Designing the built environment for a human scale

Not being an urban planner or architect, I was rather late to the whole “Jan Gehl” thing. It wasn’t until 2013’s The Human Scale documentary about Gehl’s legendary Danish practice that the intersection of urban planning, architecture and my familiar terrain of human-centred design actually made sense. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth your time.

Gehl has spent sixty years asking planners and architects one question. What will a person standing here actually do? It sounds obvious. I’d wrongly assumed most urban planners and architects already centred their work on that basic question.

“Only architecture that considers the human scale and interaction is successful architecture.”

Jan Gehl, Cities for People

Gehl built his career on the observation that most twentieth century city building was designed from above, from a drawing board or a masterplan, for a version of the city that existed only on paper. Buildings were placed to satisfy sunlight studies and setback rules. Streets were sized for the cars that planners assumed would fill them. The person walking through the result, the person waiting, the person trying to cross the road with a pram, was an afterthought if they were considered at all.

Gehl’s answer was to go outside and count. He and his students would sit in public squares and note down who stopped, who sat, who lingered, who crossed quickly with their head down and never came back. Life Between Buildings, his 1971 book, turned that habit into a discipline. Cities for People, published almost forty years later, turned it into a movement that reshaped Copenhagen, Melbourne, New York and a good many of the cities we now hold up as liveable.

Boiled down, Gehl contends that people want to see other people, sit somewhere comfortable, cross a street without fear, walk with something worth looking at. Design that starts from the human body and human behaviour and works outward tends to succeed. Design that starts from an engineering diagram and adds humans in later tends not to.

What gets measured at the gate

Since the Gehl-penny dropped for me back in 2013, I have spent several years working for and inside NSW Government bringing “customer” earlier and iteratively into the design of major built environment infrastructure such as Sydney Metro train stations.

My professional journey into this work has been accelerated by the enlightened thinking of NSW Government that embedded customer-centred design into tendering requirements aligned to the Infrastructure NSW stage gates. It’s the kind of structural commitment we think more jurisdictions and well-intentioned architects should be paying attention to.

If you haven’t sat inside that process, it’s worth understanding what it actually does, because it explains both the opportunity and the risk in delivering infrastructure at this scale.

Every major NSW government project moves through a sequence of independent reviews, from an early options assessment through to business case, procurement, delivery readiness and eventual benefits realisation. Each iNSW gate asks a version of the same question with more evidence attached each time. Has this option been properly tested against the alternatives? Does the business case prove the preferred option delivers the promised benefit? Is what’s being procured actually going to deliver what the business case promised?

That structure is designed, reasonably, to protect public money from projects that overpromise and underdeliver. What it doesn’t automatically protect is the experience of the person who will use the thing once it’s built. A gate review could wave through a station design that is fully costed, fully scheduled, and genuinely difficult to navigate with a suitcase, a pram or a vision impairment. Nothing in the gate criteria necessarily stops that unless someone has put the human experience on the table with the same rigour as the cost plan.

This is where we believe human-centred design earns a formal seat at the table, rather than sitting off to the side, ready to be the first thing cut when trouble starts. Up front discovery research, early concept testing and customer-centred design requirements built into the gates themselves, not bolted on afterwards, is what makes HCD and the iNSW stage gates a robust partnership. We think it’s an exemplar other built environment initiatives and jurisdictions should be watching.

We’ve seen what discovery research does that a cost model can’t, well before a business case is locked. It surfaces how people actually move through a station precinct today, where they hesitate, where they get lost, what a wheelchair user or a parent with two kids and a stroller has to plan around that a fit adult commuter never notices. Feeding that into a concept design at the options stage changes what gets costed in the first place. It’s far cheaper to widen a concourse on a drawing than to retrofit one after the tunnel boring machines have gone through.

Then, as the design matures and heads toward each subsequent gate, that same customer evidence does a second job. It gives the review something concrete to hold the design to account against. Not “did we consult the community,” which can mean almost anything, but “does this design perform against the wayfinding, accessibility and dwell time evidence we gathered, and if it’s changed, why.” Stage gates built to protect cost and schedule can just as easily protect the experience of the people who’ll ride the thing, provided someone has put that evidence in front of the reviewers in a form they can act on.

Prototyping before concreting

Gehl’s method was to observe the world as it already existed and let that observation shape what got built next. Infrastructure doesn’t get that luxury. You can’t watch how people move through a station that doesn’t exist yet. So the discipline has to be recreated a different way, through prototyping that stands in for the real thing early enough to change it.

We start with a concept prototype. A sketch, a scenario, a simple model of a journey from platform to street that a project team can walk through and argue about before any of it is fixed. It sounds unglamorous next to a rendering, but it’s often where the real decisions get made, because it’s cheap enough to throw away and try again.

We use virtual reality prototyping to do something a plan or a rendering cannot. It puts a person, at their own height, inside a space that is otherwise years from existing. Put a station design in front of someone in VR and you find out immediately whether a concourse feels open or oppressive, whether a sightline to an exit actually works when you’re the height of a twelve year old rather than an architect, whether the platform edge feels safe when a train is arriving. These are Gehl questions asked of a space that hasn’t been poured yet. VR won’t tell you everything, and it’s a poor substitute for standing in a finished square counting who sits down. But it lets you ask the question decades earlier than you otherwise could, at the point where the answer still changes the design rather than just the retrospective.

Physical prototyping closes the loop. Full scale mockups of a platform edge, a ticket gate, a seat, a section of wayfinding signage, built in a warehouse or a car park and tested with real people including those a purely digital tool will miss. Someone using a wheelchair, someone vision impaired, someone travelling with a child and luggage. There’s no substitute for watching someone’s hand actually reach for a handrail that turns out to be five centimetres out of comfortable range, or watching a queue form somewhere the plan assumed people would spread out.

None of these methods replace the others. Concept prototyping is fast and cheap and catches the big structural mistakes. VR lets you test scale and feeling long before construction. Physical prototyping catches the last mile of human factors that only a real body in real space will reveal. Used together, and used early, they do for infrastructure what Gehl did for the public square. They let the people building it observe how a human being will actually experience it, before it’s too late to change.

First life, then space, then buildings

Gehl has a line he’s returned to for decades. First life, then space, then buildings, the other way around never works. He meant it about city blocks and public squares, but it holds just as well for a metro line or a hospital or a school. Start with how people will actually live in and move through the thing you’re building. Let that shape the space. Only then let the space determine the structure.

Big infrastructure resists this instinct at every stage. The scale of the budgets, the political pressure of a fixed opening date, the sheer complexity of engineering a tunnel or a bridge, all of it pulls attention toward the things that are easiest to measure. Cost, schedule, risk register. Human experience is harder to put a number on, which is exactly why it needs its own discipline, its own methods, and its own seat at the gate reviews that decide what actually gets built.

The stage gate process I worked inside for years is not naturally hostile to that idea. It’s neutral. It will hold a design to whatever evidence gets put in front of it. Our work in human-centred design for infrastructure delivery is to make sure the evidence in the room includes the person standing on the platform, not just the person balancing the budget. Gehl spent sixty years proving that when you do that patiently enough, the city gets better. There’s no reason the same discipline, applied early and applied often, can’t do the same for the infrastructure being built right now.

This is the work we do at brkrs. We help organisations and industries adopt human-centred design processes so that we de-risk major expenditure and ensure outcomes align with human needs.