The Life-Sized City Blog

There's an exciting new development underway on the north side of Copenhagen harbour. A boardwalk extending out into the water, designed by JDS Architects for the City of Copenhagen . The project is called Kalvebod Waves - named after the stretch of harbourfront, Kalvebod Brygge. When the harbour was decommissioned for commercial traffic over a decade ago, the City was keen to get development going. Unfortunately, they turned a blind eye to the projects that a number of developers proposed. The result is a stretch of waterfront that is so shockingly devoid of architectural creativity and urban spaces for humans that you'd think it was the mid-sixties all over again. It took a few years but the City realised that they had screwed up and, when a new City Architect took over the job, there was more focus on design and architecture rather than just building in a hurry. The only building that is actually interesting is the first one near the bridge Langebro. The Nyredit Bui...

This article first appeared in the Danish newspaper Politiken on 27 November 2012. It was written by a colleague of ours and her co-workers at Center for Design, Innovation and Sustainable Transitions The Transition of Copenhagen’s Traffic Logic by Anne Katrine Braagaard Harders, Jens Stissing Jensen og Erik Hagelskjær Lauridsen are researchers at the Center for Design, Innovation and Sustainable Transitions, AAU København. The past weeks' heated debate on cyclists’ behavior in Copenhagen reflects intensified tensions between the urban space’s different mobility logics and demonstrates a need for a transition of Copenhagen’s traffic. Cycling is, as an urban mobility form, of a different nature to that of the motorized traffic. A typical picture of the Copenhagen cycling traffic could be young men on their racing bikes, merging in and out between elderly women cycling slowly, dads talking with their kids on the large cargo bikes, and girlfriends chatting and cycling side ...

Here's the cover graphic of Copenhagenize Consulting's upcoming anthropological project tracking the Desire Lines of all the bicycle users in one Copenhagen intersection over 12 hours one day in April. We blogged about it earlier . Here's a .pdf of a larger version, if you fancy that . Opens in a new window. We filmed the intersection for 12 hours and anthropologist Agnete Suhr crunched the behavioural patterns over two months. Counting bicycle users and cars, tracking desire lines and observing the general behaviour of the bicycle users. While it was a ballet of human-powered movement, it was also a spectacular display of mediocrity. There were only a handful of "rogue cyclists chipping away at society's foundations with their reckless behaviour" out of 16,536 Citizen Cyclists. As we always say, well-designed infrastructure breeds good behaviour. While data maps are great for tracking... data... observing 16,536 bicycle users gives you a whole dif...

If you're wondering about the sporadic publishing here on the blog over the past while, it's simply because we have so many exciting projects on the go around the world at Copenhagenize Consulting . One of the projects has been preparing our offering for the upcoming exhbition The Good City - Visions for a City on the Move , which the Bicycle Innovation Lab is curating. The exhibition opens on June 8th in Copenhagen, the first stop on a world tour. It's an exciting exhibition. We're presenting our own vision from here at the company but we are also curating the vision from a third-grade class at LaCour Vej School. Nine and ten year old urbanists. They have been working hard on the redesign of the roundabout next to their school. Here's the spiel about the exhibition from Bicycle Innovation Lab: THE GOOD CITY MINI-CONFERENCE AND EXHIBITION Friday the 8th of June at 12 o'clock, Bicycle Innovation Lab will inaugurate the international traveling exhibiti...

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...

Last week I attended the National Cycling Conference in Fredericia. To my surprise, I discovered that the town was in Jutland, the Danish mainland. I thought it was on the island of Funen. So I got a geography lesson, too. I was invited by the Road Directorate and the Danish Cyclists Federation to take part in a debate with sociologist Anette Jerup Jørgensen and Mogens Knudsen, police officer and Superintendent in Copenhagen's Police Traffic Unit. Journalist Adam Hannestad from the newspaper Politiken was the moderator. Anette started by discussing some her findings regarding the behavour of cycling citizens. In the blue corner, Mogens was representing the police's tradtionally staunch conservative line that cyclists should just obey every single rule. Period. I have since learned that this is perhaps more Mogens' personal line rather than the entire Danish police. In the red corner, yours truly. I was on the other side of the scales, saying that traffic laws should b...

I see this lovely, elderly lady quite often in my neighbourhood. She is always walking her bicycle. More often than not with bags in the two baskets. She walks slowly and steadily along. I've never seen her ride it - she just might - but I thought that she was perhaps like many proud elderly people in Copenhagen. When their agility fades they walk their bicycles on their daily rounds, using it as support. A kind of crutch or two-wheeled walker. Nothing wrong with walkers, of course. Design and technology have offered up all manner of funky walking aids, but I like that the bicycle keeps on giving, even when you no longer can ride it.

It's another tiny detail that is all-important in marketing urban cycling for the masses as opposed to the minority. When the transformation of the now famous street Nørrebrogade [North Bridge Street] was being planned and implemented, I noticed a detail in the terminology used by the City of Copenhagen's Bicycle Office. Nørrebrogade is not only the busiest bicyle street in the western world, it has also, over the past year or so, been a traffic planning showcase for how to recreate liveable neighbourhoods and prioritize bicycles, pedestrians and busses over cars. It was here the Green Wave for cyclists was implemented, regulating the traffic signals for bicycles so that if you cycle at 20 km/h you'll never put a foot down all the way into the city centre and home again. It was also here that cars were shunted away so that the neighbourhood would blossom once again. In places there are now bicycle lanes that are double as wide, after another lane was reclaimed from motori...

The Car Empire strikes back again. My friend Troels found this Volkswagen advert in an glossy book about great advertising campaigns from around the world. In it, Volkswagen are keen to show off various features on their cars. In this case, Energy-Absorbing Door Padding. To illustrate this exciting feature, they highlight one of the great irritations that motorists face in the urban environment, visible at just left of centre in the photo. Fortunately for the motorist getting out of his fine vehicle he has invested in German engineering to reduce potential damage to his vehicle. Nevermind that he didn't bother to check his mirror before getting out or that the inattentive man on the bicycle risks injury from what we are led to assume will be an imminent collison. Energy-absorbing door padding will save the car from too much damage. How does the esteemed panel of readers feel about this photograph/campaign? It's clearly ' ignoring the bull ' and placing responsibility on...

The further development of Bubble Wrap Society seems to be in full swing all over the world. The buzz about the bicycle over the past 18 months or so has seemingly given rise to increased buzz about bubble-wrapping the vulnerable traffic users like pedestrians and cyclists. It's a kind of counter-attack, not unlike the Audi advert we blogged about recently. Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic and the blog How We Drive has a telling article in Slate about the current cause célèbre among motorists and authorities - cracking down on jaywalking. In his In Defence of Jaywalking Tom covers the new hype about these foolish souls who dare to inconvienence motorists by crossing streets where they're 'not supposed to' are under fire. Which brings us to the question. Is Urban Mobility a basic human right? Do we not have the right to move about the urban landscape as we see fit? It has been so for most of human history, after all. If the answer is yes to that question, then surel...