Foreword

Copenhagen is generally considered as a beacon of hope in terms of urban regeneration - one of the few true examples of a humanised European city where squares and streets have been thoughtfully and steadily enhanced over the last 30 years, offering the city a sequence of impressive and inspirational public spaces. Against this background Copenhagen provides an excellent platform from which to study and describe the new role and new form of public spaces in contemporary society.

This excellent new book is an illuminating account of the working methods used, showing the delicate analysis, identifying and mapping those elements of urban fabric that together constitute an energised whole. The book offers a fascinating and instructive insight into these working methods, and highlights particular examples of successful urban design that best serve the everyday needs of city communities. The vision ranges from the exact number of front doors within a given stretch of thoroughfare contributing to a lively street environment right through to the broad sweep of monumental public spaces, identifying surface treatments and lighting systems that will humanise and dramatise the urban landscape.

Jan Gehl and Lars Gemzøe believe passionately in the importance of citizenship and the liveliness and humanity it stimulates. This manifests itself in planned large-scale civic gestures but also in the small scale and the spontaneous which together create a rich diversity of city life. Cities remain the great demographic magnets of our time because they facilitate work and are the seedbeds of our cultural development. Cities are centres of communication, learning and complex commercial enterprises; they house huge concentrations of families; they focus and condense physical, intellectual and creative energy. They are places of hugely diversified activities and functions: exhibitions and demonstrations, bars and cathedrals, shops and opera houses. This work celebrates the combination of ages, races, cultures and activities, the mix of community and anonymity, familiarity and surprise, the grand spaces as well as the animation that simple pavement cafes bring to the street, the informal liveliness of the public square, the mixture of workplaces, shops and homes that make living neighbourhoods.

Although inner-city blight is slowly being addressed in a number of cities in Europe as well as abroad, great urban meeting places are still being eroded and violated by the ever-increasing intrusion and unseemly domination of the motor car. Public areas have become dangerous and polluting rather than lively and invigorating. Neighbourhoods are fragmented, citizens flee city centres in alarming numbers and the essence of a city - its human vitality - is being sucked out, leaving behind ghost towns offering only physical dereliction and social exclusion.

This book can be seen as a key element in reversing this trend. The insistence on imaginative urban design means that we can celebrate Copenhagen's renaissance as a catalyst for the many cities in Europe and abroad desperately in need of similar skills. If confirmation were needed that a well-designed city is the only sustainable form of community, then this brilliant book provides it.

London, October 2000
Richard Rogers