Good City – The Short Version distils decades of Jan Gehl's urban research into 24 short stories, translating the gap between drawing-board planning and lived city experience into something architects and planners can actually hold onto.
About This Book
This book began as a student's memory. Camilla van Deurs recalls her supervisor Jan Gehl not for the volume of his knowledge but for the way it travelled — anecdote by anecdote, repeated until it stuck. Good City – The Short Version carries that same pedagogical instinct into print: 24 short, accessible reflections on urban life drawn from Gehl's body of research. The book sits at the tension between architecture and urban planning as professional disciplines and the concrete, sensory reality of cities as people actually inhabit them. It is a compact transfer of ideas across generations — from one way of thinking about public space and human scale to the next.
Key Features
- 84 pages of short-form reflections translating urban research into accessible, story-driven writing
- Authors: Camilla van Deurs and Jan Gehl
- Published by The Danish Architectural Press, ISBN: 9788774073307
What You'll Discover
- How Gehl's research findings translate into lived urban experience — not as data, but as readable reflection
- The persistent divide between architecture and urban planning as drawn disciplines and the city as inhabited reality
- The relationship between small-scale spatial decisions and large-scale human experience in city life
- How ideas about public space and human scale pass between generations of architects and urban planners
About the Author
Camilla van Deurs studied under Jan Gehl and draws on that formative relationship as the framing device for this book. Jan Gehl is an architect and urban designer whose research into human-scale urbanism and public life has influenced city planning internationally.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 84
- Dimensions: 210 x 130 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9788774073307
- Publisher: The Danish Architectural Press
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Architecture and urban planning students, practitioners interested in human-scale design, and anyone who wants Gehl's ideas in a form they can read in a single sitting.