The Life-Sized City Blog

The Bicycle as a symbol of progress, of renewal, of promising times ahead. This is not a new concept. Indeed it has been around since the invention of the bicycle. Many bicycle posters at end of the 19th century featured promising themes like liberation, progress, freedom. Here's an example: In this beautiful poster, there is a lot of metaphorical gameplay. The young woman is riding a bicycle to the future. Dressed in white and seemingly casting fresh flowers as though leaving a trail for us to follow. The old woman is looking backwards to the past as she sits in a bed of thorns, almost resigned to the fact that the future - the bicycle - is passing her by. When people in most cultures see art or photgraphy, our brain sees movement from left to right and interprets the piece based on that. The German historian and psychologist Rudolf Arnheim who wrote, among other books, " Art and visual perception – A psychology of the creative eye " noticed that the way many cult...

UPDATE 10 OCT 2014 The Copenhagen bike share bikes we talk about in this article have been on the streets for a few months now. The goal is that each bike is used 3 times a day - by local commuters. So far they are used 0.8 times a day - by tourists. Oops. Fail. These $10,000 shiny toys are already a tourist gimmick - like the originals in Copenhagen - and that does not encourage locals to use them. Locals never want to looks like tourists. Keep reading for more rationality. ---------- While La Rochelle, France can boast about having started the first proper bike share system in the mid-1970s , Copenhagen introduced the Bycyklen - City Bike - in 1995. Picture above and below, the bikes were cute gimmicks that lasted until late 2012. They worked on a shopping trolley system - put a 10 or 20 kroner coin in and get it back when you return it. The bikes were horrible to ride and it didn't take long for them to become tourist magnets. Most Copenhageners wouldn't touch th...

I've returned home from after a brilliant journey to Brazil. It was a full programme and every moment was rewarding. Last year, in July 2011, I was invited by the City of Sao Paulo to speak about Copenhagenize Design Company's Four Goals for Promoting Urban Cycling. On that visit I had the opportunity to meet with the Secretary of Education for the city - Alexandre Schneider and his advisor Daniel Guth, who is the coordinator for the project. The Education Secretariat is responsible for the education of 1.2 million children in Sao Paulo. A mindboggling number. I pitched them the idea of placing bicycles in their schools as a way for the Education Secretariat to be the 'missing link' for childrens relationship to the bicycle. Most of them still learn to ride but their options for continuing to do so are limited because of lack of safe infrastructure and the explosive and continuing growth of car culture. I explained that bicycles have been on the curriculum in Dan...