The Life-Sized City Blog

Vacuum cleaner transporting a ... vacuum cleaner. I've been saying for years that we don't have bicycle culture in Copenhagen. We just have vacuum cleaner culture. We all have one, we all have learned to use it, we use it. End of story. Another vacuum cleaner transporting a vacuum cleaner. We don't buy vacuum cleaning clothes at a specialty store, we don't wave at other vacuum cleaning enthusiasts on the street, we don't keep 7 vacuum cleaners polished in our shed. It's not a hobby or a fetish or a sub-cultural membership card. Our vacuums, like our bicycles, are just tools that make everyday life easier. So I figured I needed a logo.

When I travel around with various lectures I tend to open with a crash course in understanding Copenhagen's bicycle culture. I explain how my friends and colleagues get a kick out of the demand for me to travel around the world talking about something as dull and everyday as 'bicycle culture'. I call it Vacuum Cleaner Culture. I have even made a logo to explain this . We all have a vacuum cleaner, we've all learned how to use it and we all use it. But we don't go around thinking about our vaccum in the course of a day. Only when the bag is full do we roll our eyes and sigh. Kind of like when our tire is flat/chain is loose and we chuck our bike into the bike shop. We don't have a 'stable' of vacuum cleaners. We don't buy vacuum cleaning clothes from our LVS or wave at other 'avid' vacuum cleaning 'enthusiasts' on the street. The relationship to our bicycles is the same as to our vacuum cleaners. They're both merely incredib...