Love Handles and Blogging the City

So, slapped up a Copenhagenize Love Handle in Amsterdam last week, when I was speaking at the brilliant Blogging the City conference. As I promised the audience. Maybe it's still there. Maybe it's not.

Let us know if you see it.

More on the Love Handles can be read here.

The Blogging the City conference, organised by Jeroen Beekmans & Joop de Boer of The Pop-Up City, featured a great line-up of speakers.

- Brilliant talk by Charlie Hilton of Urban Times.
- Zef Hemel head of the urban planning department of the City of Amsterdam, and blogger at Vrijstaat Amsterdam.
- Stefan Höffken from Urbanophil talked about his work and inspiration.
- Wouter Boon talked about his successful Amsterdam Ad Blog.
- Antonia Märzhäuser on the always brilliant and fascinating Freunde von Freunden site.
- Régine Debatty highlighted the story of her inspiration for her blog we-make-money-not-art

- Luc Harings from IloveNoord.nl about placemaking and civic pride.
- Loads of cool urban shit from Rudolf Klöckner of Urban Shit.
- Filip Visnjic of Creative Applications, a blog that reports innovation and catalogues projects, tools and platforms at the intersection of art, media and technology.
- Martijn de Waal from The Mobile City investigates the influence of digital media technologies on urban life, and the implications for urban design.
- Ernst-Jan Pfauth from Pfauth.com gave an impassioned plea for more Amsterdam blogs.

Overcomplicating Winter Cycling - Why It's Bad

One of the main focuses of this blog has always been on how Copenhagen and other cities have succeeded in increasing cycling levels by approaching the subject using mainstream marketing techniques. Tried and tested marketing that has existed since homo sapiens first started selling or trading stuff to each other. Modern bicycle advocacy, by and large, is flawed. It is firmly inspired by environmentalism which, in turn, is the greatest marketing flop in the history of humankind. Four decades of sub-cultural finger-wagging, guilt trips and preaching have given few results among the general population. When sub-cultural groups start trying to indoctrinate and convert the public, it rarely ever succeeds. For the better part of a century, people all over the planet rode bicycles because they were quick, easy, convenient and enjoyable. In hilly cities. In hot cities. In snowy cities. After the bicycle largely disappeared from the urban landscape because urban planning s...

A Walking Helmet is a Good Helmet

At long last logic prevails. A new campaign has hit the streets of Denmark, thanks to the visionaries at The Danish Road Safety Council [Sikker Trafik] and Trygfonden [an insurance company]. Intense promotion of walking helmets for pedestrians has begun. This logic has been sorely missed. These two organisations have happily promoted bike helmets but pedestrians suffer just as many head injuries, if not more. This Danish campaign poster reads: "A walking helmet is a good helmet" "Traffic safety isn't just for cyclists. The pedestrians of Denmark actually have a higher risk of head injury. The Danish Road Safety Council recommends walking helmets for pedestrians and other good folk in high risk groups." The slogan is catchy in Danish since it kind of rhymes. All in all it's a brilliant project. Let's save some lives. The new walking helmets will be available in the Danish Cyclists Union's [Dansk cyklist forbund] shop. Although, as the...

Driving Kills - Health Warnings

I think it's safe to say that we have a pressing need for marketing cycling positively if we're to encourage people to ride bicycles and begin the transformation of our cities into more liveable places. Instead of scare campaigns about cycling [a life-extending, healthy, sustainable transport form], wouldn't it be more appropriate to begin campaigns about the dangers of automobiles? Many people in car-centric countries no longer regard cars as dangerous. Maybe they realise it, but the car is such an ingrained part of the culture that the perception of danger rarely rises to the surface of peoples consciousness. Sure, there are scare campaigns for cars out there, but what if we just cut to the chase? Much like smoking. Only a couple of decades ago, cigarettes were an integral part of life, whether you smoked or not. That has changed radically. We think that we could borrow freely from the health warnings now found on cigarette packs around the world. In order to be tho...

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