The Life-Sized City Blog

The concept of " hygge " is, by all accounts, all the rage this year. A slough of books about “how to hygge” are on the market in the UK alone this year. The Guardian even endevoured to produce a good longread about the whole shebang.  All to the amusement of Danes for whom the word is more of a ingrained feeling than a concept requiring an instruction manual. Hyg. Hygge. Hyggelig.  This simple Danish word has captured many imaginations. Other languages have a similar word - gemütlichkeit in German or gezellig in Dutch but in Danish the meaning is taken to the next level. It often gets translated as “cosy”, but that is sadly inadequate. I’m going to get to how or if hygge relates to transport, but I need to lay down a baseline first. My standing example when I have to explain the concept to foreigners took place when I was in my 20s. A group of male friends and I met at a friend’s flat on a dark, November evening with pizza and beer to watch a Champion’s League match...

" Hi... excuse me... can you help me find this address? " An oft-used phrase for visitors in a foreign city. A few months ago I met up with Andy Cutler from Providence, RI, who was in Denmark to explore opportunities for Providence and Copenhagen to hook up on a creative and business level. He did a cool little experiement. He was here for two weeks and only got around by asking people on the street for directions, instead of using tech-gadgets. He wrote about it here, on the Better World by Design blog . He told me about it at Bang & Jensen café in Copenhagen one evening and I thought it to be cool. One of his observations is that Copenhageners - besides being helpful - never really gave him complete and specific directions. They sent him in the right direction and then suggested he ask someone else for further details once he got closer. I found that interesting. I've spent a awful lot of time thinking about it since then. Making mental notes of my own e...

We've written before about how cargo bike culture starts early in Copenhagen . Here are a couple more examples from last week. Above, heading home from kindergarten, a Copenhagen kid gets to try and ride the family's Christiania bike along the cycle tracks. And this was spotted on my way home from picking up Lulu-Sophia from kindergarten. A mum sitting on the back rack and letting her kid get the feeling of the ride from the saddle of this Nihola . Here's a glimpse into the secret life of cargo bike compartments. This one - one of many - was parked outside the kindergarten. All the essentials for a kid's life. Including a magic wand. I use the Velorbis to pick up Lulu-Sophia at the moment. Well, Lulu and friends, of course. The classic hook on the back racks of Danish bikes comes in handy when transporting a lunchbox. Although apples are doable as well - among many other things. Here's more on these hooks on our bikes .

By coincedence I've found myself explaining Cycling's Secret Sect to a couple of colleagues on two separate occasions over the past couple of months. Bicycle planners the both of them. Neither had heard of the group before and in both situations the discussion was whether or not countries like America and the UK would ever get on the bicycle bandwagon in any great numbers, as well as why they haven't done already. Especially considering the fact that so many cities and towns in Europe have rapidly and impressively increased the numbers of everyday cyclists of the course of two short years. The secret sect I'm referring to is known in some circles as Vehicular Cyclists and is largely unknown in most international circles. I've had a draft of this article for a while but reading this post over at Crap Cycling in Waltham Forest yesterday made me dig it out. I explained this Vehicular Cycling theory to my colleagues in brief. Saying that this group fight tooth and nail...

Dublin. 1961. The frightening " Two-wheeled Taliban " terrorize the streets of the Irish capital. Like I always say, welcome to Bicycle Culture 2.0. We've been there before. We're there again in many cities. We're going there again in many, many others. Time to get used to it. Will Dublin be at the head of the pack or lagging behind? Hopefully I'll be visiting in June to check it all out.

I've called Copenhagen and Amsterdam the Romulus and Remus of modern urban bicycle culture before. Another analogy applies to Denmark and Holland. These two countries are, in many ways, the Galapagos Islands of modern Bicycle Culture. We're different species of Darwin's Finch , yet we both love to fly on human-powered wheels. These two countries and the main city in each have evolved in each their own way over the past thirty or forty years. Many of the details are interesting anthropological observations that would probably be difficult to trace to the root. Here are some of them. Very generally, pannier bags are used in Holland whereas front baskets are the norm in Denmark, usually wicker. This is all very general, of course, but often when the Dutch do have a basket it's a sturdy plastic crate. And you do see pannier containers in Denmark, too. We all agree that carrying stuff on a bike is paramount, but it's fascinating to see how these two standard forms dev...