PHOTO: Jan Gehl wishes the city luck in re-inventing itself. "When the Australians can do it, surely you can, too," he said.
Last night, Hammerson Hall was host to the final instalment of the Our Future Mississauga Speaker Series, featuring Jan Gehl, an architect and expert on public space, and Ken Greenberg, an urban designer.
Both men delivered fascinating speeches. In fact, it was the best of the four nights of the speaker series. Sadly, it was also, with about 500 people, the smallest audience. The only reason the audience was that large was because there were a lot of urban design students from GTA universities.
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First up was Jan Gehl, the affable Danish architect with a charming accent.
He graduated from architecture school in 1960, when liveability wasn't the primary concern of designers. He then married a psychologist, and spent time with her psychologist friends, and they asked, "Why are you architects not interested in people? Why are you only interested in composition and monuments? Architecture is about people."
In 1971, Gehl's first book, Life Between Buildings, was published. The book was about how people use cities, and about how they want to use them.
The book is, in the world of urban designers, a classic.
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"We are slow, we are linear, we are horizontal, we can move, at a maximum, five kilometres per hour, and our senses are made for five kilometres per hour."
He later added, "All the answers to planning are in the human body."
Gehl separated urban design into two categories: five-kilometre-per-hour architecture, made for pedestrians, and sixty-kilometre-per-hour architecture, made for cars.
Re: five-kilometre-per-hour architecture - "We see it in all the old cities. It's the architecture of small spaces."
Re: sixty-kilometre-per-hour architecture - "There are no details because you're too far away from them anyway...There's nothing much to being a human being in this environment."
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Public spaces are split into three zones: market space, meeting space, and connection space.
Connection space is made up of areas used to get from one space to another, and those spaces have taken over the urban landscape in places like Mississauga. Most of our infrastructure is there to facilitate moving from point A to point B.
"The market space has been pushed into Square One, and the meeting space has moved I don't know where."
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"The greatest interest of human beings is other human beings."
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To make the city better, and to cover all the themes the City is studying in this project, the best approach is a small, street-level one.
"The way to hit all these birds with one stone is to plan for pedestrians and bicycles," Gehl said.
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He also, like several other speakers who took the stage at Hammerson Hall, warned the City that building new roads is a terrible idea.
"There hasn't been a place in the world where they've built more roads and they haven't had more traffic."
Gehl's statement took me back to my time as a reporter for the Oakville Beaver. Oakville Town Council was taking a look at their plans for development north of Hwy. 5. Andres Duany, an arrogant and brilliant American, was called on to give a series of public talks.
I went to the library and took out one of Duany's books, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream.
This is from that book:
"The mechanism at work behind induced traffic is elegantly explained by an aphorism gaining popularity among traffic engineers: 'Trying to cure traffic congestion by adding more capacity is like trying to cure obesity by loosening your belt.'"
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Ken Greenberg, former director of urban design and architecture for the City of Toronto, spoke second.
He said, "Every city and every town is marked by the period in which it was born. You're largely a post-second world war city."
So, really, Mississauga was just unlucky, born at the same time as sprawl.
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Re: the environmental component of planning a city: "This is not a frill. This is actually fundamental for our survival."
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Greenberg told us to steer away from big projects. Big projects do not make a city. Instead, Mississauga should focus on small, five-kilometre-per-hour projects. Go to the nodes, the areas that are meant to be community focus points, and build main streets properly.
"This could turn into Dubai, which is just a collection of buildings, or it could start to take on the intimacy of some of these other cities we've seen."
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After doing a day-long tour of Mississauga with staff: "I was looking for cyclists all day, and I think I saw three."
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So, to recap. Think small. Dream about details. Build for people.
Now, we move on to phase two. That takes place in February with the weekend Visioning Symposium, in which citizens, community leaders, and planners will all get together and spend the weekend talking about how to rebuild Mississauga. Seriously, if you sign up for this thing, you have to spend the entire weekend there. I am told there will be good food available for participants, as well as the chance to tell friends and relatives for decades to come, "I helped design Mississauga." Is that worth a weekend of your life? Probably.
You register for the Visioning Symposium online at www.conversation21.ca. Not yet, though. The registration option will be up later this week, or month, or maybe early next year. Keep checking back.