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Gehl, Jan. Cities for People. Washington: Island Press, 2010. 269 pp. ISBN 978-1-58726-573-7.
Jan Gehl's Cities for People is an accessible and engaging update to his well- known work Life Between Buildings (1987) that provides a timely introduction to Gehl's people-centered urban planning and architecture practices. Since the translation of his work from Danish in the 1980s, Gehl has become one of the most visible heirs to urban thinkers like William Whyte, Jane Jacobs, and Christopher Alexander, serving to spearhead visible changes in the apportion- ment of urban space in places like London, New York City, and throughout Australia. Cities for People is a well-illustrated overview of Gehl's urban theory and practice, o^ering short chapters on the importance of human scaled archi- tecture, the importance of paying attention to the body, the role of street life, and walkable urbanism in cities in the Global South.
The book is organized in a way that allows di^erent levels of engagement to...