The Life-Sized City Blog

Part 1 - On bicycles & Behaviour “Think of a city and what comes to mind? Its streets”. The oft-quoted words of Jane Jacobs from her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities ring true even in 2013. Throughout time, there have been key urbanists who are not satisfied with municipal jobs, tucked away from the citizens. These are the urban superheros. The almost mythic figures like Jacobs or William Whyte who intimately know our cities.  A little over a year ago, we blogged about an exciting new project to honour these thinkers’ legacies. We put their methods into action in novel and exciting ways. We study the bicycle users' intricacies on a greater scale than ever before. Enter a simple video camera, an ordinary intersection, and more than 16,000 bicycle users. “The Bicycle Choreography of an Urban Intersection—an anthropological study” was born. Over 200 hours were logged by anthropologist Agnete Suhr as she studied 12 hours of video foota...

This is where we believe it all comes together. As the previous two installments in this series have demonstrated, Copenhagenize Design Co. is unveiling a document to help analyse the intracacies at work in urban spaces. In fact, a fascinating intersection out of our very own window. We show that developing alternatives to mainstream traffic planning is possible with basic equipment and hours to devote to studying human movement patterns.  Without further ado, we now present our “Copenhagenize Fixes”. These fixes are quite simple, but we believe, will go a long way in working with traffic behaviours, instead of policing them. The graphic above shows the following improvements to the streetscape. Each desire line is given a different letter as a label. The numbers are the number of bicycle users. Two numbers? The first is a mounted bicycle user and the second, a person walking their bike (example: through an intersection). For bicycle users: -Bicycle path...

If you’re just tuning in, this series is dedicated to sharing a snippet of the main findings of our report entitled, “The Bicycle Choreography of an Urban Intersection—an anthropological study”. At the end of the series, we will unveil this report for the first time. Our first segment described behavioural findings from the study. The finer details of the urban theater and what we think really makes ordinary movements “come alive”: micro-communication through body language, subtle shifting at stop lines, and any number of other minute details discovered through close observation. Here, we take the quantitative data from the study and tell a story about our cities. A story about how to understand allegedly ‘rule-bending’ behaviour to discover how municipalities can better relate to these users and the desires of all on our roads today. Thanks to some solid work by data wunderkind Pedro Madruga , we were able to visualize the finer details of the 16,631 bicycle u...

“Think of a city and what comes to mind? Its streets”. The oft-quoted words of Jane Jacobs from her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities ring true even in 2013. Throughout time, there have been key urbanists who are not satisfied with municipal jobs, tucked away from the citizens. These are the urban superheros. The almost mythic figures like Jacobs or William Whyte who intimately know our cities.  A little over a year ago, we blogged about an exciting new project to honour these thinkers’ legacies. We put their methods into action in novel and exciting ways. We study the bicycle users' intricacies on a greater scale than ever before. Enter a simple video camera, an ordinary intersection, and more than 16,000 bicycle users. “The Bicycle Choreography of an Urban Intersection—an anthropological study” was born. Over 200 hours were logged by anthropologist Agnete Suhr as she studied 12 hours of video footage from our camera’s vantage point abov...

Cities use various methods in order to draw attention to themselves. Tourism campaigns, posters on busstops to advertise events or municipal services. City Branding is also a thing . Countries and organisations do the same. Usually the money is spent on highlighting positive angles. What often goes unnoticed is that cities have a tendency to spend taxpayer money on broadcasting the sad and undeniable fact that they are completely inept at keeping the streets safe. They try, unsuccessfully, to thinly disguise their incompetence as "safety" campaigns. Consider the simple idea of school crossing guards. It's a concept well-known around the world. Hey, I used to be one back in the day (and I remembering hating having to do it). I was waiting at the crosswalk by Lulu and Felix's school in Frederiksberg yesterday morning. Waiting for the lovely kids to step out and block the cars and bicycles to allow us to cross. Then I realised... the concept of school crossing g...

It's not just about bicycles as transport. The city needs lots of important things. More colour. More citizen interaction. More cinemas, for example. So Felix and I decided to do something about it. There was the perfect little hole in the wall across the street from us, in a doorway. Last December, we decided that a bit of urban infill would be just the ticket. We agreed that we needed a cinema closer to home. We measured the hole and went home to build our Lego Cinema, returning to glue it in place. The kid taking the city back. Because we can. I recalled that a few years ago the Danish Architecture Center (I think) put up tables on City Hall Square along with a fantastic amount of white Lego bricks. Passersby stopped up and built whatever their heart desired. The Felix and I spent a good couple of hours there. Continuing on the LEGO theme, Felix and I made this chess set five years ago. We still have it and use it.

In light of the recent launch of New York City's Citibike bike share system, Copenhagenize Design Co. has produced this highly-scientific and frightfully academic statistical graph. Based on the 500-odd bike share systems now in place in the world we have gathered all the public perception of the systems and crunched the data - compressing it rudely but effectively into one easy graph - for use by cities who are considering implementing a bike share system. We have also assisted some NIMBYs in New York. One of them was quoted as saying that he couldn't imagine the Mayor of Paris - the city of arts - placing a bike share rack in front of the Louvre:

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...

Oh those Hungarians. Once again, they show the world that they are leaders in the area of bicycle promotion. Here's the latest film from the Hungarian Cyclists' Club 's Bike to Work campaign - or " Bringázz a munkába " if you want to get all Magyar-esque. The cycling NGO has an ongoing relationship with global advertising firm Young & Rubicam , who have produced some of the films. Something the rest of the geeky bicycle advocacy world can learn from. Mainstream marketing is the key. Taking this product called "urban cycling" and selling it to the 99%. Selling the simplicty of urban cycling instead of overcomplicating it. The good people at the Hungarian Cyclists Club know that sub-cultural marketing is not an effective way to sell a mainstream product. Unlike many other NGOs around the world who are seemingly intent on merely trying recruit new members to their clique, the Hungarians see the big picture and go after it year after year after ye...

" 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...