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...

I had the pleasure to once again visit the G-spot of Bicycle Culture - Groningen in the north of the Netherlands last week. The occasion was to speak at the Let's Gro Festival and to have some meetings with the City. I decided to take my kids with me for the trip south. Because I like bringing my kids with me but also because I was curious. I wanted to see what two Copenhagen kids thought about cycling in a Dutch city or two (we also visited Amsterdam afterwards). Regular readers will remember how Lulu-Sophia (now aged six) outed herself as the World's Youngest Urbanist - and again here , as well as describing her wish for a Life-Sized City . Felix, at 11 years, is no rookie either when it comes to observing his urban theatre. He was the inspiration for my idea to get his third grade class to redesign the roundabout outside their school - as described in my TED x Talk from Zurich last year . He constantly impresses me with the conversations we have about urban planning a...

Some of you may remember the article about The World's Youngest Urbanist - Lulu-Sophia - a couple of years back. Since then, Lulu-Sophia continues to fire off brilliant, simple and rational observations about her life in Copenhagen. Many of them are simple observations. We were riding down the cycle track along a busy street once and then turned off onto a bike path through a park. "Ooh, Daddy! Listen to how quiet it is all of a sudden!" Always simple but poignant. Noticing things on her urban landscape that often go unnoticed. A few months ago, Lulu-Sophia took it to the next level. We were walking and had stopped at a pedestrian crossing, waiting to cross. We were quiet at the moment. Lulu-Sophia's urbanist mind was, however, in full swing. She looked up at me and said, quite simply, "When will my city fit me, Daddy?" Fantastic. And of course, life as a child in a city is spent staring at the asses of grown ups. Garbage cans are as tall a...

Lulu-Sophia, who I called the World's Youngest Urbanist last year and who features in my recent TED x talk from Zurich constantly fires off simple and logical observations from the urban theatre. Yesterday we were out shopping on our cargo bike and we spotted these two red peppers that had presumably fallen off a bicycle. We chatted about them and then off we went. Lulu-Sophia was quiet for a moment and then said: "Daddy, I bet they'll get run over and squished." "I'm sure they will." "I think it'll be a car that runs them over." "Why?" "Because cars can't see them. Cyclists can see them but the people in cars can't." Ah, yes. Indeed. The interaction with the urban landscape is heightened on a bicycle or on foot. And motorists can't see shit. Lulu-Sophia's observations are always out of the blue, simple and poignant. Wonderful to see how she notices what goes on around her. Not long a...

So, Lulu - aged 4 ( the world's youngest urbanist ) - says to me, "Daddy, what should I draw?" I said, "How about a cargo bike?" Off she went. Here's her interpretation. How she regards our cargo bike and its role in our daily lives. Love it. Says it all. Here was her first interpretation of a bicycle. Danish design minimalism. Deconstructing a bicycle to its basic ingredients. Well... except for pedals. Here was her first interpretation of herself with her bicycle. And this was her first interpretation of a cargo bike - using our Bullitt as inspiration.

Ah, out of the mouths of babes. Last Sunday I dropped Felix off at football training and then headed to a hardware store with Lulu-Sophia in the Bullitt. She's three and half. We talked as we rolled along, as we always do. At a red light she looked over at a motorcyclist with a passenger on the back. She commented on it. "Daddy... look. There's a motorcycle with TWO people on it!" Daddy replied with "Yeah! I guess they're friends or something, aren't they?" "Yeah." She thought about this for a moment. "We're two people on this bicycle, too!" "Yes, we are. We're friends, too." "Yeah." The light changed green and we rolled onwards. What then came out of her little mouth and clever mind amazed me. She must have been looking around at the traffic after making her observations. "When people are in cars, you can't see them, can you?" "No, you can't", said Daddy...