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David Sim of “Soft City”:
Making the Places We Live

More Human

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, a 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 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.

Source: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/10/28/david-sim-
of-soft-city