Can you talk a bit about the project you’re working on with Gehl here in Reykjavík?

We were made aware of the competition that was running in summer 2007: the city invited people to come with ideas and to brainstorm on this central space in the area next to Lækjatorg. So we came to Reykjavík and actually lifted our view a bit and tried to come up with an overall strategy for the development of the city.

The way we approached it was to look at Lækjatorg as the heart of the city, as a square that could really do much more than it does now. It could also be the center of three axes. You could reconnect the waterfront to the lake by doing this cultural axis that should be very intimate and artistic, and should provide for a lot of interaction and everything that you could do within technology or the arts that would change over time.

And then we looked at the main street, Laugavegur, that would intersect the cultural axis in the square. We suggested you take out all the cars and put in a light rail, so you really upgrade this. Because it’s a perfect street. It’s approximately one kilometer in length. It lacks an anchor point to the east, but otherwise it has a fantastic scale; it’s walkable, it’s narrow, it has all the things you would look for when you walk. All the stimuli. We tried to come up with some solution that could make it more walkable even if it’s raining, and the light rail would be one of those things. In some city centers there’s a free light rail, and I think that would be fantastic for Reykjavík, just have it free on that stretch so people could just hop on and off, really using that to connect to the city.

Then we talked about a third axis, which was about celebrating history. That was a very sensitive issue within the entire competition: Whether to rebuild the burned house near Lækjatorg or not. We suggested that you respect the footprint, but celebrate the history by reopening the river and trying to locate places in the city that would have historic interest.

So those were the three main things we suggested. We didn’t do any building design at all. We just had an idea that it should be a very public place.

Putting yourself in the shoes of someone living here, if there were one thing that you could suggest for the strategy, this new plan for how the city could evolve, what would it be? Is it this aspect of walking more and getting rid of the cars?

Yes. I think it’s the aspect of changing the mindset and trying to celebrate the climate instead of saying it’s a problem that it’s windy, it’s a problem that it’s rainy. All the people visiting Iceland come here for that. So why not celebrate it and say, “You can actually walk and in some stretches you will actually feel the wind? You can get in touch with the climate, which is so special?” And then try to act more urban. I know that everybody here needs a car, of course, if you want to go out into the landscape. But once you’re in the city center, there’s no reason whatsoever to use the car.

One example you brought up is that of placing café tables outside in Copenhagen, and literally changing people’s perception of the seasons there. Are there other examples of things you’ve done in your work with Gehl that have changed not only people’s use interaction within the city, but their literal perceptions?

That’s a good question, because it also takes time. That process I mentioned with Copenhagen took maybe forty years. So I don’t think we as an office have those good examples yet, because it takes a lot of time to change people’s perceptions—but in every project we do, we try to implement these things that could. In every city we work in, it’s the same issues we meet. For an example, with the car: it’s always, “We need the car. There’s no way we can do without the car, there’s no way we can move around in the city without the car.” I would say that no matter where you are, you can do without the car! It’s important to emphasize that we don’t see the car as this monster that you need to get rid of. The car can also generate activity in spaces where nothing’s happening. But it’s a question of balance, and it’s a question again of urban behavior. So in cities where the car has taken over, it becomes a problem.

In Copenhagen the car is actually not a huge problem. We’ve really been able to reduce the number of cars in the city center and upgrade the public realm. But again, this was a process of forty years. We had a very clever traffic engineer and a city architect who together gradually took out parking. It was almost as if they took out a parking place every night, and nobody really noticed! So it was not like they decided that in one day we’re going to cancel five hundred parking spaces. No, they did it very gradually. I think that was one of the successes in turning the city around and giving it back to pedestrian activity—and nobody noticed!

We don’t have the light rail yet, but the bus system here I find to be fairly good. But there’s this perception that only certain types of people use the bus: foreigners, old people, students. It’s not something that respectable Icelanders use. That seems like another area where we need to slowly change people’s mindset.

Yes, and I think now is the time where you can actually do something about it, because there’s this global awareness of sustainability issues. Because Iceland has good energy, I think a light rail that would run on electricity would be obvious to introduce and again, help change the mindset that public transport is something that you’re proud of, and not something you should try to hide.

You talked about Gehl’s approach of starting with the human element: taking into account people’s height, their walking rate, their range of vision…

It’s a long process of trying to change the entire planning process. We’re still struggling with trying to get people to think of man as the prime user. Who are we planning for? That’s a huge question. I think some architects are planning for themselves; some cities are planning for the people who are in government. We need to be very aware of who we are planning for, and take it very seriously, because we will influence people’s lives every day with what we will decide to do. There’s a huge challenge in getting to know the user groups—getting to know their needs and understanding what they want.

Sometimes it can also be a danger to think that everybody wants this overall social interaction, and that every time we do a square it has to accommodate everybody. In a sense we also risk that it becomes anonymous, or indifferent. It doesn’t have any character, because everyone should be able to use it; it has to accommodate everybody, and we have to mix use, this melting pot of the city. So that’s a challenge also of finding the balance and really getting to know the users we’re planning for.

I like the phrase you use about “taking the temperature” of a city.

Yes, I think that’s a really important issue. It is really amazing that every city would know all the statistics about the car, but they often do not know anything about their pedestrians.