13) Locating to create life

People designing urban centres, need to understand how life is created in that centre. Successful urban spaces are filled with life. How life uses urban spaces is not that straightforward. However, there is one key principle Swedish urbanist Jan Gehl can be credited with that anyone interpreting a place should understand, which is that people undertake two different kinds of activities in urban places:

Necessary activities

• Activities such as commuting or going to work and shopping for essentials

• These activities are undertaken in pleasant and unpleasant conditions for they are things we need to do.

Optional activities

• Activities such as eating or drinking out and shopping for comparison goods (shoes, clothes, perfume etc)

• These activities are only undertaken in pleasant good conditions for we choose whether or not to do these

• People are more likely to undertake optional activities if these are located next to necessary activities

Watch creating life for more on this:

Some activities inspire more life than others. Co-location of life creating uses results in the sum being greater than its parts, for one activity brings life and footfall for another. Think of the pre-school sat on the edge of the town, life appears outside of the building at two or three points in the day. The parents will often engage in whatever activities are convenient, but if there are none there, they won’t do anything other than deposit or collect their kids before driving off.

If the pre-school is in the centre of the town, then life around the school will probably engage in the other activities sat around it. Having dropped off their children, parents may meet for a coffee or pop into a shop to try or buy something. The level of activity and vibrancy has increased purely as a consequence of co-locating activities.

So when we look for places to site activities, we should cluster them together. The life from one activity brings footfall for another activity. Life tends to breed other life, because somewhere that is vibrant is likely to attract other people to it to undertake other activities. If we create this cluster affect it means that there is more footfall and therefore more likely that more shops and services can survive or thrive.

Done with that? Onto section 14.