He is disappointed that more of the vision set out in the 2004 report Towards a Fine City for People has not come to fruition: "I have not been impressed. London, though, doesn't yet qualify in his view. In a "fertile period" during the sixties and seventies, this was challenged in some places by "lower density building based on making neighbourhoods communities." But then, during the eighties and nineties came the "the period of egotism and the architects became more and more obsessed with buildings with funny shapes." More optimistically, he points to such as New York, Melbourne, Moscow and, most notably, his home capital Copenhagen as examples of cities where the economic and social value of creating Cities for People has been recognised and followed by action. Gehl describes a post-war urban planning formula in which the car was transport king in linear asphalt empires and housing developments sprouted in high-rise isolation amid concrete voids. He observed that "everyone has read her very famous book ," but regreted that its lessons had not been learned more quickly and widely. The closing mention of Jane Jacobs, the legendary thinker on cities who so profoundly opposed the post-war planning consensus in America, was repeated by Gehl when we spoke on Friday.
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