What matters most when we create liveable cities? We need to go back to first principles and talk about people, says Allison Dutoit, Gehl Architects

A cycling strategy is not only about getting more people on bikes. It’s about positive development and health, it’s about safety, social equality and well-being. That's what cycling and walking strategies can deliver. Policy, planning and urban design is part of the mix: it’s about tying these things together, and it transcends a transport plan. We need to change the conversation. We need to go back to first principles and talk about people. This includes understanding how we describe and measure successful ‘good living’. 

At a time when division seems to dominate the political landscape in many parts of the world, it is both paradoxical and comforting to realise that people’s desire for closeness remains really important. This was one of the  lessons learnt from a recent impact assessment completed by Louise Kielgast of Gehl Architects with Nordea-fonden in Denmark under the campaign ‘Go od Living in the City’**. When we discuss healthy cities, we quickly come to the key question: how can what we deliver influence behaviour?

Closeness may seem like something that is hard to grasp. Nonetheless, as we started following three selected projects, it became evident that the importance of closeness prevailed and was a contributing factor for generating impact. We saw how growing closer relationships with other people had an impact, not only on people’s sense of community, but also to the extent with which people started engaging and taking responsibility.

 The impact assessment project was a piece of work aimed at developing new models for measuring impact. An important first task was to define just what ‘good living in the city’ could be, acknowledging that they are likely to be as many different responses to what ‘good living’ is as there are people involved. In close collaboration with Nordea-fonden, we developed a set of overall indicators that would address some of the most prevalent challenges facing urban living today: loneliness, segregation, need for more co-creation, privatisation and the importance of accessibility to green/blue spaces for our well-being. We ended up with the following five themes:

• Community
• Diversity
• Ownership & engagement
• Public space as meeting space
• Visibility about possibilities

In addition to representing possible responses to social challenges, these indicators were chosen in order to emphasise our people-centered approach towards impact assessment, focusing both on the value created for society as a whole, as well as people as individuals.

 As we recognise that the public realm can greatly influence our health, this study reinforces the notion that ‘what we measure matters’. If we want to create invitations to be more healthy in our everyday life, then we must look at the places we are creating. Who is invited? Is it safe, inclusive, and enjoyable?  It’s not only large-scale projects that matter; change can happen though small interventions in public spaces, and can have a substantial impact in terms of bringing people together in new ways. We at Gehl have an urge to bring a new vocabulary and new indicators to the forefront of the development of our cities; for example supplementing discussions around density with new parameters of proximity, which will broaden the choice we have in the public realm. Liveable cities must be healthy cities.

Allison Dutoit will be speaking at the Sustainable Transport + Health Summit at Bristol City Hall on Friday 24 February 2017