Think “iconic place” not “iconic building” is the advice of Danish urban designer Henriette Vamberg before she heads to Australia to headline the Property Council’s Future Cities Summit in May.
Vamberg is managing director of Gehl, an urban research and design consultancy established by famed urbanist Jan Gehl in 2000. Vamberg has been with Gehl since its inception, and now leads its team in Copenhagen, with further offices based in San Francisco and New York.
People are the starting point of Vamberg’s work: their scale, senses, movements, interests, behaviour and engagement with their surroundings. Vamberg and her team spend a lot of time counting, measuring and analysing the places that they are working to improve, recording the ‘life’ as well as understanding the ‘space’.
Vamberg says we instinctively know how to create people-centric cities. “But it’s a bit like the challenges of climate change – we all know what to do but we’re often occupied by short-term questions and gains.”
Integrating active mobility into new developments is a good starting point, Vamberg says, pointing to Amsterdam as the gold standard.
Decades of effort and investment in special cycling routes and car-free Sundays have made Amsterdam the biking capital of the world, and today 63 per cent of Amsterdammers cycle daily, with 881,000-odd bicycles outnumbering the city’s 850,000 inhabitants!
“In Amsterdam, as has been the case in Copenhagen, there has a been an equal focus on increasing bicycling since the 70s,” she says, adding that this has resulted in “high modal splits”, with 40 per cent plus cycling rates in Copenhagen, for example.
Vamberg’s advice is to “embed long term planning for cycling, set your targets and recognise that there has to be a persistent political will to get the incremental infrastructure updates to a level where you can really enable a bicycle culture flourish”.
Affordable housing is also an essential element in the people-centric city, and Vamberg suggests Australia could look to Vienna’s sustained investment in public and social housing, which has driven down rents over many decades. More than 60 per cent of Viennese citizens live in public or subsidised housing, and the city spends $900 million a year on subsidising, constructing and preserving public housing.
“When you invest in good quality public and social housing you enable diverse populations across various neighbourhoods. This retains access to labour for different populations which in turn helps limit spatial segregation and related stigmas developing,” she says.
Models like that in Vienna is flexible to housing needs throughout the lifecycle, she adds.
Amsterdam and Vienna – cities that rank highly on global liveability indices – both illustrate big picture thinking, Vamberg says, and a commitment to “establish community instead of focusing on the individual building blocks”.
Creating places for people doesn’t always take huge investment and multi-decade plans. But it does demand big picture thinking, and Vamberg points to the inspiring and innovative placemaking initiatives that have sprung out of Christchurch post-quake.
Gap Filler, a placemaking and urban regeneration social enterprise in Christchurch, has been busy testing and piloting pop-up concepts that bring people, life and energy back to the heart of the city.
Among these are the world’s first giant, outdoor game arcade, operated by an oversized joystick at a busy intersection and a five-metre-wide screen mounted on the Vodafone building. There’s the dance floor on a vacant lot, powered by a coin-operated converted washing machine, called the Dance-O-Mat. And a heritage-themed mini golf course incorporating salvaged bits of buildings and other artifacts to tell the history of the neighbourhood.
“These projects consider the role of public art and performance as part of the community rebuild,” she explains.
Vamberg’s advice is clear.
“Think iconic place rather than iconic building. It is clear that developers should increasingly take into account the sites surroundings. An individual building is rarely successful across any parameters when the place fails.”
Henriette Vamberg is among a stellar line-up of speakers heading to Sydney for the Future Cities Summit on 24 May. Don’t miss out on your ticket.