BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Talks.cam//talks.cam.ac.uk//
X-WR-CALNAME:Talks.cam
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Pedestrianship: Jan Gehl\, Revanchist Urbanism and the Making of 
 “Liveable Cities” - Professor Maroš Krivý (Estonian Academy of Arts)
DTSTART:20260226T160000Z
DTEND:20260226T180000Z
UID:TALK243565@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Dr Laszlo Cseke
DESCRIPTION:Bike lines\, temporary street closures\, piazzas doubling as t
 ribunes and skateparks\, restored wetland trails: affluent municipalities 
 and developers in cities on all major continents have embraced pedestrian-
 centred urban design as a hallmark of liveability. Yet how do designers\, 
 experts and consultants commissioned to deliver tangible\, transformative 
 strategies imagine the pedestrian themselves at the centre of it all? This
  talk develops the concept of pedestrianship to examine the epistemic work
  and moral economy associated with pedestrian-oriented revitalisation sche
 mes.\n\nPerhaps more than anyone else\, the Danish architect Jan Gehl has 
 been widely hailed for his contributions toward making cities more livable
 . In this talk I reveal a history of how Gehl developed a series of tradem
 ark methods for observing and assessing the behaviour of people in public 
 space—a toolkit that forms the basis for the services provided by Jan Ge
 hl Architects\, an influential urban design consultancy the Dane co-founde
 d in 2000. This is a multi-sited investigation encompassing places where p
 edestrianship has been developed\, implemented and promoted\, taking us fr
 om Sienna and Copenhagen to New York and Kyiv\, among other places.\n\nI s
 how how expertise focused on mundane aspects to pedestrian choreography\, 
 such as measuring how many people sit\, stand or walk on a particular stre
 et or square at a particular time of day\, has gained a heightened signifi
 cance in the context of neoliberal downtown regeneration. Pedestrianship i
 s therefore a class-based\, racialized imaginary—infrastructure even—o
 f the revanchist city: making cities unliveable for many as the flip side 
 of making them liveable for the few.
LOCATION:Small Lecture Theatre\, Department of Geography
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR