Copenhagenize: The Definitive Guide to Global Bicycle Urbanism

By Mikael Colville-Andersen

The bicycle enjoyed a starring role in urban history over a century ago, but now it is back, stronger than ever. It is the single most important tool for improving our cities. Designing around it is the most efficient way to make our cities life-sized—to scale cities for humans. It is time to cement the bicycle firmly in the urban narrative in US and global cities.
  
Enter urban designer Mikael Colville-Andersen. He has worked for dozens of global cities on bicycle planning, strategy, infrastructure design, and communication. He is known around the world for his colorful personality and enthusiasm for the role of bike in urban design. In Copenhagenize, he shows cities how to effectively and profitably re-establish the bicycle as a respected, accepted, and feasible form of transportation.
  
Building on his popular blog of the same name, Copenhagenize offers vivid project descriptions, engaging stories, and best practices, alongside beautiful and informative visuals to show how to make the bicycle an easy, preferred part of everyday urban life.
  
Copenhagenize will serve as inspiration for everyone working to get the bicycle back into our cities. It will give planners and designers the ammunition to push back against the Automobile Age and convince the skeptics of the value of the life-sized city. This is not a guide on how to become Copenhagen, but how to learn from the successes and failures (yes, failures) of Copenhagen and other cities around the world that are striving to become more livable.
  
We need to act in order to save our cities—and us—from ourselves. Copenhagenize shows the path forward.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Mar 29, 2018
• ISBN: 9781610919395

Book preview

Conclusion

Introduction

I have spent the past decade staring intently at urban cyclists in cities around the world and closely examining the role of the humble bicycle on the urban landscape and in the finely woven social fabric. All of the thoughts and observations that have welled up through that time have reached a critical mass, and this book, I suppose, is the vessel into which they flow.

In picking up this book, you may have a hunch that I’ll be discussing bicycles and bicycle urbanism, and rightly so. Nevertheless, I want to make sure that we’re on the same page before we begin.

Let’s be clear from the get-go. This is a book about bikes, but it’s also about urbanization. It’s about how we possess the ability to move a lot of people through cities and to effectively reestablish the bicycle as a respected, accepted, and feasible transport form—all while making money off of the investment.

In many cultures—not least in North America—the bicycle is still sadly misunderstood. It remains a tolerated tag-along in the resplendent urbanism parade. Instead, I will build a pedestal for the bicycle as transport to stand upon, in order to accelerate the understanding of its role in the life-sized city and the transport equation, as well as to drive home once and for all the importance of best-practice infrastructure.

The global bicycle boom has been underway since 2007 and shows no sign of waning. The bicycle is returning as transport in our cities after an absence, in many places, of decades. We have entered into an exciting urban age of rediscovery, but there remains a lack of understanding, be it macro or micro, about the role of bicycle urbanism in our cities as both transport and as a social cohesive. It is high time we fixed that by presenting a clear and definitive guide to the hows and whys of embracing an urban future that includes the bicycle as the key tool for transport, design, planning, and social development. I firmly believe that the bicycle is the single most important tool in our urban toolbox for improving our cities. We need to ensure that as many people as possible are in the loop about how to use it efficiently.

Living in Copenhagen—the City of Cyclists—has offered me a solid pedestal from which I have been able to regard other cities. Through my work I have cycled in over 65 cities around the world, rolling effortlessly along gold-standard infrastructure but also navigating bizarre bike lanes and the worst asphalt imaginable. Studying and analyzing the designs and how they work or don’t work. Observing the people cycling in a city and how they interact with the infrastructure or lack thereof, as well as all the amazing anthropological details and transport psychology relating to urban cycling.

Since I am the author of a book about urban cycling and bicycle urbanism, it may come as a surprise that I am not a cyclist. Perhaps quotation marks are in order: cyclist. I don’t identify in any way, shape, or form as one. I am just a modern city dweller who just happens to use a bicycle to get around because it is safe and efficient. I’ll explore further along why citizens of Copenhagen—including myself—overwhelmingly choose the bicycle as transport, but for now it is important to establish that baseline.

When I leave my apartment to go to the bakery, I suppose I become a pedestrian if I walk, a motorist if I take a car, or a passenger if I take public transport. Likewise, I transform from being an apartment dweller to being a cyclist if I hop on my bike. For purposes of gathering data, we get sorted into these categories. Fair enough. The very word cyclist, however, has strong connotations in many parts of the world. If I am talking to someone in a bar in America and I say I am a cyclist, images will invariably appear in their head of me decked out in spandex, helmet, and clicky shoes, out for a long ride somewhere or trying to beat my record for speed or distance. In Denmark, we use the word cyclist to differentiate among traffic users, but very few people will identify as one.

This book isn’t about bicycle culture any more than it’s about vacuum-cleaner culture, which is how I describe bicycle-friendly cities like Copenhagen, Amsterdam, or Tokyo. We all have a vacuum and have learned how to use it. We don’t have a stable of vacuums that we keep polished and oiled. We don’t dress up in vacuuming clothes or wave at other avid vacuumists on the street. The vacuum cleaner is just an effective tool that makes our daily lives easier. Just like the bicycle.

I came to cycling late. Like any kid, I had a burning desire to learn how to ride, but my dad worked ungodly hours, and while my mum was a model matriarch, her skill set didn’t include teaching a kid to ride. I think I was seven when my big brother Steven visited and took me out onto Fairview Crescent and worked with me until I nailed it. I’ll never forget that moment. He had been jogging behind me, holding onto the high backrest bar on my banana seat—it was the 1970s, man—to help me keep my balance. Then, on one run up the street, I realized I couldn’t hear his footsteps. I turned my head as best I could and saw him far behind me, standing in the middle of the street with a big smile on his face. I was cycling. Isn’t it beautiful how most people remember that moment when they cycle for the first time? Despite decades of car-centric development, children still learn to ride a bike, even if they don’t have anywhere safe to ride it afterwards. This remains the first powerful moment of true independence in our lives that we can remember. We’re too young to recall sitting, crawling, or walking for the first time, but mastering the bicycle stays with us forever. The fact that learning to ride a bicycle is still a thing is, for me, one of the great poetic aspects of cycling.

I can’t be bothered to repair bikes beyond the most basic fixes. Hey, I live in a city with 600 bike shops, so, like most of my fellow Copenhageners, I chuck a bike into a shop for my repairs. But I believe in the bicycle, not only as a brilliant symbol for this emerging urban age but also as the tool for reversing the damage done to our cities over the past century. The bicycle boom that started in early 2007 with Cycle Chic could have been a brief, viral window. A trend like acid-washed jeans in the 1980s (guilty as charged). But the bike stuck. It’s as though, without knowing it, we were waiting for its return to fulfill its timeless role as a symbol of modernity.

In 2006, very few cities were considering the bicycle as transport. Ten years on, very few cities haven’t at least had the conversation, and, more encouragingly, many are making serious efforts to capitalize on bikes.

I grew up in Calgary, Canada, the son of immigrants who had arrived from Denmark in 1953. While much of my childhood and youth was spent on bikes—cycling to sports, friends’ houses, and the local shops, and generally disappearing on my bike until I got hungry and came home—I also lived in North America, where getting a car at sixteen was the default. A 15-minute walk to high school became a five-minute drive. No more bus rides to get to the mall. Nevertheless, I still rode my bike, enjoying the pathway around Glenmore Dam and trying to beat the personal best that I had timed.

At eighteen, I moved from Calgary to Vancouver and, for reasons I no longer recall, I would ride my bike from various apartments in North Vancouver to downtown over the Lion’s Gate Bridge. I just liked it. This was 1986, and I don’t remember seeing very many other cyclists on my daily routes. I also recall that I never experienced any animosity from motorists. (Things have changed.)

When, at 22, I ventured farther afield—leaving Canada, never to return—I often found a bike to ride for transport in the cities where I was living. Melbourne, Moscow, London, Paris. Even Suva City and Hong Kong. I was often regarded with curiosity and a bemused smile, but never ridicule. I never wore the spandex uniform of cyclists or had any gear on my trusty 10-speeds. I never intended to be demonstrative about my transport form. I was just a dude on a bike who liked moving around like that.

In retrospect, one pivotal event left its mark on me and continues to feed my inner aquifer with inspiration. In 1988, I was studying in Pasadena, California, and, while crossing the street at the corner with a friend, I was struck by a car traveling at about 60 km/h (about 40 mph), according to police estimates. I flew through the air like a football and landed 30 meters (98 feet) farther along. By all accounts, everyone who witnessed the accident was convinced that I was dead—no one could have survived such an impact. But I was a lucky man. My leg was broken in two places and my collarbone snapped close to my sternum from landing on my shoulder, but apart from that and some road rash, I was fine. Based on what I know now about death and injury rates from automobile impacts, I had only a 5 percent chance of surviving being run down at that speed.

The event dipped under the surface of my consciousness but never disappeared completely. It was only later in life that it manifested itself as a primary factor in my work and personal philosophy about urban development. I was handed a slim chance of survival and I was allowed to take it. Since that day in November 1988, I have tried to live life to the fullest and, through my work, design conditions in cities that will allow other people to live without the risk of the same situation or worse.

I moved to Copenhagen in 1994. I had intended to visit friends for a week before continuing my restless wandering from city to city around the world. Because of my family’s heritage, I could work, so I decided to stick around for a bit. That was 24 years ago. I found the roots I didn’t know I had been searching for.

I had hardly been in country more than a week before my friends made two things perfectly clear. One: if I was going to stay, FC Copenhagen would now be my Danish football team of choice. That was not up for discussion. Two: I needed a bike to get around. I was tossed a bike key and informed that the bike was somewhere in the backyard and was probably green. I found it and immediately hit the cycle tracks. No fireworks or rousing orchestral music. Just two wheels and a rusty chain. That bike key doubled as the key to the city. The absolute normalcy of using a bicycle in Copenhagen is something I can recognize now, but at the time I just slid right into it without much conscious thought. Isn’t that the way it should be?

I continued my life in Copenhagen. Like most of my fellow citizens I was happily ignorant of the inherent beauty of being a part of the organic transport ballet of the Danish capital. Until the morning of November 14, 2006. I have shot street photography for many years, and that morning was no exception. I had a trusty camera in my pocket as I headed to work at Danish Broadcasting. According to the Exif info on the photo, it was at 08:46 that I took a photo in the morning traffic. The light ahead had just turned to green. A cyclist on the right was pushing off. A couple of cyclists were swooping in from a side street on the left. In front of me was a Copenhagener who hadn’t yet moved. She was standing astride her bicycle. A pillar of calm in a world of chaos, lost in her thoughts. I snapped the shot and rode past her to work.

Later that day I put the photo on Flickr, where I had a bit of a following. I started receiving comments, mostly from the States, like How does she ride a bike in that skirt and those boots?! As though it was some bizarre thing to do on a bike. I didn’t get it. These were odd questions for me, a Copenhagener. I had no idea what they were talking about.

When someone reacts positively to your work, be it photography or writing or whatever, the simple reaction is to continue in the same vein. I started taking more photos of elegantly dressed Copenhageners doing absolutely nothing special on their bikes, and viewers continued to express their amazement.

In early 2007, a series of these photos were published in Magasinet KBH, a local publication about life in Copenhagen, and I coined the phrase cycle chic as a title (cykel chic was how it was rendered in Danish). People kept reacting and I kept shooting. In mid-2007, I decided to start a blog. Hey, everyone and their dog was starting one at that point. I figured I could use the blog as a repository or gallery in case I took more shots of Copenhagen’s bicycle life. What happened surprised me. Within a week, there were a few hundred visitors a day, and that continued to grow exponentially.

In mid-2007, streetstyle blogs were booming, and Copenhagen Cycle Chic walked right into this trend. In addition, I discovered that there were no blogs anywhere dedicated to urban cycling. I googled and googled and could only find blogs about sport and recreational cycling. Streetsblog had a few articles about urban cycling, but there wasn’t much else out there.

My blog continued to explode and I upped the content contribution. The majority of the readers were—and still are—women. Even though the blog featured street photography, the streetstyle feel was the main draw, and the fact that we focus on bicycles made it unique.

Cycle Chic continued to snowball and, at its peak, there were over 200 copycat blogs all over the world. It was in the spring of 2007 that I started to ponder in detail why these photos were capturing so many imaginations. Something that was so completely normal to me and my fellow Copenhageners was getting people around the world excited. The simple act of riding a bike through a city. I started researching how Copenhagen had ended up like this. My curiosity as a journalist led me down the path to start Copenhagenize.com, designed as a companion blog to Cycle Chic.

I had read an article about the copenhagenization of some city, used in a slightly negative way by a journalist. I let copenhagenize roll off my tongue a few times and liked it. The next, natural step was to google both copenhagenise and copenhagenize to see what was out there. There was nothing apart from a naval term dating from the early 1800s, used to describe the British strategy of bombing an enemy into submission from the sea and then sailing their entire navy away. The Brits did this to Copenhagen in 1807 and the term Copenhagenize originated there. Until 2007, of course, when I gave it a new meaning.

Others in my industry have hijacked the term and use it to describe all manner of urbanist influences coming from Copenhagen, but that was never my intention. I stick to my original meaning, which is the specific focus on the bicycle as transport.

The Copenhagenize blog, like Cycle Chic, exploded early on. This little blog seemed to fill a gap about the bicycle’s role in cities as transport. Indeed, I have pondered the whole return of the bicycle. It is as though we were all waiting for something, anything, to act as a symbol of where we all should be heading with urban development and environmental concerns. The bicycle came back and slid effortlessly into the same role it had played after its invention in the late 1800s. Pragmatic, sensible, modern, societal change.

It is safe to say that very few cities were discussing the bicycle as transport in 2006. Now, there are very few cities where the bicycle has not been, at the very least, discussed. A strong esprit de corps has developed. A lone voice in the wilderness has morphed into a choir.

The role of these two blogs in reestablishing the bicycle in the public consciousness, however inadvertently, was not restricted to the rest of the world. The bicycle was an integral part of the image of Amsterdam, but in Copenhagen, despite having the same cycling levels, the bicycle was not a visible part of the city’s branding or image. There were very few hotels that rented bikes to tourists in 2006; instead they sent visitors to a handful of rental locations. Now, a hotel without bike rental is a rarity and bikes appear regularly in the city’s tourism material. Copenhagen’s cycling life is a role model for other cities everywhere.

The bicycle could have enjoyed a starring role in just that one brief chapter of urban history over a century ago, but now it is back. Bigger and stronger than ever. It’s time to cement it firmly in the urban narrative.

I approach the subject matter with fresh eyes, unencumbered by academic indoctrination. I draw upon my own thoughts and ideas, but also the experience I’ve gained while working for dozens of cities around the world on bicycle planning, strategy, infrastructure design, and communication.

After a century of urban confusion, of wrongly placed energy, of seduction by overcomplicated technology, it’s time to clean up. To return to a spirit of mater artium necesssitas—necessity is the mother of invention. We need to act in order to save our cities—and us—from ourselves. To fix a century of broken with a tool that fixes.

Let’s go.

CHAPTER 1

THE LIFE-SIZED CITY

Daddy, when is my city going to fit me?

Lulu-Sophia Modler-Andersen

Cyclists on best-practice infrastructure in Copenhagen.

I have a strange suspicion that we’ve been hacked. As people. As societies. We have been led to believe that big is best. That growth is good. For so many years that you can easily call it a century of living with the Cult of Big. Certainly regarding the economy. You can’t mention the economy without mentioning growth. But I’m not an economist. I work in urbanism. In cities. And the same thing applies. Cities have to be bigger. Broader. They have to sprawl into the distance as far as the eye can see. That is what makes a city great and good. Or so we’ve been told for many, many years. Buildings have to be taller, shinier. Reaching for the sky. Breaking world records. Monuments to engineering and, quite possibly, phallic symbols for the male-dominated industries that design and build them. Roads and motorways have to be longer, wider, go farther. More capacity, improved flow, reduced congestion. It’s one of the saddest ironies of urban planning that the only thing we have learned from a hundred years of traffic engineering is this: if you make more space for cars, more cars come. It’s sad if you think about all the kabillions of dollars we’ve thrown at this for the past century.

Lulu-Sophia in Copenhagen in 2011.

Megaprojects are all the rage. Never finished on time, always obscenely over budget, and yet they make up 8 percent of the global GDP. We’re fascinated, obsessed by megaprojects. We, the people, the consumers, are told to spend more. Buy more stuff. The more we buy, the better it will be for the economy. For growth. Or so we have been told for a very long time.

Perhaps we’ve been hacked, but I believe that we still have the original code inside us. When you have been around for 300,000 years as homo sapiens, you possess that original code. The pure programming. We can be rational when we want to be. Everyone knows, deep inside, which ice cream will be more enjoyable to eat when choosing between a single, delicious scoop or a monster pile of ice cream. Once in a while we can go crazy, but the single scoop will usually be the best experience. The same applies to food portions. We’re hard-wired to understand the basics of urban life. Every one of us who lives in a city knows what a good street should look like. It’s in our urban DNA to know that a human street that is friendly to pedestrians and cyclists and that has lots of green space is the best solution. We know intuitively and instinctively as a species that size doesn’t matter. Luckily, somewhere in there, in the dark shadow of the Cult of Big, behind the mountain of obsessive growth, there is a lovely little place I call the Life-Sized City, where things are different.

The idea of the life-sized city has become a cornerstone in my working philosophy. The concept was handed to me by one of my life’s greatest urbanist inspirations: my daughter Lulu-Sophia. We were walking around our neighborhood and waiting to cross a street, holding hands. She was quiet, looking around at the cityscape around her. Suddenly, she turned and looked up at me and said, Daddy, when is my city going to fit me? She was five at the time. I looked down at her quizzical face and assured her she would grow to fit her city better. She just shrugged and nodded. She knew the answer but in that moment she felt too small for her city, as so many kids must. But her innocent concept lodged itself in my head. I couldn’t think of anything else and wondered about whether my city fits me.

There are many stretches in Copenhagen where it feels as though the place were designed for me and me alone. Riding over Queen Louise’s Bridge on one-way cycle tracks over four meters wide, the city fits me like a finely crafted glove. Elsewhere, even though I have gold-standard infrastructure to cycle on, the buildings are out of scale, the roadway parallel to the cycle track is congested with noisy, polluting automobiles, and in place like these, I fail to achieve a sense of life-sized. Indeed, there are few places in the world where I, let alone Lulu, feel like the city fits me.

From that revelation coming from the mind of a child, the phrase life-sized city came to me—both as a way of describing cities at the moment and as a goal for how cities should be once again.

The idea of the life-sized city is complemented by the concept of genius loci—the spirit of place. Applying both of these notions to city planning will bring the scale back to normal. We all possess a universal, individual desire to feel like we belong in our surroundings.

Think about your home. Think about the effort you put into designing, crafting, and creating a space in which you have a constant, unwavering sense of belonging and well-being. Think also about where you work, where people (hopefully) have put a similar effort into making a space that inspires you to be a productive member of the workforce.

After decades of car-centric planning, the same can’t be said for most of the cityscapes we move through on a daily basis around the world.

What is a city? When I travel, I often hear things like, Oh, but that’s Copenhagen … It’s different there … Civic pride is important. Absolutely. I wouldn’t want to live in a city that did not give me a sense of ownership every single day, even with a tectonic political landscape that often fails to match my own desires. We have, however, allowed our cities to be engineered since we invented the automobile, even though cities are organic creatures, morphing themselves over time and space to accommodate shifting generational needs and demographic trends. They are defined by the citizens who live in cities here and now and who hopefully have an eye on the future of the place. You simply cannot engineer organic places populated by a wide and varied selection of humans. Nor do you need