The Life-Sized City Blog

Here's the cover graphic of Copenhagenize Consulting's upcoming anthropological project tracking the Desire Lines of all the bicycle users in one Copenhagen intersection over 12 hours one day in April. We blogged about it earlier . Here's a .pdf of a larger version, if you fancy that . Opens in a new window. We filmed the intersection for 12 hours and anthropologist Agnete Suhr crunched the behavioural patterns over two months. Counting bicycle users and cars, tracking desire lines and observing the general behaviour of the bicycle users. While it was a ballet of human-powered movement, it was also a spectacular display of mediocrity. There were only a handful of "rogue cyclists chipping away at society's foundations with their reckless behaviour" out of 16,536 Citizen Cyclists. As we always say, well-designed infrastructure breeds good behaviour. While data maps are great for tracking... data... observing 16,536 bicycle users gives you a whole dif...

We are in the midst of an interesting little project here at Copenhagenize Consulting . Something we've been planning for a while but only recently got started with. Like everywhere else, the ever-growing urban cycling boom is causing a backlash in Copenhagen. There's a lot of negative press about bicycle users and little happening to reverse that. When the police go out on their Viking raids for a week at a time, ticketing cyclists for trivialities, the press regurgitate all manner of hype about the 'lawlessness' that will surely cause imminent societal decay. Always forgetting to highlight the fact that The 99% ride by the book and have done for 125 years. So. We thought we'd look at an intersection - an average one - to observe behaviour and chart patterns and numbers. The Choreography of an Urban Intersection. We chose the intersection outside of our office window. Not only convenient, but also a unique intersection in that it is primarily a transport hub t...