Megacity and Citizen’s Needs

I found this clip on Youtube when I was looking for inspiration for my design studio project and thought it is suitable for a post here. The clip is a trailer for a documentary called “The Human Scale”.

What caught my attention was that it talks about Jan Gehl and his vision and philosophy on city planning. Gehl Architects are one of my favourite reference whenever I deal with design studio on an urban scale. I hold a personal believe that architecture and urban planning should center on the need of the people using the space instead of being driven by financial capital of the developer. Perhaps this is why I am interested in organization such as Better Cities and I usually participate in their events in Malaysia especially those which brings together communities and ask them what their preference in terms of improving their neighbourhood are.

The happiness of the people are always the determining factor of a successful city planning. Then why not make them the core studies when we are doing an analysis on urban planning. It is important that we understand how people use and react to the space around them especially in the urban context. Their needs differs from one culture to another and designers and planners need to identify the cultural identity of a place and the demographics of the place in order to cater to the need of the people in their projects. I find that the most effective way to do so is to map the demographics, social and cultural patterns and the zoning and building typology of the site in varying scale. I model this method from the practice of Gehl Architects’ Public Space Public Life where I think they did an excellent job in breaking down the analysis of a place to different components and presented it in the forms of maps and data. However, the data presented has very little to do with planning policy and regulation. Rather, the focus is on human behavior and this is what I find interesting with their analysis.