My wife and I had started to study how the built form influenced people’s behavior. But her book was highly inspiring, especially in relation to my research. I only learned to know fear in 1972, when I visited North America for the first time. JG: I can remember my enormous surprise that the first chapter was on sidewalk safety, because that was not an issue in this part of Europe at that time. MCP: Did it inform your work, or was it too much from an American perspective. It was during these studies that I came across her book.

That resulted in a book I wrote called Life Between Buildings. After that I was invited by the school of architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, to continue these studies on a research fellowship. I received a grant to go to Italy for a half-year in 1965, to study Italian squares: how they worked, why they worked, which ones worked, which ones didn’t. And I took a special interest in what people did in public spaces and how the form of those spaces influenced the life of the people who used them. Then I got married to a psychologist and started to get interested in the borderland between architecture and the social sciences. Jan Gehl: I graduated in 1960 and spent a few years doing standard architecture work. Martin C Pedersen: Do you remember when you first read 'Death & Life'? I spoke to Gehl about Jacobs, the folly of modernist city planning, and New York City’s durable urban form. Gehl Architects currently has offices in Copenhagen, New York and San Francisco. The author of a number of books, including Life Between Buildings, Cities for People, Public Spaces-Public Life, and most recently, How to Study Public Life, Gehl and his colleagues have also served as consultants for the cities of Copenhagen, London, Melbourne, Sydney, New York and Moscow. For the better part of a half-century now, his focus has been on the development of people-oriented cities. Jan Gehl, the great Danish urbanist, has much in common with Jane Jacobs. This article was originally published by Common Edge as ' Jan Gehl on Why Tall Buildings Aren’t Necessarily Bad for Street Life.'

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