"After a few months, we started to be Italians, because we had room to be Italians," Gehl recalled. But the following year saw Gehl and Copenhagen pedestrianizing Strøget, which remains to this day a car-free zone. In the U.S., that started, arguably, with the 1961 publication of The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. Gehl then glossed over the history of the revolt against modernist city design. "Nobody thought about the fact that only if you had helicopters could you enjoy it," he reflected. Gehl discussed the many impressive features of the city: how a bird's-eye view of the city reveals a bird-shaped plan. "Architects designed cities until they had a nice composition and then people would live in them." He and his cohort, he said, were particularly enamored with Brasília, the Corbusian capital built by architect Oscar Niemeyer, planner Lúcio Costa, and landscape designer Roberto Burle Marx for Brazil's president Juscelino Kubitschek in 1956. "Cities were planned from above," Gehl said, discussing the state of the practice when he came to it, around 1960. He is the author of Life Between Buildings (1971) and Cities for People (2010), among other books. NASA Brasília as seen by the Advanced Land Imager on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 satellite. Jan Gehl is a founding partner of Gehl ArchitectsUrban Quality Consultants.
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