But increasingly it has been recognised that if you document something you care about it more. And because there is a lot of money involved in the motorcar industry. Motorcars have been a major focus historically because they create accidents. Is that something that you think has changed? Many cities have traffic departments but still don’t invest the same sort of money and expertise in studying people. Image by Andrea CauĪs a city architect, you have written a lot about the need to study people and how they behave. New York City, where traffic is prioritised over people.

The new spaces were often too big, too wide, too windswept and not attractive in any way. That was a massive change in the way cities were built. So instead of making spaces with buildings around them, they started to make buildings with no man’s land around them, what I call leftover space. What happened with the modernists was that the focus was completely shifted away from spaces to objects, to buildings.

If you think of the older cities you know, people often don’t remember buildings but the main squares or the important public spaces. Until modernism, cities were built around spaces where people moved around and held markets, which were also spaces that linked various parts of the city together. You have written at length about how modernism wasn’t about making cities for people but cities that looked good from above. Jan Gehl is a city architect that has helped transform places like Copenhagen and Melbourne into some of the world’s most liveable cities and written seminal books such as Life Between Buildings: Using Public Space (1972) and Cities for People (2011) that explore the need for making people-oriented cities.

Cities for People by Jan Gehl