Designing cities for people

Louisiana Channel interviews Danish architect and urban designer Jan Gehl about how to build a good city. Gehl argues for planning cities around people and life between buildings, not around traffic.

City planner Jeff Speck's TED talk on the walkable city. He argues that making cities walkable is the way to fix many of their problems, and explains what makes a street worth walking.

A School of Life video essay on what makes cities attractive or ugly. It argues that beauty in cities comes from shared rules on how buildings look, as in Amsterdam or Barcelona, rather than leaving the look of the city to property developers.

Not Just Bikes explains what gives an urban place a sense of place and why so many car-oriented places feel lifeless. The video contrasts street layouts and public spaces that work for people with ones built around cars.

James Howard Kunstler's TED talk arguing that bad architecture and car-centred planning have wrecked American cities and suburbs. He argues that places have lost their civic spaces and that nobody wants to be in much of what gets built.

A Vox explainer on how the US interstate highway program carved up American cities. It covers how highways were routed through dense, often Black and poor neighborhoods, and what that did to urban life.

Not Just Bikes explains the stroad, the road and street hybrid common in North America: wide, fast arterials lined with driveways and businesses. The video argues that stroads are dangerous, costly to maintain and bad for the businesses on them compared with real streets and real roads.

The first part of a Not Just Bikes series summarizing the ideas of Strong Towns. It argues that spread-out, car-oriented American development costs cities more to maintain than it brings in, which makes it financially unsustainable.

Not Just Bikes explains why low-density car-oriented development costs cities more to maintain than it brings in through taxes, so new growth is used to pay for old infrastructure. The video draws on the Strong Towns analysis of municipal finances.

A Not Just Bikes video on the missing middle, the modest housing types between detached houses and large apartment blocks that zoning rules in most of the United States make hard or illegal to build. It contrasts this with places where such housing is common.

A Not Just Bikes video on mixed-use, human-scale neighbourhoods of low-rise buildings and narrow streets that support walking, cycling and local shops. It explains why zoning rules make them illegal in most of North America, and pushes back on the idea that old cities were simply built for walking.

About Here explains how a single building-code rule, the requirement for two stairways, shapes apartment buildings in North America and makes smaller, nicer buildings hard to build. The video pays particular attention to Vancouver and compares it with practice elsewhere.

A Life Where I'm From video on Japan's zoning system and how it shapes the look of Japanese cities. It explains how broad, permissive zones allow mixed uses, small businesses, narrow streets and affordable housing side by side.

An OBF video on why Tokyo is so well designed as a city. It looks at what makes the city work.

Not Just Bikes explains why posted speed limits and the 85th percentile method don't control how fast people drive. He argues that road design sets real speeds, and that streets need to be built so the safe speed is the natural one.

A short BicycleDutch video on how the Netherlands got its cycle paths. It covers the postwar rise of car traffic, the protest movement against child deaths on the roads in the 1970s, and the shift toward building dedicated bicycle infrastructure.

A talk by Seattle landscape architect Fred Young, hosted by UniversityGreenways, giving a visual tour of Dutch street and cycling design. It covers the many small measures, from road materials and narrower lanes to junction layouts, that make cycling safe and pleasant, and asks how Seattle could adapt them.

Not Just Bikes explains Dutch continuous sidewalks, where the pavement runs unbroken across side-street crossings so cars visibly have to drive over it. The video shows how this street design prioritises pedestrians and slows turning drivers.

Not Just Bikes explains ontvlechten, the Dutch practice of untangling road networks so that cyclists and drivers use different routes and not just different lanes. He shows why the bike lanes in the Netherlands are hard to notice.

BicycleDutch explains in about five minutes how junctions are designed in the Netherlands so cyclists, drivers and pedestrians are kept apart and protected. It shows real junctions and how their layout works.

A Vox explainer on Barcelona's superblocks, which group city blocks into car-limited zones and give streets back to pedestrians. It shows how the plan reshapes street life and public space.

A Not Just Bikes video arguing that the noise people blame on cities mostly comes from cars. It compares the soundscape of quiet Dutch and European streets with car-heavy ones, and looks at noise sources such as mopeds and at how traffic noise could be reduced.