff to break their routines and try new things; whether the environment fosters creativity, enabling observation and investigation of everyday phenomena; whether the building protects against violence and bullying; and even whether the school welcomes visiting parents.32
SPACE AS SOLUTION
Spaces, as we have seen, can have an immense impact on daily life and can help us be more human in our homes, workplaces, and play spaces. But they can also help solve social and environmental problems. In 1982 James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling put forward their famous ‘broken windows’ theory—that visible, physical signs of disorder signal crime as an acceptable norm, perpetuating further crime. Small fixes to the physical environment, such as cleaning up graffiti and litter as well as repairing broken street furniture like park benches, can have more of an impact on crime than direct police intervention or increased social services.33
In Lowell, Massachusetts, authorities identified thirty-four crime ‘hot spots’ and proceeded to clean half of them up. They found that in the half where litter was collected and debris removed, there was a 20 percent drop in police calls.34 At the University of Groningen in the Netherlands psychologists repeatedly left an envelope with a €5 note clearly inside half-sticking out of a postbox. When the street was orderly, 13 percent of passers-by took it (the rest pushed it back in); when litter surrounded the area, 25 percent took it; and when the postbox itself was covered in graffiti, the number increased to 27 percent. Disorder on the street doubled the propensity of passers-by to become thieves.*35
Street-level nudges can be remarkably effective for other problems as well. Sweden’s Vision Zero program, which aims to eliminate road deaths, has given Sweden one of the best road-safety records in the world.36 Since it started in 1997, annual road deaths have come down by four-fifths compared to 1965, despite a doubling of traffic.37 Vision Zero has a simple but radically human-centered message: “In every situation a person might fail, the road system should not.”38 The Swedes have thus tried to design a road system nationwide that aims to maintain and increase mobility but never at the expense of people’s lives. They understand that people make mistakes, but they believe that death should not be the consequence. This is not, the Swedes argue, any different from how we approach other systems: “If you take a nuclear power station, aviation, a rail system, all of them are based on the idea that they are operated by people who can make a mistake,” says Claes Tingvall of the Swedish National Road Administration. With that in mind, roads are designed in Sweden so that although mistakes might cause an accident, there are no fatalities or serious injuries. “You have to take the human in our behavior into account when you design the road transport system. It is understanding that we will never be perfect,” says Tingvall. For example, knowing that drivers will try to overtake other cars on two-lane roads, Sweden has installed ‘2+1’ roads, where each direction of traffic takes turns using a middle third lane to overtake. In its first decade that one improvement saved 145 lives.39
My favorite example of more human design for public space is from the Netherlands. Consider how Amsterdam became one of the most bike- and pedestrian-friendly cities in the world, with cars used for only 22 percent of all trips (the rest are by bike, public transport, or foot).40 In the early 1970s Amsterdam was like most urban environments around the world: traffic clogged and dangerous. At rush hour streets resembled car parks, and the air was choked with exhaust fumes. Car accidents killed more than three thousand people annually across Holland in the early 1970s, including over five hundred children.41 In 1972 one group of children living in central Amsterdam had had enough. The neighborhood called De Pijp (‘the pipe’) was about a hundred years old, five times denser than the rest of the city, and not built for the cars that the forty thousand inhabitants brought with them and filled the streets with.42 Pupils at one of the local schools started a petition to make the streets less convenient for cars and safer for children like them, launching a campaign that quickly outgrew the tiny classroom from which it started. They even took matters into their own hands, temporarily closing a street to physically demonstrate the need for a safe place to play.
This was part of the birth of a larger movement, Stop de Kindermoord (‘stop child murder’), that would transform streets in Amsterdam and greater Holland. It wasn’t easy—there’s a famous video of an irate driver picking up and throwing a roadblock children had erected to turn a small part of a street into a car-free zone. Despite the violent backlash against the anticar campaign, the children, supported by their teacher, stuck to their guns. All they wanted was a safe place to play. And through their action they started a worldwide urban-design movement that today has mainstreamed pedestrian zones, bike lanes, street furniture, tree planting, and so on. The children recognized that the space they lived in was not designed for their human needs—to play, to walk to school, and to socialize with their friends and families—and they did something about it. One group of children, in one school in Amsterdam. What a lovely, inspiring tale of more human social change.
In many cases making space more human is really just about recognizing how people actually behave in certain contexts—as opposed to how we assume they do—and designing our environments with this in mind. A Stanford University project that Jason (the Jason who, along with his brother Scott, helped me write this book) was involved in, designing a ‘concept home’ that would be net-zero-energy, shows how a human-centered approach can help solve environmental problems too. Jason first mapped all the places people interact with their homes in ways that consume energy—light switches, thermostats, and so on. His team’s key insight was that few people actually want to waste resources; we just do so because there are small, seemingly insignificant barriers that, for reasons of forgetfulness, lack of attention, or even just laziness, get in our way. If the team could remove as many of these barriers as possible, people’s intention to either save money, do good for the environment, or simply avoid waste would be less impeded.
Of the handful of innovative products his team developed and built in the house, my favorite was a ‘room switch’ that would make the people at Nest (producers of beautiful and practical home services like thermostats) blush. “We wanted to rethink the whole idea of the light switch,” Jason says. There are all sorts of different electronic items plugged into the wall that draw energy, even when they’re off—device chargers, televisions, kitchen appliances. Jason and his team wanted to design a ‘light’ switch that worked for the whole room, one that could turn everything off, not just the lights. “Simplicity was important—part of the reason people don’t unplug things is because it’s a pain.” The solution, as is so often the case, lay right in front of them. Most of the team had Apple laptops, which have what are called ‘trackpads.’ Inspired, they built a similar control in place of where a light switch would normally be: instead of a toggle switch or even a screen, you touch an opaque surface. As Jason puts it, “You can achieve an incredible amount of functionality based on your gestures and how many fingers you use to draw them, all without automating away users’ agency.” Yet most importantly, with any ‘room switch,’ it just took one touch to turn off every electrical appliance in a room or even put the whole house ‘to sleep.’
SPACES AND HUMAN IMPACT
“First life, then spaces, then buildings—the other way around never works.” At seventy-nine years old, Danish architect Jan Gehl still has strong opinions about the way our cities are designed. He’s spent the past fifty years developing the principles of what makes a city ‘livable’ and leading an unwavering campaign for “architecture that considers human scale and interaction.”43
I was fortunate to be introduced to Gehl’s work by Richard Rogers, who, along with the great British architect, Thomas Heatherwick, has taught me so much about architecture and urban design and is a fantastic champion for the future of cities. “Cities—like books—can be read, and Jan Gehl understands their language,” he writes in the foreword to Gehl’s book, Cities for People. “The street, the footpath, the square, and the park are the grammar of the city; they provide the structure that enables cities to come to life, and to encourage and accommodate diverse activities, from the quiet and contemplative to the noisy and busy. A humane city—with carefully designed streets, squares, and parks—creates pleasure for visitors and passers-by, as well as for those who live, work, and play there every day.” Denser and more sustainable cities, Rogers adds, are the future, but only if we build them with space to walk, cycle, and breathe in, with “beautiful public spaces that are human in scale, sustainable, healthy, and lively.”44 Like the thinking of Jane Jacobs, Rogers’s and Gehl’s philosophies of cities resonate with me deeply.
It turns out that Gehl might not have learned the language of cities at all had love not intervened. It was 1960, and like all formally trained architects at the time, he was perfectly prepared to build exactly those types of ‘modern cities’ that Jane Jacobs would soon complain about, cities that, in his words, were full of “high rises and a lot of lawns and good open space—good windy spaces.”45 Had he not met Ingrid Mundt, a psychologist who would become his wife, his life might have turned out drastically different. As someone who studied “people rather than bricks” as Gehl puts it, Mundt inspired a host of conversations among their combined peers. Why weren’t architects interested in people? Why weren’t they paying attention to how architecture could “influence people’s lives”? Why couldn’t they work out how to make cities that would make people happier?
Gehl’s philosophy was forever changed. “Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, is a great example,” he said. “From the air it’s very interesting. It’s interesting for a bird or eagle. From the helicopter view, it has got wonderful districts with sharp and precise government buildings and residential buildings. However, nobody spent three minutes to think about what Brasilia would look like at the eye level. . . . Nobody was responsible for looking after the people.”46
In 1965 they created the PSPL, a “public space/public life” survey in Siena, Italy. The initial goal was simple: keep track of the number of people in a public space and what they were using it for.47 Such ‘street-level’ observations would inform recommendations for improvements to various neighborhoods. Fast-forward half a century, and Gehl has now surveyed cities around the world. His focus is almost entirely on considering the city, however large, at the human scale. To him that’s the only way to understand the effect architecture ultimately has on people.
From São Paulo and Amman to Brighton and New York, Gehl and his team spend weeks surveying people at all times of day, watching how they interact with the urban space in question—where they walk, where they spend time, what they do. Just as in Siena, he and his firm can take this base knowledge and use it to advise clients on questions of urban design and master-planning. In all these years his goal remains the same: create ‘cities for people.’ Through this work Gehl has created a list of twelve criteria for any public space, based on what he and his colleagues believe are the things people need from their urban environments. They span three categories: protection (from traffic, crime, and pollution); comfort (to be able to walk, stand or sit, converse, and play without impediment), and enjoyment (of the weather—hot, cold, rain, or snow—and of aesthetic qualities). Their approach is meticulous, combining highly studious ethnography with traditional surveys to capture every on-the-ground detail. In one project aimed at improving London’s walkability, surveyors counted thousands of pedestrians, measured precise distances between curbs and pavement obstacles, like trash cans and street poles, and keenly observed every sort of behavior they could catalog, from mothers enlisting passers-by to help carry a stroller down steps, to how many people cross against a red signal. They even compare measurements between weekdays and weekends, summer and winter. Though they don’t provide a score per se, their reports are exhaustive, combining qualitative and quantitative elements, including photographs, charts, and annotated maps to give planners a sense of where they are strong and where they are deficient in each category.48
To do this for every space, from schools to offices, houses to neighborhoods, would be extreme. But Gehl is onto something. We don’t need specific measurements or a points system to be able to assess whether a space fulfills human needs; acknowledging them during its design is half the battle. So here’s a simple way for us to make our spaces more human. Today every building that’s constructed has, at the very least, basic safety standards it has to pass as well as extra hurdles like environmental impact reports. On top of that, almost every type of space is subject to seemingly endless rules and regulations, standards, and requirements.
What I propose is far simpler: a report, nothing too long or onerous, let’s call it a Human Impact Report. No specific regulations or requirements. Just a short, straightforward statement of how any development—home, office, city block, or neighborhood redevelopment—fulfills each of Gehl’s twelve criteria. In the spirit of ‘nudging’ outlined in Chapter 2, the point here is not to create another layer of burdensome bureaucracy; rather, if architects, planners, designers, builders, and engineers are prompted to start thinking along these lines, that simple act will end up making a difference—because it will make people think. It will make people think about people. And when this becomes part of the planning vernacular, when buyers, tenants, residents, citizens, and everyone else who occupies a space is exposed to these questions—and how builders answer them—‘human-ness’ will become a real competitive advantage. Imagine that: a system in which developers and builders and architects and urban planners compete with each other to make the world around us more human.
That’s a world I’d want to call home.
*Unfortunately, misinterpretation of the theory has been used to support other, only partially related policies. Critics use (far too-frequent) occasions of abusive police over-reaction as an indictment of ‘broken-windows’ policing writ large. Such criticism is an inaccurate conflation of two completely different phenomena. Yes, broken-windows theory suggests it’s important to police petty crime. But it also suggests that community policing—more human policing, whereby officers walk the beat and actively foster relationships—is the answer. A proper application of broken-windows policing is community engagement, not creating an authoritarian police state.