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...

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...

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...

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...