The Human Scale looks at car wars
Pedestrians battle automobiles for world supremacy
It’s a well-known (though often ignored) aphorism in urban-planning circles that the more roads you build, the more traffic you get. The optimistic documentary The Human Scale looks at the converse, which also turns out to be true: If you make more space for people, you get more public life.
Writer/director Andreas M. Dalsgaard builds his thesis around the ideas of Danish architect and urban philosopher Jan Gehl, but the film interviews many planners as it hopscotches across our increasingly urban planet. (Three years ago, we passed the point at which 50% of humanity lived in cities. By midcentury, that figure is expected to be 70%, or about 6.4 billion people.)
The message is simple. We have, for the past century, built cities with cars as their pre-eminent citizens. Traffic flow is still largely considered the metric of success. Gehl suggests we study people, not cars, and change our cities accordingly. He gathered a wealth of before-andafter data beginning in the 1960s, when many of Copenhagen’s downtown streets were turned into pedestrian-only zones.
The documentary outlines a number of successful transformations. New York has worked to make pedestrians and bicycles more important than cars in several major Manhattan intersections. Change has sometimes been as simple as putting in public chairs and benches. In Times Square it was found that 90% of the space had been devoted to cars, when 90% of the square’s users were pedestrians.
In Dhaka (the capital of Bangladesh) an anti-car movement sprouted up after the city banned rickshaws in an attempt to curb traffic congestion. In fact, the real culprit turned out to be automobiles.
Sometimes, urban infrastructure fights back. The film shows how Danish consultants modified a street in the Chinese city of Chongqing to favour pedestrians over cars. But when they returned six months later to check on their work, they found the road had reverted to its old look. Traffic police and the local planning department had undone the changes.
Even so, the film ends on a hopeful note. When the city of Christchurch, New Zealand, was struck by earthquakes in 2011, officials closed off a central portion of the heavily damaged downtown and decided to rebuild from scratch. Citizen input was solicited and, like a society of Jane Jacobses, they declared they wanted low-rise, human-scale, pedestrians-first planning. Even more astonishing, the government listened.