Gehl's day 3 - Malmö, the best district in the world (with Anna Modin)
*this is a translation of the original post at http://maxkatz.livejournal.com/
Planned for the third day was a trip to Malmö that is located across the bay - in Sweden. Getting there by train takes about 40 minutes. I will publish a larger post about the regional transportation system around Malmö so I won't go into details even though I really would like to.
I woke up at 7 and surprisingly didn't find the street outside the window. As it turned out there was fog so thick that I couldn't see the nearby building. Meanwhile at the central train station a children's choir was singing.
In Russia street musicians are not welcome and get even kicked out. In Paris I saw a lot of musicians in the subway, and here the whole choir of about 30 people. A large crowd gathered around them and you could get a sheet with the lyrics and sing along what many people actually did.
In Malmö I met Anna Modin. She is a Swedish architect who worked on various Gehl projects including the material for the city of Perth, Australia that I had read carefully back in Moscow and gave it to read to Ilya Varlamov. So anyway, we had something to talk about.
This is an incubator for small businesses where you can rent a small office, there are accountants, lawyers and other professionals working there so you can purchase the services you need from them. An interesting place, I'll probably write a large post about it with numbers and an interview with their director (but not sure).
A district bo01 is really mind blowing. One day there was an exhibition in Sweden on the occasion of which they decided to build the best district in the world :) and they succeeded. For example, there is an artificial river that you can see from the balconies of the apartments.
There is also a really cool wood quay where everybody comes to hang out
And there is a lot of other interesting things that make an ordinary residential area the world's best one (in my opinion). I will publish a bigger post about it later. That is so awesome even though I've been here before and literally walked with my jaw dropped. Walking and hearing about all the details of this place from a Swedish architect was extremely interesting.
Residents here don't protest against new tile insisting that old asphalt pavement is just fine. So that's how it looks
I must admit that residents here are kinda weird sometimes. For example, many people were against the construction of this district because it would be "ghetto for the rich". In other words, it would be so cool that only rich people would live there - better build something simpler, jerks.
Also there is no private ownership on apartments 0_0. Instead of an apartment in the house you buy a share, and you get a percent from this house but not your own apartment. So you can't do whatever you want with it - for example, you can't rent it out for more than two years. Then either live there yourself, or sell it - what are you, trying to make a guest house or something?
Or for example, if you want to rent out an apartment to somebody there will be limitations on the maximum price that are set either by the city, or by the manager of the house. Are you kidding me?!
Train station of Malmö. It is divided into two parts - one is full of people who came here in a hurry, bought a ticket and ran to the platform with a warm bun in their hand they'd just bought.
Another part is for people who came here early. It has a huge food court with good cafés, looks like half of the city comes here to eat.
Anna rode her bike to pick up her child at kindergarten.
Meanwhile I took a walk through the center of the city. It's quite cold in Malmö in winter but the cafés want people to still sit outside. For that purpose they have a lot of gas heaters and it feels really warm to sit around them.
At 3 pm I came back to Copenhagen and went to the office where I met Lars (from the first post) who was reading my post in English. He gave me a picture :)
In the office I found out that the Moscow government has been actively writing letters to them. It would be so cool if Gehl Architects worked in Moscow. I went on the site of state purchases and found this - St. Petersburg is ordering a research project entitled "Development of the concept and the implementation program of activities concerning the cycling movement in St. Petersburg, including the building and developing of bike lanes". I'll try to connect St. Petersburg and Gehl together, we'll see how it works.