The Inhuman Scale: Jan Gehl, Capitalism and the Making of Livable Cities

Abstract

Creating vibrant pedestrian areas is today an aspirational value and a mark of success for affluent municipalities and many private developers the world over. The Danish architect Jan Gehl, and the eponymous urban design consultancy he founded in 2000, have been widely hailed for their achievements toward making cities more livable. This article contributes a history of urban livability, with an emphasis on Gehl’s approach to designing cities for the human scale. Drawing on archival and policy research, the article reveals a story taking place in two different settings: mid-century Italy and turn-of-the-century Denmark. In 1965, Gehl toured central Italy to observe how everyday people use the streets and squares of historic cities, testing a variety of methods for recording his observations. Over the subsequent decades, Gehl made Copenhagen his laboratory for standardizing the methods into an operational public-space design toolkit, while foregrounding the idealized image of Southern conviviality as a benchmark for measuring the quality of life across various sites in his Nordic hometown. Yet it was the Danish capital’s embrace of neoliberal policy in the 1990s, marked by revanchist urban regeneration targeting social-housing neighborhoods, that created a precondition for the strategic significance of Gehl’s ideas—and a viable pathway to the consultancy business. This article contributes toward a dialogue between architectural history and urban political economy. The idea of the inhuman scale highlights the role of global capital and its structural violence in shaping urban design and expertise.