The world’s foremost “renovator” of cities, Jan Gehl, recently gave a presentation to over 500 people in a standing room only situation at Toronto’s Design Exchange (at 3 p.m. in the afternoon! Click below to watch the three videos of Jan Gehl’s seminar on the Science given at Toronto’s Design Exchange: Part 1,     Part 2, and   Part 3.

Gehl began by recounting his student days at university in the 50’s. It was there that he was incessantly badgered with the dictum that: “that the several hundred year old tradition of city design was wrong; because, public open space was evil and dangerous!“ The badgering continued with the pushing of the new paradigm as laid out by Corbusier, which was the Vertical Garden City! Whereby cities were just to be composed of thousands of giant skyscrapers, surrounded by grass (and some trees and flowers.) Gehl concluded that ever since then, landscape architects, architects and urban planners world wide (especially in Toronto) have been religiously adhering to Corbusier’s fool hardy, erroneous city killing dictum. Click here to watch Gehl’s complete presentation in three parts.

This is what the iPhone would look like if landscape architects (or architects or urban planners) were hired to do the designing ....

One has to just look at Toronto’s one dimensional Dundas St Square, or the privatized downtown Harbourfront’s newly constructed “Bridges To Nowhere” or to the narrowing of sidewalks on St. Clair Ave. to understand that landscape architects and others in Toronto are still caught up in Corbusier’s “wet dream”. But New york, Paris, Vancouver, Seattle, London, Sydney are not; they along with Gehl are bringing back effective usable public open space for the residents. The outcome is a return of a natural vibrant public life to the Streetscapes of the above mentioned cities.

Not only are landscape architects still entrapped by Corbusier’s dogma in Toronto and other cities; even worse, they have forgotten a compelling notion that any excellent designer understands and practices: Form Follows Function. One might want to chuckle about the iPhone pictured above; but, that’s the erroneous approach that landscape architects have been using in Canada for 60 years when it comes to public open space. Public spaces are not designed around people’s needs; but instead, are unabashed gross monuments to the designer’s ego. As well, one has to wonder whether or not, kick backs in brown paper envelopes are being passed across restaurant tables from suppliers of never ending assortment of plants, useless playground equipment, 3 ton park benches, gross football stadium lighting standards or incessant concrete or asphalt products. 80% or more of what one sees plopped down in public open spaces has no rhyme or reason. 

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This point of view opinion piece was written by Harry Pasternak. As a consultant to the Province of Ontario, Pasternak was brought in to improve the “Quality Of Life” to neighborhoods across Ontario. The latter appointment directly led to Pasternak’s intensive “never done before” primary research projects. He is the only Canadian who has done primary evaluative research on Public Open Space Design, Pasternak “taught” Urban Social Research Techniques within the Urban Studies Program at York University. Pasternak initiated and organized Canada’s only national conference on Public Open Space Research and Design, which was held at the Science Centre In Toronto. He has spent 30 years doing primary, secondary research, public education and pro-active community work with respect to the Science of Public Open Space Design.