A nice processional route, like the avenue of Rams on the way to the temple of Karnak, is handy in a city. Ditto for set pieces, like the piazza framing views of St. Peters in Rome (hi to all of the students who have come with me to that spot to analyze Bernini’s fine tricks

My box bike (or bakfiets in Dutch) can go where no pedestrian or vehicle can go. It could traverse slopes that would hurt peoples’ ankles if they walked. It can fit through gaps that vehicles are unable to fit through. It is safe enough and clean enough to be ridden indoors. And it can shrink spaces that

As one of the few cities I’ve ever lived in long enough to require a non-tourist Visa or enroll my children in school, I have a sense of how things could play out in New York when their city-bike scheme has had time to shake down. I’ll be there in a month to welcome an envoy

A renaissance in urban cycling is forging ahead in many cities, generally, ones that are dense, flat, and that have a wealth of building stock predating the age of basement garaging. But what if the city you live in isn’t like that? What if your city happens to be one of the thousands worldwide that grew late,

If you haven’t read my blog in a while (or ever), the last few posts explain my decision to work within the literary genre of Utopian writing. Utopian visions have always precipitated new paradigms in urban planning. It is unimaginable that such a thing as a purpose-built bicycle city could even come into existence without

Books have been written about the wild enthusiasm with which the architectural community approached the possibilities presented by cars in the twentieth century (1, 2, 3). None, though, have mentioned a gaping hole in one piece of their logic that doesn’t tally with their espoused claims about rationalization. Whether designing a town plan, a house,

Whatever happened to raincoats? On rainy days when I was in school, all the kids turned up in yellow. All our houses had hooks in the laundries or inside the front doors, loaded with yellow plastic raincoats for all of the family. Another must-have in everyone’s wardrobe was a huge pair of Wellies or gum

First, a little extraneous background to the history of the office building as a type. We could go back to the Greek stoa or Roman basilica, but that would be stupid. The earliest critical interval of significance to the evolution of the office building as we know it today was the rebuilding of Chicago in

Map all the existing and potential routes for bike paths that are nowhere near cars against the redundant industrial sites those bike paths could unlock for bicycle-oriented redevelopment. For about a year now, I’ve hypothesized that that is the first planning step toward making bicycling oases in cities otherwise overridden by cars. The cities we

My last post arguing that groups of cyclists have an ethical entitlement to ride 2 abreast, or indeed take up the whole road the way cars do, got a few thousand hits in a few days. It’s a hot topic, clearly—not in all countries, certainly not Holland, but definitely hot in countries where many cyclists find themselves

It is hard to believe smart bohemians of the early twentieth century had a mental image of Australia like the image many of us now have of Sweden or Denmark. In a dog-eat-dog world, this newly federated nation and trade-union stronghold on the other side of Asia somewhere promised to be an ongoing project in social justice.

Among those of us batting for bicycle transport, many hold a quaint misconception that travel mode choices are made voluntarily. They suppose that the whole city will swap cars for bikes when they have their awakenings. Those holding onto such hopes make the inductive fallacy that because they personally choose to ride bikes, everyone else

During her 6 years (2007-2013) as Commissioner of New York’s Department of Transportation, Janette Sadik-Khan partially restored 317 linear miles of 19th-century streets so they could be used for a similar kind of non-motorized mode (cycling) to the mode for which they were laid out (horse-drawn transportation). 317 sounds like a lot. Like a revolution, coupled with statistics showing

For the past year, I have been leading teams of MA and Ph.D. students at the University of Tasmania, Australia, in a range of pure research and research-by-design projects. One of the questions we have been asking is, “what might a purpose-built bicycling city actually look like?” Would it have streets, alleys, or free-flowing ground

Don’t you hate when a media outlet preps you with questions, you spend an hour or two writing responses on paper, preparing your mind for the big moment, then when the interview comes, it is about some other topic entirely? A producer for ABC Radio National Drive got in touch last week and asked what

This might seem arcane, but it’s obvious that every architectural or urban design act refers back to a pinnacle. In Renaissance times, it was the body. Whether through analogy (e.g., the civic administration building is the head, the church is the heart, the neighborhoods are the hands, etc.) or simply by copying proportions, architecture and

Here is a mapping technique highlighting the possibility of bicycling heterotopias in just about any city. It has been designed to help people imagine greenways built along non-vehicular easements (waterways and rail corridors, for example), unlocking potential new redevelopment districts where bike-friendly building types like the one below would be the basis of a new kind

Pedestrian advocates will never tell you that life as a walker invariably leads to one thing: public transport. Driving always struck me as a very expensive way to get fat. As for life as a car-free pedestrian, I gave it a shot, first when I lived in Singapore and later when I lived in New

Riding a bike in the city wearing business attire is like walking a dog in Central Park. It’s an innocuous, necessary act for some people, but one that they obviously love for the opportunity afforded to parade yuppie status. If carrying a mug of tea made at home past all the cafes is too gratuitous,

At the risk of reading too much into too little, I should like to begin this raincoat review with a deep and meaningful observation that you might find a tad sanctimonious, even for me. The marketing imagery presented by this raincoat company out of Cambridge, UK, does not emphasize walking from the subway to the

It is time we had a touchstone notion of a Cycling Utopia. Tempting though it may be to dismiss such a thing as a straw man, it is worth remembering that the garden city and car city both have their Utopian models for planners to hold at the backs of their minds. Bike planning does not