The Life-Sized City Blog

Everybody sees their city differently. What does the city look like through the eyes of The World's Youngest Urbanist? Lulu-Sophia keeps delivering a solid flow of pure observations about city life. She also grows up in a home filled with cameras and has free access to all of them. What about putting those two things together, I thought. Some Canon camera, be it 5 or 7D is usually lying in the window sill at our place. I often find photos on the memory card that Lulu-Sophia had taken of people out on the street in front of our flat. She just started picking up the camera and shooting. A couple of years ago I started handed her the camera when we're riding around on the Bullitt cargo bike . I never say what she should take photos of. I just say "take photos if you want". Totally up to her and no big deal if she doesn't. Sometimes I don't notice what she does but when I load the photos onto the computer, I get to see what she sees. And it is quite wonder...

Quite out of the blue during dinner one evening, I asked my daughter, Lulu, aged 6 almost 7 (you may know her as the world's youngest urbanist ...) if she thought she could find her way to the local swimming pool by herself. I was explaining directions to somewhere else to my son, Felix, aged 12, and I realised that all the references were visual. No street addresses or anything, just directions like "go down that street and when you see that shop, turn right...". To which he would reply, "is that the shop with the red door?" or "is that the shop across from that other shop with this or that recognizable feature?" It all originates with this earlier article here on the blog: Wayfinding in a Liveable City . So I wondered how much Lulu has registered in her daily, frequent journeys around our neighbourhood. So... I laid down the challenge to Lulu. Find your way to the swimming pool on foot. Felix and I would walk behind her but wouldn't offer...

Elevated cycle track network - Netherlands 1950s. Read more about how London is becoming the Village Idiot of Urban Innovation with other ideas like this one. There's been a bit of chatter of late about a (not very) new idea for bicycle "infrastructure" in London. None other than architect Norman Robert Foster, Lord Foster of Thames Bank, OM Kt, has dusted off a student's idea and launched it upon an unsuspecting world. Rendering of the Sky Cycle Now of course this isn't a good idea. This is classic Magpie Architecture. Attempting to attract people to big shiny things that dazzle but that have little functional value in the development of a city. Then again, Foster is a master of building big shiny things. Ideas like these are city killers. Removing great numbers of citizens who could be cycling down city streets past shops and cafés on their way to work or school and placing them on a shelf, far away from everything else. All this in a city that is ...

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

" 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...

Robert Doisneau - running pedestrians in Paris We recently covered the disturbing and archaeic 85th percentile method and how it is applied for (and by) vehicles. If you thought THAT was fun, you might also enjoy The 15th Percentile. It is frequently used to determine the time between the WALK and DON'T WALK crossing signals -  in other words, how much time the engineers computer models allow for human beings to cross streets. It's not as rooted as a standard as The 85th Percentile, but it is still widespread. In a nutshell, we should be paying more attention to pedestrian crossings, when you consider statistics that say that " 40% of accidents involving pedestrians occur at these intersections ". In Europe, one in four pedestrians die on a crossing . What seems to be the problem? In the U.S., the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) establishes a “normal” pedestrian speed at 1.2 metres per second (m/s), so traffic signal times are set according...

It's no longer the city you may think it is, it seems. The Danish Justice Minister, Morten Bødskov , is the latest antagonist to restrict the growth of Copenhagen's bicycle culture. He has proposed that Danish municipalities be allowed to remove bicycles parked incorrectly. It is currently only the police who are authorised to do so. That there are many bicycles parked outside bike racks is certainly a fact and an interesting issue. Look at the cartoon at the top. It's from a legendary Danish satirist, Storm P., who was always keen to highlight the cycling situation, as he was a bicycle user himself. We've translated his pisstake on the anti-cyclist mood in the 1930's previously . The cartoon reads, " Since they're considering to use sidewalks for bicycle parking, it'll be rather difficult to walk on them ." There were many more bicycles in use in Copenhagen in 1938 than there are now. Parking was an issue then, as it is now. It's bas...