Summary on "Cities for People" by Jan Gehl

Cities are not entirely about architecture but culture. It is not about buildings of the city but more of when the buildings get into the human scale level. The city of Melbourne are becoming a failure due to the increasing poverty.  It could lead to a social catastrophe if we do not turn our city around. The cities were build according to trends over the centuries from one generation to the next and traditions were  carried on throughout the whole period of time. There were small installments and a couple of buildings built around the streets and squares that were done by craftsmen. For the traditional city, the buildings were all made using the same two basic building blocks - the street is the moving space organized after our feet and the square is the area our eyes can  oversee. This theory was used throughout by the entire history of human settlements. The people treated the functions of the public space such as market place, meeting place and connection space and they were all organized by the people on feet and it works in harmony together in the same space. It is important to also study the life of something besides studying the form. The Change of Paradigms was about scales like human scale, helicopter scale and rooftop scale. And that the different scales is important when designing a space because it may look nice from a helicopter view but once it reaches the eye level/human scale, it may not turn out the way we planned it to be. Thus both scales are important to take note of. Whenever the skyline of a city is more interesting than the way the buildings land and what kind of city the people will get, there should be a sense of worry.