Re-Imagine the Upper West Side at a Workshop With Jan Gehl

By Aaron Donovan
Sep 15, 2007

Save the date for a very special Upper West Side event featuring Jan Gehl, the world’s foremost designer of green & livable streets.

For over 30 years, Jan Gehl has been improving people’s lives by making neighborhoods lively, diverse and safe. Jan — a friend and colleague of the late, great Jane Jacobs — will tell entertaining and illustrative stories gleaned from his famous work in Copenhagen, London, Zurich, and Melbourne.

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Talking Headways Podcast With Special Guest Jan Gehl

By Tanya Snyder | Feb 7, 2014

Danish architect and urban planner Jan Gehl, who led Copenhagen’s turn away from car-domination toward streets and public spaces for people, is on a U.S. tour. I got to sit down with him this week in Washington. Where traffic engineers count cars, Gehl and his colleagues count people. So instead of telling city officials to […]

Jan Gehl on Sustainable Transport in Copenhagen and NYC

By Ben Fried | Dec 15, 2009

While in Copenhagen to film the Danish capital’s world-beating bike infrastructure, Streetfilms’ Elizabeth Press caught up with urban planner extraordinaire Jan Gehl for a brief, canal-side chat. In this clip, Gehl explains how cycling and transit fit within the city’s sustainability agenda, and why "unnecessary transportation" threatens the global climate. With Mayor Bloomberg in Copenhagen […]

Jan Gehl Joins Advocates to Talk Public Plazas in Low-Income Neighborhoods

By Stephen Miller | Feb 6, 2014

Ask a New Yorker about the city’s plazas, and they’re likely to first think of Times Square. While the city’s marquee pedestrian space gets most of the attention, there are dozens of neighborhood-scale plazas across the city, with dozens more in the works in communities requesting them from DOT. Not all local groups have the […]

StreetFilms: Upper West Side Streets Renaissance With Jan Gehl

By Aaron Naparstek | Nov 7, 2007

A standing room-only crowd turned out for last night’s Upper West Side Streets Renaissance event with Danish urban designer Jan Gehl and DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan. All in all, it was an inspiring night and we’ll have a more detailed write-up later today. Though Gehl wasn’t allowed to get too specific about the work he […]

Times Square Flashback: Revisit the Bad Old Days With Streetfilms

By Stephen Miller | Aug 21, 2015

New Yorkers might have forgotten just how bad the bad old days were in Times Square. Gridlock blocked crosswalks. Pedestrians were relegated to crush levels on the sidewalks. It wasn’t a pleasant place to be. Relive the nightmare with this Streetfilm from 2006, in which Streetsblog publisher Mark Gorton interviews Danish architect and public space expert […]

Streetfilms: A New Vision for the Upper West Side

By Brad Aaron | Nov 18, 2008

Residents of all ages, electeds and planner-about-town Jan Gehl gathered at PS 87 last Thursday to mark the launch of "Blueprint for the Upper West Side: A Roadmap for Truly Livable Streets." A year-long community-based project of the Upper West Side Streets Renaissance campaign, the Blueprint [PDF], as its name implies, offers a detailed vision […]