I was in a taxi recently, talking to the driver about issues with cyclists and cars, and he said, “It’s a shame, but cities just weren’t built to accommodate cyclists.” He said it as though cities were built for cars. Most date from the age of horse drawn transportation, that averaged just 6 kilometers per hour, and unfortunately filled streets with mountains of horse shit.

When bikes hit the streets in the late 1800s, they were called “silent steeds”, and recognised as the greatest thing ever for cities. And right into the forties, bikes were city’s best friends, perhaps even more so than the trams everyone seems to recall most. The biggest mistake ever was letting freeways spill into cities, in the 1950s and 60s, and squeezing out cyclists with these big fast machines that cities really weren’t built for.

It’s no surprise that all over the world, that mistake is being unravelled. What is surprising, is the bike craze we’re now seeing, isn’t precisely the same as cycling in the inter-war era. There’s a wider variety of bikes, including sports bikes, and eBikes, that can transport average riders much further. Old urban cores are broken with arterial roads and surface car parking. And industrial areas are being converted into new urban districts with car-free promenades, that are filling was quickly with cyclists as walkers.

The new age of the bicycle brings with it a whole range of new problems, and opportunities, for architects and urban designers, that I’ve been blogging about for the last couple of years, and have now developed into a book. I chose to have it published by the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi) Publishers, to be partnered with the country that has the most to teach others at this time in history. Now you can be in league with us, by pledging to support this book’s promotion, so it doesn’t just sit on the shelves. I would love to see it on every architect’s and urban planner’s desk before Christmas! The book holds lots of best practice examples and new ideas, that I think can break through a lot of the barriers holding cycling back at this time, when it really needs to forward.

If you’re in the bicycling industry, or from the fields of architecture or urban planning, or if you might like to help by pre-ordering a book for yourself, please just have a quick browse through the various rewards we’ve prepared for big or small sponsors, on our crowd funding site.

Encourage a generation of architects, urban designers and planners to regularly cycle in the cities they shape.

Live to see cyclists recognised as a protected group in anti-hate speech legislation.

See to it that land along bike paths—so long as it doesn’t have access to roads—is rezoned to permit no-impact green building.

Find an awesome Italian steel racing bike that someone is throwing away

Live to see laws ensuring developer infrastructure contributions from bicycle oriented developments are reinvested in bicycling infrastructure.

Aestheticise the world as uniquely viewed from a bike (as distinct from the POV of a walker or driver).

Design a bicycling city in China

Be on a bike every Bike Hour (6-7pm every equinox, wherever I happen to be in the world).

Reach the target figure in my crowd-funding venture to promote my new book.

Ensure all the world’s bicycling advocates, one day, are reimbursed for the time they have have been giving for free.

Convene a world bike bloggers’ conference in Tasmania, where we can all ride between venues on smooth country roads with no cars

If I think of anything else, I’ll come back and add it. Meanwhile, there is a “leave a reply” button below. So tell us: what’s on your list of things to accomplish?

It is not every weekend that I descend some mountain during a bike race, as I did last Saturday, so indulge me fellow urbanists while I savour fresh memories. I was part of a group of 6 or 7, chasing two who passed the crest 20 seconds before us. By the bottom, we had caught them, due to the greater weight of our cascade. Headwinds slow leaders, and drafts bring new riders forward, each of us staying as aero and relaxed as we can. I’m only human. I wanted to be there about as much as one wants to be watching live boxing, until something takes over, and you would not be anywhere else. The trees beside the road turned into a blur. The temptation to hang back, was swapped for a lust to take my group faster and faster, all of us sensing we were catching those whippets who had beaten us on the climb. After that experience, I want to race mountains every Saturday.

Okay, so perhaps Jan Gehl will not take what I have just said and go preach the virtues of plummeting bike paths to delight those of use with a death wish. And no doubt my regular readers will see what I have just said as masculine prancing. Believe me though, that it was a few sublime minutes, when I managed to work through my fear for the sake of experiencing an aerodynamic phenomenon that I suspect only group cyclists would know. I was surprised we only clocked 70kph. I recall topping 100 with groups I used to ride with when I was younger and more in the habit. TI guess we looked roughly like this:

Try as you might to blend in, you will always look out place on a road bike. On the road, you’re the only one without a car. On the bike path, you’re resented for being a spoiler, and for not even having a bell. At the Melbourne Bikefest, you’re a non halal Maccas in Kuala Lumpur. But then you always were an outsider, hitting on your mates’ girlfriends at school, which is why you’re now a roadie. Have you ever thought though, why you wear pink?

The best known reason, is to be able to feel god almighty  superior, because you know the heritage of the maglia rosa, while those plebs yelling abuse from their car would not know the italian meaning of “latte”. Pink is also fairly well known as the best hi-vis colour aside from tones that should only be worn by turkeys on birdys.

But have you realised that drivers will pass you more carefully, if you’re wearing pink? The mere chance that you might be an unusually broad shouldered girl, will temper their base inclinations, then by the time they realise you is a dude, it is too late: they have already missed you.

It is with all these facts clouding my mind that I have been choosing pink when buying new bike stuff of late, to the point where I’m even feeling drawn toward pink bar tape and socks. Fearing this could all go too far, I’m seeking the support of the cycling fraternity, for rules governing the wearing of pink, and propose: one piece on practical grounds; one piece hidden from view; and one piece as a symbol. Three pieces max. That would allow for my new day-glow bag cover (practical), merino pink boxers (hidden), and my new splashed-with-musk helmet (symbolic). I guess the obvious rule, is pink should only be worn when using a road bike with drop bars, and nothing in the way of luggage carrying capacity attached to the frame.

An architect dreaming of a future when sprawling car cities will be relying mostly on bikes, could easily imagine what new kinds of buildings they would need to provide for that day. People arriving on sophisticated bikes built for long 10 or 20km journeys, might find secure bike parking facilities, showers, and fresh laundered clothes. For those who have not travelled so far, there would nonetheless be well patrolled bike racks. Such conveniences would be in abundance, because everyone coming to buildings in a bicycling future would have a bike with them. Shopping malls would be ride-through. Offices workers would all keep their bikes by their desks. Bike love would be indulged, just as car love was indulged in the 60s.

For now though, the bike loving architect designs for bicycling rates as they are: less than 2% in most sprawling car cities.

That is not how architects who were dreaming of a future with cars, were designing when cars were still just a rarity. Walter Gropius designed the Bauhaus as a gateway bridging a road, decades before that road (now Bauhausplatz) came into existence. The autobahn network was then just a proposal. It would be forty years, before Germany could be called a nation of drivers. Gropius was like a one armed conductor, wanting architecture to be a part of a symphony with freeways and cars, when in 1926, there were very few cars, and no freeways at all.

We find a similar story with The Villa Savoye, designed by Le Corbusier in 1928. It is based on a fantasy, that serpentine roadways have become so ubiquitous in the late 1920s, that houses should include loops for cars to pass under and through. It is a premature vision.

Le Corbusier dreamed about a car-borne society, the way many dream now of everybody on bikes. He bought a car from his friend Gabriel Voisin and photographed it in front of his houses, in a sense wishing to push those houses into a future he could then only guess at. At the same time he was designing a car, and redesigning Paris for cars.

Gropius and Le Corbusier belonged to a generation of architects who so assiduously designed buildings as destinations for cars, that by the time freeways were being built, the architectural historian Sigfried Giedion could write a book about Avant-garde buildings being parts of that system. The central idea of the book, is that freeways cause us to measure distance in time (like saying it’s 4 hours from New York to Washington) and that somehow architecture was partied to this new conception of space.

Giedion has a lot to say about Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, as well as paintings by Picasso, that represent time. One can apprehend Picasso’s Portrait of Dora Maar in an instant, but it captures two moments in time, the moment when Picasso was standing in front of the subject, and the moment he was seeing her from one side.

It is a remarkable book that helps explain time as a kind of absent presence in architecture (something that’s so conspicuous by its absence as to invite us to look for it, even if it’s not actually there). But Space, Time and Architecture also had a diabolical influence. For one, it completely ignored a parallel Modernist tradition in Scandinavia. Second, it gave Utopianism a bad name, by backing a really damaging vision, of cars and sprawl.

Giedion put any speculative builder of a drive-in spec home in league with Einstein. By 1981, Tom Wolfe could fairly dismiss Modernist rhetoric and style as elitist and false in From Bauhaus to Our House. More damaging still, was the ramification of Charles Jencks’s observation that Modernism ended when Pruitt Igoe, one of its utopian schemes, had to be demolished in 1972 as a result of the social disharmony it was abetting.

I studied architecture in the 1980s, the decade it was decided architects should never try to impose utopian visions again. We can see we have the power to make vision real, but disasters like Pruit Igoe have taught us the folly of using that power. The period of my professional life, therefore, has been one of poststructuralist reticence.

But now people are talking about a new wave of Utopian architecture. And I am saying utopianism has a different emblem this time: the bicycle. With Part 3 of this essay I will show how architects of this new Utopian spirit are doing all the same things to promote bikes, that their forebears did (with evident success) to promote cars, when cars were still rare.

In 2000, The Philip Merrill Environmental Center became the first ever building to receive a platinum LEED certification for energy efficiency. In addition to daily energy use, the designers, SmithGroup Inc., considered the smallest details of the building’s environmental impacts, including its demolition, even its “light pollution” at night. Yet they gave no thought whatsoever to the building’s transport energy intensity. The client’s old office in downtown Annapolis that many workers had been commuting to on the bus or by walking, was replaced by a Platinum LEED certified building 16km (10mi) out of town. Today, almost all workers drive, and the organisation’s energy use, and impacts on natural habitats flanking Annapolis’s roadways, are most likely higher than when they occupied a “non-sustainable” building.

Town planners have traditionally been more astute to such matters than architects have been. Planners would rather buildings be inefficiently designed, than inefficiently sited. Their principle of Transit Oriented Development (TOD) would have development crowd around transit stops, so that buses and trains could run without timetables, and no one would have to own cars.

Newcastle, Australia (my city)

What though of cities that have already been carved into quarter acre lots for freestanding houses? Their populations will always be spread too diffusely to be served by frequent  (<10 minute) buses or trams. Most people living in cities like these seem likely to remain car-dependent, and thus big polluters. The consequences for them personally are equally dire: oil prices will rise; they might have to buy eCars; electricity prices will skyrocket because of those eCars, etc.. The spectre of expedient solutions to rising oil prices, like new nuclear power plants, or more coal fired power stations, has many looking for better solutions.

While most people are focused on pathways to abundant renewable energy, others are thinking of the bicycle’s role in reducing demand for transport energy. The bicycle propels people further per watt than other other device, is cheap to buy and cheap to provide for, and has the added advantages of providing streets with passive surveillance, and saving societies costs related to healthcare. Meeting the transport energy needs of cities too spread out to provide transit, city could be as simple as providing some extra kilojoules with each meal, to fuel healthy bodies.

Providing riders with energy is the easy part. Inspiring them to ride, rather than drive, between destinations like the Philip Merrill Environmental Centre, is the big challenge.

The solutions would most likely be different from ones found in famous bike cities like Amsterdam and Copenhagen, where bikes have been encouraged primarily to save those dense cities from gridlock, and where bike trips are short. Here we are talking about young regional cities and towns, with much lower densities, where bike trips will be long, and where there are no immediate imperatives (in the eyes of most voters who have invested in cars) to move from car dependence. Only a minority are using bikes to insulate themselves from rising energy prices, or sedentariness, or to reduce their emissions.

The job of making car dependent cities like these more conducive to cycling is so far being done by unpaid bicycling advocacy groups, black-spot by black-spot. I would like with this essay to show that it is within architects’ power to take this cause further. I will start by highlighting ways architects of the 1920s avant-garde period helped inspire later public investment in freeways, by inspiring people to want cars in the first place. Then I will show how a new wave of utopian architects are doing things now to inspire people to cycle, that may later cause larger scale investment in bike paths. Then I will explain the principle of Bicycle Oriented Development (BOD) that architects can use to justify higher site yields for their clients when building near bike routes, and to provide funds for upgrading those routes. I will conclude with some thoughts about aestheticising sprawling cities, landscapes and buildings, from the point of view of a cyclist.

This is an essay in progress, based on a talk I gave recently, that in turn grew out of an essay I drafted as a blog post two weeks ago; please pardon the repetition if you’re a regular reader. I can’t be sure, but feel I’m working toward a grant application, for some of your (Australian) tax funds, to further this research. You can help me now too, by looking at a site I am using to raise funds to promote my new book, on cycling and cities. I am uniquely placed to help architects and urban designers get behind cycling, as former generations of architects got behind cars. That’s my particular role in this bike revolution we’re living through here.

All the bike racing clubs along the coast North of Sydney converged yesterday upon a mountain pass near Bulahdelah, for combined races. The famous “Bulahdelah Bends”, where the trees grow tall from kids’ vomit, sees almost no traffic these days, since a fissure was blast through another part of the mountain, for a new 4 lane highway; in a country where budgets for bicycle infrastructure barely meet the cost of green paint, it is worth noting how mountains can be moved to win drivers’ votes.

I hitched a car ride to the race with my club president (a life-long friend) and one of our commissaires. Our president, who I shall call David (because that is his name), had a story of a meeting a young man with no helmet, black clothes, no lights, and how he had told Mr Time Bomb that a helmet would only cost him 10 or 12 bucks from any discount store. But the guy would rather pay fines. Perhaps he was inspired by the conscientious objector pictured below, who (to my eye) is clearly doing a good job of warning off cars with his fragility.

I heard then how our club president and commissaire rile against cyclists not wearing helmets, as vehemently as emulators of Dutch cycling rile against lycra. No two bike tribes could be further apart, or more ready for blood. Having one foot in each camp can at times make me feel like they’ll see it from my stretched apart butt cheeks.

Koreatown 1992

“David,” I said, “I appreciate you have met an extremist [no lights, black clothes, see his hair, yeah], but for people using bikes for daily trips, there is a good case for conscientious objection. And for upright style riding, wearing no helmet may even be safer.” Being friends, we all saw each others positions, and I left reminded that cyclists only argue with cyclists because we are all on the bottom together. During the LA riots, African American rioters looted Korean owned stores, and Koreans shot Blacks, while the whites stayed at home saying tisk-tisk and masturbating in front of their tellies.

So 3 hours of our cycling-Saturday was spent driving to a road we could ride on, because driving has outgrown that road, and left it to cycling. How much easier would it be, simply to build for bike riding (recreational and transport) right from the outset?