People vote with their feet. So what?
Interview with Jeff Risom from Gehl
When it comes to urban planning, Gehl is one of the most well-known names around the globe and the studio is often considered as the pioneers of the simple, yet powerful idea of making cities for people. Within VEFRESH audio series I had a chance to talk to Jeff Risom who is Partner and Chief innovation officer at Gehl and researches the interaction between people, urban spaces and technology. The focus of our conversation is citizen engagement in smart city development. Citizen participation in infrastructure development is quite a stable and predictable process - there are rules and regulations regarding when and how public consultations should take place, how long they should last, etc. However, if we think about technological solutions in the city, citizen engagement is at best inconsistent if not absent entirely.
Viesturs Celmiņš: Do you think it’s a problem that people are not involved in smart city solution development?
Jeff Risom: I would maybe challenge the first assumption that we have the more typical type of engagement down. In reality citizen participation is often nominal. We still have a tendency to ask a very specific group of individuals for feedback on problems that affect thousands. With this approach we set up ourselves to fail at the very start of the process. In smart city context we have an opportunity to change this, but ironically we just take digital tools like mobile apps and stick to the same questions and approach. That does not address the core flaw of the process.
Another problem lies in the fact that urban planning and citizen engagement is fragmented. We talk separately about streets, about public transport, about recreational zones. Each department is in charge of one thematic vertical, but there is no holistic view of the city from citizen perspective.
That’s well said. From the individual's point of view their experience of their neighbourhood is not neatly broken down into silos of development, housing or transportation. If you take a truly human-centred approach that would mean looking at the person's everyday routine. For example, what kind of dwelling space they would want, how do they get to work or school? What are their favourite public spaces in the city, where and how do they spend their free time? Are the city’s digital services convenient, accessible and intuitive? If we would take a look from this perspective, the research would get complicated, but it would be simpler for people and less siloed. Easier said than done, but if we're going to try, let's be ambitious and do something different.
If you were in charge of citizen engagement in smart city development, how would you organize this process?
So firstly I would define a smart city as one that can learn. People essentially vote with their feet, and it’s our job to understand these choices, behaviour and attitudes, and by researching that we can learn a lot. For example, if we're observing who is in a public space and there’s no children or disabled people that tells us about the accessibility of that area. Or if a place is active during commuting times or lunch hours, but empty on the weekend that shows us that people do not choose to be there, it does not bring them joy. Therefore, we try to ask people questions they are expert in. If there would be a plan for reimagining an area in Riga, we would not ask people – what do you want there? We would say - what are some of your favorite places in Riga already? Then we would go study those places and look who's spending time there, what activities are taking place there. We ask people questions they’re expert in - about their life in the city.
You work with the idea of “platforms for yes”. What is this principle and how does it work in the city?
The most illustrative example is from New York where we did ethnographic research in Times square. People had a very hard time imagining how a place that is noisy and full of cars could be made human scale, but New York City plaza program did exactly that. Afterwards the city said – all right, we can do 4 more of these next year, who wants one? If you want one, coordinate with your community, get signatures, choose people who could be involved in creating and maintaining this place. Whereas we as the city will make it happen – we will move the traffic and do the first investments. Essentially, the city is saying – if you don't want one, be quiet, just go about your business, but if you do want this change, then activate your local community and come to us.
Times Square before and after. Photo: Gehl.
Do you have any other examples where this principle has been implemented in the city?
One example is from Copenhagen where they did a survey about people’s favourite places in the city, a lot of responses came in that people loved the top of bridges. The city authorities didn't even think of the tops of bridges as places, but time and time again people were saying – I love the top of that bridge and this little viewpoint there. That gave the city insight that, when designing bridges in the future, they should think about this and how do we make use of people’s joy for these things.
What are your suggestions to those of us working with smart city solutions?
A lot of times the smart city is like a solution looking for a problem - hey, we developed this new technology, let's see what we can apply? The first thing I would do in this whole discussion is really take a step back and try to just understand what's going on in the city and what people care about.
Listen to full interview with Jeff as well as to conversation with Maija Bergstrom about citizen engagement in Smart Kalasatama on VEFRESH audio third episode. You can find the series on Spotify and other largest podcast platforms. The project has been created with support from Education, Culture, and Sports Department of Riga City Council.
Viesturs Celmiņš