The Life-Sized City Blog

Some of you may remember the article about The World's Youngest Urbanist - Lulu-Sophia - a couple of years back. Since then, Lulu-Sophia continues to fire off brilliant, simple and rational observations about her life in Copenhagen. Many of them are simple observations. We were riding down the cycle track along a busy street once and then turned off onto a bike path through a park. "Ooh, Daddy! Listen to how quiet it is all of a sudden!" Always simple but poignant. Noticing things on her urban landscape that often go unnoticed. A few months ago, Lulu-Sophia took it to the next level. We were walking and had stopped at a pedestrian crossing, waiting to cross. We were quiet at the moment. Lulu-Sophia's urbanist mind was, however, in full swing. She looked up at me and said, quite simply, "When will my city fit me, Daddy?" Fantastic. And of course, life as a child in a city is spent staring at the asses of grown ups. Garbage cans are as tall a...

(Note: Kristen Maddox was an intern for Copenhagenize Design Co . and was quickly elevated to the status of Legendary Interns in the company. She is sorely missed here at our offices.) Danny Kaye made for an endearing H.C. Andersen in the 1952 film H.C. Andersen  that tells the story of the legendary Danish author of The Little Mermaid and other fairy tales. One priceless scene: a group of sailors creaking into Copenhagen's port after a long journey, finally coming home up the Kattegat--the little bit of water hugged by Denmark and Sweden. The nostalgia in the scene is epic. Here are some of the lyrics: On this merry night  Let us clink and drink one down To wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen   Salty old queen of the sea  Once I sailed away  But I'm home today  Singing Copenhagen, wonderful, wonderful  Copenhagen for me As a guest student here for a year to research, I always knew there would be a time when I'd have to return home to Chic...

I explore in my most recent TEDx Talk how the paradigm shifted . How our perception of streets changed from being accepted as a human, democratic space for 7000 years to becoming perceived as the sole and exclusive domain of automobiles. What is clear is that people generally have a problem seeing differently. You can present them with reams and reams of statistics and evidence that cars have a destructive influence on our societies and that there are too many in our cities but you still hear the same last-century perceptions about how things can't be changed and how nothing should change. It's mind-boggling how people will deftly dance around stats like 35,000 deaths a year on the roads of America alone - and 6 million injured annually - and still come out blind to the obvious danger that citizens are exposed to. "Dude... I still want to drive my car". In cultures that have not been given the benefit of transport choice (Hi, America!) for a couple of generatio...

Should car manufacturers be forced to include health warnings on their products? Read about that idea here . Addendum: 19.07.2013. Yesterday, two gentleman from Citroën Denmark knocked on the door. In Danish, a sudden, unannounced visit is called "fransk visit" or French visit, so that was appropriate. They were from the marketing department and they wanted to discuss, of course, the parody commercial that we had whipped together to highlight the fact that car commercials never reflect reality or fact. We weren't suprised to hear from Citroën, but their personal visit was an interesting twist. A good, strategic move in a social media age where sober Cease & Desist letters get blogged in 4 seconds. I invited them in, of course, and we had a pleasant chat on the sofa. They wanted, of course, the parody commercial removed. No surprise. They were sent from headquarters in Paris, who saw the parody on a Turkish blog. They had also sent an email that morning, b...

Earlier this year, Mary Hudson Embry wrote about the cycle track addition on Gothersgade . Another "missing link" in the Inner City's bicycle network was just completed, this time on Bremerholm: a small one-way street near Christiansborg (the Parliament and other governmental functions building), Holmen Canal, and Magasin de partment store. The road leads towards other focal points in the Inner City such as the famous pedestrian street ca lled St r øget. Now that Knippels Bridge is the most biked street in Copenhagen according to the newest 2012 Bicycle Accounts, the new cycle track will allow bicycle users to continue on a straight path from the bridge into the inner city. Before, one would have to risk going against the grain of  car traffic  or turn either left or right and take a more circuitous route. Other highlights: fresh bump-free pavement, a separate traffic light for bicycles, and two lanes-- one for those going straight or turning left and another to t...