The Life-Sized City Blog

Copenhagenize Design Company Guest Author, Jason Henderson , is Professor of Geography & Environment at San Francisco State University, visiting Copenhagen this Fall on a research sabbatical examining how culture, politics, and economics shapes transportation in Copenhagen. Jason is author of Street Fight: The Politics of Mobility in San Francisco (2013) , and co-author of Low Car (bon) Communities: Inspiring Car-Free and Car Lite Urban Futures . He has published articles in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Antipode, Urban Geography, the Journal of Transport Geography and several book chapters in academic books on sustainable transportation and the politics of the automobile. He is a Master Class by Copenhagenize alumni, as well. Electric Cars: Where Will the Energy Come From? by Jason Henderson Electric cars are often touted as a promising response to climate change, reducing air pollution, and bringing energy security. So it’s not surprising that th...

Fools & Roads - The Arrogance of Space in Moscow By James Thoem / Copenhagenize Design Co. After an unreal week of ribbon cuttings, bike parades and Russian saunas in our client city of Almetyevsk, Tatarstan , the Copenhagenize Design Co. team retreated to Moscow to see what Europe’s second largest city has to offer. Sure enough, there was no shortage of awesome sights, fantastic parties and delicious food. But what hit us right away was the sheer scale of the city. Stalinist era administrative and residential building blocks taking cues from Viennese facades and neoclassical styles were blown out of proportion. Any one of Stalin’s gigantic ‘Seven Sisters’ skyscrapers always seemed to loom on the horizon. Most oppressive of all, however, were the roads. The roads! We’re talking about a network of roads 8 to 14 lanes wide stretching through the entire city. Uptown, downtown, suburbs and all. And of course, traffic never ceased to fill the city ( Check out Taras Grescoe’s Str...

This is a translated version of an  interview with Mikael published in the Norwegian newspaper Morgenbladet on 29 April 2016 by journalist Marius Lien . The photo used in the article is by Christian Belgaux. The Great Road Choice by Marius Lien for Morgenbladet - 29.04-05.05 2016 Oslo - one of Europe’s best bicycle cities? It sounds like a joke. But according to the Danish urban designer, Mikael Colville-Andersen, everything is in place for Oslo becoming the next great bicycle city. “No city in the world is as exciting as Oslo right now” , says Colville-Andersen He should know what he is talking about. As head of the Danish consulting company Copenhagenize Design Co. , he has travelled over the past nine years from one global city to the next to share his knowledge with urban planners and politicians. Recently, he has spent a lot of time in Norway since he got a Norwegian girlfriend, and he tosses around anecdotes and bicycle urbanism experiments from every corner of t...

Even in Copenhagen there are examples of an ongoing Arrogance of Space. Bizarre but true. Even here we are still battling to reverse decades of destructive urban planning at the misconceptions that came along with it. In Copenhagen, only 22% of households own a car. No, not because it's expensive and there is a high tax on cars . The rednecks in the provinces buy them all the time and both cars and gas are cheaper than in the 1970s during the oil crises. Only 10% of Copenhageners use a use a car to get around each day. 63% ride a bicycle. The rest take public transport or walk. It costs 50,000 DKK (ca. $8000) to make a parking spot and maintain it. But a parking permit for residents only costs 720 DKK (ca. 110) per year. That is bad business. The non-motoring majority are basically subsidizing a destructive, archaeic transport form used by a old-fashioned minority. Nevertheless, there are still three parking spots for every one car in Copenhagen. Despite the logic and the n...

We felt it was time for another look at the Arrogance of Space , this time applying our filter to an intersection in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Our friend and colleague Dora Moreira took this photo for us last week - Dec 2015 - of the intersection of Praça Julio Mesquita - Avenues São João & Rua Vitória. It was 16:40 on a Saturday. Looks nice and quiet with not a lot of traffic of any sort. We are, however, looking at the space allocated to various transport forms. When you apply the colours to the photo, you start to see The Arrogance of Space emerge. This photo is a little deceptive because it is not completely aerial. The yellow of the buildings dominates, so let's focus on the streetspace. Despite being in the heart of Sao Paulo, pedestrians are not afforded very much space. The angry red of the roads emerges as the clear winner in the space sweepstakes. A token strip of purple denotes some sort of bike lane - far from anything we recognise as Best Practice. Not to menti...

Thanks to reader Felix Feldhofer for the photo and the heads up about this story. By and large, history is repeating itself as we work towards making cities better. We are returning to many of the ideas that made cities human - before the automobile appeared. It's often a very good thing. Which makes what is happening in Cologne, Germany, even more comical, bizarre and stupid. It is absolutely shocking. A stunning example of Ignoring the Bull . We've written before about The Anti-Automobile Age in the early years of the 20th Century. In this article, you can read about the "jaywalking" concept , basically invented by the automobile industry to keep the streets clear for their cars and get the irritating, squishy obstacles out of the way. I highlight this in my Bicycle Urbanism by Design TED x talk . We know it was crazy. We know that it was a desperate - and successful - ploy by the automobile industry to claim the streets for themselves, despite the fact t...

Ole Kassow from Purpose Makers - and brainchild behind the Cycling Without Age movement - gave us this great shot from a street in the Østerbro neighbourhood of Copenhagen. The City has a new thing they're doing. Replacing the old, bumpy cobblestones on certain streets with smooth ones. Just a strip, like down the middle on this one-way street - to make it a smoother ride for bicycle users. The city keeps a number of streets cobblestoned because of aesthetics and historical reasons. History can be a bumpy ride, though. We like how the new cobblestones are elegantly woven into the existing ones. On a street in the centre of Copenhagen, there are now smoother strips along the curbs for bicycle users to use. Above is a delegation from the City of Groningen, who we took on a Bicycle Urbanism tour of the city a few weeks ago. Apart from their fascination with the curb-separated cycle tracks (they filmed them in order to convince their engineers that they work... yes, they're...

My son Felix is 11 years old at time of writing.  I have written previously about a little parental thing I have going on with my kids. I've never wanted to influence them unnecessarily regarding such things as our transport habits or recycling garbage or other such things that are part of our daily life. Despite my work in bicycle urbanism, I don't bang on endlessly about how important it is to ride a bicycle in cities and how driving a car in cities is a hopelessly old-fashioned and irresponsible act. Cars simply never enter into the conversation. We don't have one and my kids only spend about five hours a year in a car so there is really no need to discuss them. They are simply not part of our life. Nor do I talk about bicycles. I'm not some bike geek so I don't talk about how great bicycles are, how bicycles can save the polar bears, cure diseases like malaria, blah blah blah. We just ride them. I just make it normal for them. Kids don't want to be per...

If you have been reading this blog for a while, you'll know all too well about what we call " Ignoring the Bull ". How in this car-centric society, non-motorised victim blaming is the norm. The status quo. You may also know the media tendency - mostly in non-cycling countries - to report about cyclists killed or injured in collisions with motorised traffic. "Hit by a truck/fast moving vehicle.... wasn't wearing a helmet." Written by journalists who are hopelessly uninformed (and perhaps uninterested) about a helmet's limited industrial design capability in collisions with vehicles . They never seem to write "Man fell from 3rd floor. Wasn't wearing a helmet." You get the point. What we're seeing lately is how the everpresent Culture of Fear is encroaching on our lives in a new(ish) way. The safety nannies and their lackies are now desperately trying to dictate what you, the citizen, wears. They are trying to make fashion choices fo...

It's simple if you want it to be. Copenhagenize Design Co.

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...

We have a tendency to give cities human character traits when we describe them. It's a friendly city. A dynamic city. A boring city. Perhaps then a city can be arrogant. Arrogant, for example, with it's distribution of space. I've been working a lot in North America the past year and I've become quite obsessed with the obscenely unbalanced distribution of space. I see this arrogance everywhere I go. I see the insanely wide car lanes and the vehicles sailing back and forth in them like inebriated hippopotami. I was just in Calgary for five days and from my balcony at the hotel I watched the traffic below on 12th Ave. A one-way street that was never really busy at all. From above, the arrogance of space was very apparent. Even more so than in a car driving down the lanes. The photo, above, is the car lines divided up with their actual width. Watching for five days - okay, not 24/7 ... I have a life after all - I didn't really see  any vehicles that filled out t...

The neverending story of car dependency: (c) Todd Litman, 2013. " Smart Congestion Relief - Comprehensive Analysis of Traffic Congestion Costs and Congestion Reduction Benefits ". Victoria Transport Policy Institute. FUD - Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. This is the general feeling when drivers know that the street they usually drive on, may soon be closed to vehicular traffic. This feeling has, to some degree, been used by those who decide to build new roads. In other words, we still live according to Henry Ford's motto, “With mobility comes freedom and progress”. As someone who works with urban planning this can be viewed as when the ends actually justify the means – cities scratched by black tar marks, roads planned and built with eyes closed. Now, the results of unconsidered planning are here - we feel these impacts on a daily basis. Currently, that paradigm is slowly shifting to a new one. In a rather considerable number of cities, city centres, as well as ma...