Places for People Downtown provides a unique opportunity to reflect on our past work, and the new challenges of our time, to put forward a new approach to public space planning with a focus on public life
and people-centred design that starts with an understanding and appreciation of the people who use public space on a daily basis.
To help us develop this new approach, the City of Vancouver partnered with Gehl to conduct the largest and most comprehensive Public Space and Public Life Study in the Americas.
This report contains a summary of the study and its findings. Using ‘people data’, it considers how people use our Downtown public spaces and streets, and provides an assessment of how people get around the Downtown Peninsula and how our public spaces could better promote public life. The report also provides us with a useful benchmark to assess our city against other cities that have been
studied by Gehl, including New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, Copenhagen and Melbourne.
