Tag Archives: Jan Gehl

“Pedestrians in Cape Town are a hunted race”… We’ve made some progress

17 April 11 1 Comment

In 2005, Gehl Architects from Copenhagen did an analysis of public space and public life in the Cape Town Central City. Jan Gehl, world-renowned architect and pioneer of the city-building philosophy of “first people, then space, and then buildings”, commented at the time, when he saw the extent of car-dominance…

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New exhibition in Cape Town: Beyond car-dependent models of city development

01 April 11 0 Comments

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Our Cities Ourselves: The Future of Transportation in Urban Life showcases the potential transformational role of transportation in ten major cities across the world and illustrates how the dream of a sustainable, equitable and liveable future can be realized when transport is a core foundation.

Ten of the world’s leading…

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Laneways, Sydney: Using Public Art to Revitalise City Spaces

17 January 10 2 Comments

While in Sydney, I was taken on a fantastic walking tour of some of the laneways that are part of a CBD lane revitalisation strategy. One of the ways in which this is being done is through an innovative urban art installation project called By George! Hidden Networks (George…

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Cape Town Central City: Reclaiming people’s spaces (part one)

03 December 09 5 Comments

When Jan Gehl, world-renowned architect who focuses on ’life between buildings’ visited in 2004, he described pedestrians in Cape Town as a ‘hunted race’. He was right. Thanks to grievous urban planning errors in the 1970s, a six-lane race track called Strand Street intersects with an eight-lane monstrosity called the Heerengracht, creating…

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