- Cars sitting and taking up half of a city,
leaving dogs, bikes, carts, and, well, people
to cram into these spaces between buildings
and the dead metal, or at least what's left of it.
- Kind of right under our noses, over the 20th century,
we had the largest privatization
of 'the commons' happen since the Middle Ages.
- The normal street, in most cities, 80% is for cars.
And if you're lucky,
20% is for pedestrian and bicyclists.
But if you reprioritize and think if you want to invite more
people walking and cycling, give them more space.
- But, how do you do that?
Well, in many cases,
we can take that public space back.
It's public after all, right?
- I think the really radical idea
about what the street could be
is enabling it to be a space for 'user-generated urbanism.'
It's an unengineering of the street.
Who gets to design and produce
the public realm in cities?
- This is Hard Reset,
a series about rebuilding our world from scratch.
This is Ewa Westermark. She's an architect,
but she doesn't focus on buildings,
but streets and courtyards, etc.
what are called negative spaces.
- I would never call them negative spaces. That, to me,
connotates that they're negative.
I understand the point, but it's like, don't use that!
- Okay, we'll stop.
So how do you make the space
between buildings more humane?
Well, look no further
than how Ewa and the urban designers at Gehl
helped New York Department of Transportation transform
Times Square back in 2001.
- At that time,
10% was space for people and 90% was space for cars.
But when you looked at who used the space,
we had like 90% of the users,
they were pedestrians, and 10% was cars.
How come people are accepting to be crowding on a tiny
tiny sidewalk in this iconic space, in this iconic city,
which is supposed to be top-notch in so many ways?
- So they started by making everything temporary.
- It was actually just painting on the ground,
stopping traffic temporary,
giving back space, space for pedestrians,
painting bicycle lanes,
putting out movable chairs
and umbrellas and planters, et cetera.
And all the spaces were temporary and they could,
within 48 hours, be removed.
It's like a full-scale experiment
that turned out to be a really,
really good experiment and people wanted it.
So then it's much, much easier to make it permanent.
- Which is kind of how the parklet movement started too.
- We thought, "There's a possibility here to do
something really provocative, actually,
that could challenge the idea even of what you do with
public space."
- This is Blaine, Ewa's San Francisco-based colleague.
Just like Ewa made temporary changes to Times Square,
Blaine and his buddies discovered back in 2010
that you can do whatever you want in a parking space
so long as you keep the meter filled.
So they made temporary parks in parking spots.
- Could we create a public realm
that acts as a platform for people's
everyday needs and desires that they can bring their
creativity to,
and to really produce that public realm themselves?
When we get into these questions
about what the city should look like and what
a neighborhood should look like—
at the bottom of all of it,
the question really to ask is, 'What is the thing that makes
people most happy?'
And it's having connections, and having time.
- In both of these examples,
the real innovation is just user-generated urbanism.
That means listening to the people of a city
as they tell you what kind of city they want to live in.
So what kind of city do people want to live in?
Well, it seems to look a lot like Copenhagen.
- There's space for cars and there are bicycle lanes
and sidewalks, and spaces for sidewalks cafés as well.
Here, the street turns into more of a shared space;
it's simple, and it's cheap to really prioritize people
in a street design.
Why are the spaces in-between buildings important?
That's the space where we meet.
That's where everything comes together.
- The people of Copenhagen have worked to reshape the city
around how they live.
That sounds small,
but the result is an elevated human experience,
not an elevated, uh, car experience.
I'm looking at you, Los Angeles...
Anyway-
- My most beautiful city moments
has to do with when that serendipity happens.
And it doesn't happen by chance.
It happens because the space, and the structure, and the
physical environment, actually let it happen.
I will never meet my friends unless I am in a space where
people meet or pass or walk.
Because I think cities are this beautiful social-
'jewel'
if they work well.
- There's so much about a city
like Copenhagen that I wanna
bring back to the United States.
And one of the things is actually just
a lack of preciousness.
They're treating infrastructure as a communications project.
There's an attention to kind of the small details that make
life easier for people.
I mean, it's observed, and then responded to.
More than any particular design solution,
I think it's that attitude I'd like to really
import to the United States.
We need to innovate in the government structures and
the sort of litigious world that we live in
to just make that easier.
- So picture a scenario where U.S. citizens and government
rethought public space,
expanded sidewalks,
plowed over parking spots,
and maybe even cut down on the
amount of streets dedicated to cars.
If you're thinking there's no way this could happen,
well, thanks to COVID,
you may be wrong.
Actually, you are wrong. That sh*t happened.
It didn't exactly go perfectly,
but things definitely happened.
- So COVID suddenly meant that we couldn't
spend time indoors.
And most of the things that we used indoor spaces for
suddenly were off-limits.
- '...sidewalk and curbside seating, parklets,
aka expanded outdoor dining areas.'
- Now, hundreds, if not, thousands
of parklets and shoplets
have sprouted up across the country,
since this movement began over 10 years ago.
Slow or carless streets became a thing.
Parks have taken on a new life.
The pandemic forced us to change how we use
our public spaces.
And this signals something about what may be the future
of urban design in the U.S.
- This is one of the most exciting things
about the whole idea
of user-generated urbanism to me,
which is the transformative power that it has for the people
who participate in it.
If you value expression, you value creativity,
you value cultural change,
let your public realm be a reflection of that.
- Come back next time for another episode of Hard Reset.
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