The event took place largely thanks to Anton Kulbachevsky, the head of the Department of Nature Management and Environmental Protection of the city of Moscow, and the Krost concern, which financed the publication, represented by its General Director Alexei Dobashin. Both emphasize that they are applying the Gale concept in their work today.
It is believed that 75-year-old Ian Gail has made the greatest contribution to the development of "cities for people" around the world over the past half century - there are dozens of them. What is the secret of this urbanist's success? After completing his studies at the School of Architecture of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1960, the young specialist, along with other designers who adhere to the unshakable modernist approach at that time, flew over his native Copenhagen and other cities on an airplane, inventing along the way (or rather, on the fly) beautiful new districts, neighborhoods, streets and buildings. The catch was that they were beautiful only in the imagination of the architects, who had a bird's eye view of panoramas inaccessible to ordinary citizens. No designer could have imagined how the projected landscape looks from the pedestrian's point of view.
Jan Gale was helped to change his point of view by a wonderful woman psychologist, his wife, who once asked him: “Here you, architects, create spaces in which people live. What do you know about them? What do you generally learn in your architecture school? Then Gail realized that, indeed, we had studied the habitat of mountain gorillas or pandas much better than the living conditions of Homo Sapiens. Today the urbanist says that he has devoted 40 years of scientific activity to the study of this species. The main conclusion he made is that only cities for dinosaurs can be designed from the air, and in order to do something good for people, you need to look around, being next to them.
Gail talks about what he managed to see and understand, descending from heaven to earth in his books. Three of them have been translated into Russian: Gale's first book, originally published in 1971, "Life Among Buildings," "New Urban Spaces" in 2000, and the last, published just a year and a half ago, in which the urbanist sums up his entire works - "Cities for People".
Jan Gale likes to say: “First we create cities, then they create us. First we create buildings, then they create us. In his books, he offers a set of 12 tools - magic wands that serve to create happy people. These tools are:
- Limiting road traffic and preventing traffic accidents
- Combating crime and violence
- Elimination of unpleasant sensations coming through the channels of the senses (here Gale means protection from unpleasant natural phenomena: wind, rain, snow, heat, cold, etc.)
- Convenience of urban space for walking - creating special walking corridors, planning the street network in such a way that it is optimal for the movement of pedestrians, etc.
- Convenient for standing up
- Seating comfort
- Visual attractiveness of urban space - the formation of the urban landscape, taking into account the distance people see, good visibility, interesting environment
- Ease of listening and speaking - in order to ensure this condition, it is important to reduce city noise and organize special benches for conversations
- Creation of conditions for outdoor games and other types of physical activity throughout the year and at any time of the day
- The "human" scale of the urban environment - urban objects should be commensurate with a human being, it is necessary to return from a techno speed of 60 km / h to a natural perception of space at 5 km / h, when the covered distances and dimensions are much smaller and pedestrians have time to discern the details of the surrounding world
- Creating conditions to maximize climatic benefits
- The aesthetic quality of the urban environment as a source of positive sensory experience
Compliance with these conditions, according to Gale, will restore the disturbed balance between the public and transport zones of the city. Indeed, throughout the history of mankind, the former have played an important role - these were meeting and meeting places, market squares and connecting paths. But since the 50s of the last century, cities have been flooded with cars, and now there is a process of reclaiming space from them: around the 80s, finally, it began to emerge that democracy is not about the ability to park a car anywhere, but freely communicate at any themes (for example, in Spain, after the fall of the Franco regime and the lifting of the ban on gatherings of more than three people, a colossal number of new public spaces arose in a very short time)
According to the urbanist, all 12 conditions correspond to the central square of Siena, and so far Barcelona, Leon, Strasbourg, Freiburg, Copenhagen, Portland, Curitiba, Bogota and Melbourne have been able to win back from cars. For the same reasons, Gale considers Venice to be an ideal city; he is especially impressed by the local tradition of stopping in narrow streets and talking for a long time.
The urbanist says that the main reward he received for his work is the opportunity to see during his lifetime that in Aalborg, Aarhus, Adelaide, Oslo, Belgrade, Gothenburg, Guangzhou, Hobart, London, Malmo, Mexico City, Milan, Newcastle, Muscat, Norwich, Sao Paulo, Sheffield, Seattle, Stoke-on-Trent, Sydney, Zurich and many other cities, people felt much more comfortable. For decades, Gail has worked to transform the heart of his hometown Copenhagen into a car-free environment. Since the 1960s, their number has been reduced by 2% annually, returning space to pedestrians and cyclists, and public spaces have sprung up in place of now unnecessary parking lots. Today, young residents of the Danish capital can walk to school without ever crossing a dangerous roadway, 4 times more people enjoy spending time on the streets, the duration of the walking season has increased from 2 to 10 months a year, and 70% of citizens do not give up the bike in the winter.
Melbourne, which is often called the most comfortable city in the world for life, was a sad, empty place 10 years ago, but Gale has achieved brilliant results here, similar to the “Copenhagen effect”. Many people in the New York suburban area now prefer bicycles to downtown, and things are going well. "More roads, more traffic" is one of Gale's favorite axioms, which he backs up with examples from San Francisco, where, contrary to expectations of absolute collapse following the earthquake destruction of three major city highways, the traffic situation improved, and Seoul, where planners remembered that there was the river flowed through a multi-level multi-lane road and returned it to its original place, in addition to stabilizing the problems of traffic jams, having received an excellent resting place along the banks.
Also, the Gail Architects team takes part in the development of strategies for the development of entire territories: this is the Castleford project, which unites 5 depressed British cities in West Yorkshire with cultural, historical, industrial, transport potential, where the stake is made on the development of the group as a single polycentric complex, construction the city of Aspern Seestadt on the site of an airfield not far from Vienna (here it is planned to create a multifunctional cluster around a large natural lake in the center, which Gale proposes to “colorfully” zone - highlight the red (trade, culture), blue (shady promenade by the lake) and green (city parks and suburban recreational areas) areas) and many others.
While in Moscow, Jan Gale expressed regret that he had worked all over the world for so long and had never been to this beautiful city before. The urbanist really liked the rivers and vast green spaces of Moscow, but the adaptability of the urban environment for human life still leaves much to be desired. In the near future, Gail intends to actively make up for lost time: he has already seen a similar picture in many cities around the world, and he is sure that he will be able to succeed in our city too.
