David Sim is the Creative Director at Gehl, an urban research and design consulting firm based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Sim has just published a striking book, Soft City: Building Density for Everyday Life (Island Press), which challenges us to imagine what it might be like to design urban spaces as habitats that invite human flourishing. I was honored to ask David a few questions about the book.

— C. Christopher Smith

C. Christopher Smith: “Soft” isn’t a descriptor that most people would typically use to describe a city. Can you summarize what a soft city is, and name a few of the virtues of this approach that distinguish it from other approaches to urban design?

David Sim: Of course soft city might sound like an oxymoron. I suppose many people perceive urban places and urban life as hard, and often it is. At the same time cities can be places of invitation, innovation, creativity, and tolerance. I think these phenomena are possible because cities have the potential to accommodate a density of diversity, and this diversity allows so much to happen. However, this diversity of opportunities is only useful if it is accessible to the many. I think the key to this accessibility is softness — the “give” which allows different activities and different people to co-exist as good neighbors in the same place, different ways of moving about and spending time to co-exist as good neighbors in the same street, and all of this human life connected to and co-existing with the cycles of the planet, being good neighbors with nature.

I was looking for a simple but broad term, to cover a range of these phenomena, and perhaps a complement or even counterpoint to Smart City. I felt that there are so many simple things that have been proven to work, things that are free or at least fairly cheap to make, things that are intuitive to use, without requiring any energy or technology, and all of these somehow help make the places we live more human.

Smith: One key aim of this work is imagining and creating urban spaces where humans can thrive as neighbors. This overarching thrust of the book was striking to me, as many cultural forces of the late-modern age (e.g., speed, individualism, auto-mobility) conjoin — at least here in North America — to resist neighborliness and to foster pathologies of loneliness. Can you tell us a little about why you believe that urban spaces designed for neighborliness can be attractive?

Sim: First of all, I started with assumption that neighborliness is in itself a good thing. I sincerely believe that people need people. There is a mutual benefit which comes from being neighbors — contact and exchange with other human beings beyond the immediate family gives many benefits, with opportunities for interaction and exchange. Ultimately this is why people move to urban places, to get neighbors.

Additionally, there are considerable health benefits to human beings that come with urban spaces, opportunities to be outside, away from centrally heated or air-conditioned environments, breathing in the fresh air, moving about, getting the exercise our bodies so desperately need, and perhaps most important of all, is that urban spaces can help combat loneliness, when they invite different people to come together in the same place.

Urban form can invite us toward neighborliness but to do this it requires different “layers” of control to allow understanding or predictability: a window with adjustable shutters, your own front door and little garden, the small, limited group of families around a common staircase, a shared, private courtyard, a curb which allows pedestrians and cyclists to use the same street comfortably.

Smith: You make the case that the soft city approach not only fosters human flourishing among neighbors, but also can reduce our collective carbon footprint and contribute to more sustainable ways of living in the present age of climate change. Can you briefly describe how this approach can help us live more sustainably?

David Sim. Image courtesy of Island Press.

Sim: We can literally build our own weather. We have a lot of basic knowledge about built form which can help us use less energy: such as responding to wind and sunshine, creating protected and thus controllable spaces which can moderate the temperature, creating comfortable microclimates. These spaces can allow us to spend more time outdoors, but, through passive heating and cooling, also help us to consume less energy. Things like street layout, roof shape and enclosure are hugely significant for reducing the negative impact of climate. Additionally, smaller dimensions (both the height and depth) of buildings allow simple, non-mechanical solutions for lighting and ventilation, as well as natural heating and cooling. Seemingly small details like shutters, overhanging eaves, arcades, recessed balconies and bay windows can temper the local microclimate (might I say nanoclimates?) to make interior spaces more inhabitable, as well as better connecting the occupants to the weather outside.

In terms of mobility, perhaps a more significant carbon footprint than buildings, every detail which makes walking, cycling and public transport more attractive and viable contribute to sustainability. And of course, if the built form accommodates density and diversity making for proximity, we can live more locally, and save energy (and time) by not having to transport ourselves about.

Both the physical form of the urban environment as well as the habits of getting about between the buildings, make for people spending more time outdoors. This makes for great awareness of how the climate affects our everyday lives. I suspect that this daily relevance of the weather can lead to a deeper reverence, as we start to take climate change more seriously.

Smith: In what was one of the most compelling sections of the book, you make the case that our quality of life is directly connected to how we spend our time. How does your approach serve to improve the quality of our lives by shifting how we spend our time?

Sim: This shift is about how the overall form, as well as the details of the built environment, can actually save us time. Much of lives are lost in transportation — as we might spend more time getting about, accessing the things we need and want to do, than actually doing them. I am fascinated how the proximity of different activities (work, education, services, commerce, leisure, entertainment, etc.) can save us time to do more of them. I am also very interested in the small details which save us minutes or just seconds, as we go about the daily business of our lives, a continuous pavement/sidewalk at the side street which allows us to cross the street without waiting, or the median strip which allows us to cross the street more spontaneously or just the opportunity of doing something useful or enjoyable while we wait for transit.

Smith: What are a few of the most important design principles that comprise the soft city approach and why are they each important?

Sim: There are three important categories of principles: how we physically layout and shape buildings, how we organize the space in-between the buildings to allow more things to happen, how we react with the forces of nature.

For buildings, I would say the most important aspects are; the clear definition of the spaces between the buildings making some kind of enclosure, including streets and other public spaces as well as more private courtyards and gardens; a system of fractals with different buildings joined up and juxtaposed; and care to layer buildings responding in particular to ground and the sky.

For the places in between, once the spaces themselves have been defined, we have to consider how we organize and allocate space to specific and general uses, such as private gardens, shared courtyards, and public squares, as well as walking, cycling, and driving. Thoughtful details which make time-saving shortcuts and inhabitable edges zones can make the urban realm perform better because it is more useful in daily life.

For the whole built environment, both the buildings and the in-between, all the details which temper the climate are significant as they can encourage people to linger longer outdoors or at least on the edge of the outdoors.

Smith: Describe for our readers one or two urban places that most powerfully embody the principles of soft cities that you offer in the book.

Sim: That’s too hard — how do I choose?

The Bo01 housing district in Malmö, Sweden. Image via Brandon Schauer.

The Bo01 housing district in Malmö in Sweden has an urban form which promotes neighborliness. This neighborliness can be observed with more different kinds of people in the public spaces interacting, doing more different kinds of things with each other. The urban form also creates a better micro-climate which can be observed through the longer, outdoor season, with more people spending time outdoors and more flora and fauna throughout the year despite the exposed locations and the harsh Swedish weather.

The transformation of Australian cities such as Melbourne with the so-called “linear Barcelona” form, densifying along transportation routes, exemplifies that a multi-fractal system can evolve over time, while ensuring a human scale and a diversity of uses, and at an appropriate pace for the local community.

Smith: You maintain that “soft is hard to break.” Why do you believe that this is true for urban places?

Sim: Perhaps it is a rather sweeping statement. But the same is true for people. Sensitive people can be stronger. Knowing when to open up and when to shut up. It has something to do with the ability to recognize change and challenge, and then respond to it, which makes people — and possibly places — more resilient.

Top photo of the Flinders Street Railway Station (Melbourne, Australia) via Weyne Yew.

David Sim of "Soft City": Making the Places We Live More Human

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