Transcriber: Kosuke Miyata Reviewer: Riaki Poništ
I'm an optimist.
But I'd like to put the next 15 minutes or so into perspective for you
and I'm going to need your help for that.
I know its early in the morning,
but I'd like everybody in the room to please clap, at this tempo.
(Clapping)
Cool, that was quicker than I expected, finding the rhythm.
For every time we clapped our hands, somebody somewhere in the world
was injured in a car accident: 96 beats per minute.
1.2 million people die globally around the world.
In Europe and the United States, every year, almost 35,000 people
are killed in car accidents, on our roads.
Do you know what that is?
That's a 9/11.
Collapsing World Trade Center towers almost every single month,
and almost every single month for the past 60 years at least.
I can't be alone at thinking that this is rather insane.
There is no war on this terror.
we've accepted a status quo in our societies
that is quite unacceptable.
I've decided to find out why we've reached this point,
and more importantly,
what we could do to make things better and think differently.
Firstly, we have to look at the streets themselves.
What are streets?
For 7,000 years, since our cities first were formed,
streets had a very singular definition.
There was a space in which we transported ourselves of course, but also the space
in which we met, gathered, talked to our neighbours, gossiped.
Where we sold our goods, where our children played.
They were extensions of our homes, of our living rooms;
they were public domain.
Probably the most democratic spaces in the history of Homo sapiens.
Now a lot of people seem to have this perception
that streets are the exclusive domain of automobiles.
I discovered that two main things happened
to cause this massive paradigm shift in our perception of streets.
Firstly, in the rapid urbanization of the late 1800s and the early 1900s,
engineers were the urban heroes of the day,
tackling any and all problems that cities could throw at them.
They did very well.
But when the automobile showed up, people started dying.
Nobody had a solution to the traffic safety problem.
So, almost in desperation, engineers were handed the job, in collaboration
with the automobile industry, who saw an opportunity.
But almost overnight, streets became regarded as public utilities
like water supply, electricity or like sewers,
puzzles to be solved with mathematical equations.
Secondly, the automobile industry had a problem.
they had products to sell and yet everybody hated them.
This was something called the Anti-Automobile Age.
Cars were despised.
Motorists were detested.
The automobile industry used techniques like marketing, spin,
and good old-fashioned ridicule to change people's perceptions.
They started campaigns, for example against what they called "jaywalking,"
crossing the street in the middle of the block.
Now, in the American slang of the day,
a "jay" was a derogatory term for a country bumpkin, a redneck,
somebody who didn't know the ways of the cool big city.
People were ridiculed when they tried to cross the street
in the middle of the block - a 7,000 year-old habit.
Boy scouts were enlisted, handing out flyers to these people,
chastising them for their behavior.
Also, anybody who was against cars,
they were labeled as old-fashioned, standing in the way of progress.
These are very effective techniques;
nobody in our cities likes to be considered old-fashioned,
and nobody anywhere likes to be ridiculed.
So, pedestrians were herded up to the street corners
to use these things called crosswalks.
Children were shepherded into these newly invented things called playgrounds.
Finally the streets were clear of irritating obstacles
and the stage was set for the paradigm shift,
probably the greatest paradigm shift in the history of our cities.
And here we are today.
Welcome to the tail end of 100 years of traffic engineering.
What do we have to show for it?
Very little.
Nobody's figured out how to make traffic flow more effectively,
how to ease congestion, or how to stop people from getting killed or injured.
Streets carve up our cities like angry rivers slicing through sand.
Traffic safety problems, but also pollution, social exclusion.
If you look at it long and hard, we live in cities that are in controlled
by bizarre, often outdated, mathematical models and equations,
cost-benefit analysis, impact assessments.
Even lovely cities like Copenhagen and Zurich.
Sometimes it feels like we're all just characters in the Matrix.
Seriously, cities around the world can't put in a simple decent cycle track
or widen the sidewalks, traffic-calm a neighborhood, lower the speed limits
because it doesn't fit into the mathematical equation
on the computer down the engineering department.
So many ideas die on their doorstep.
Let me ask you, is there a way out of the Matrix?
Urbanization is on the rise now more than ever before,
and we need new solutions; we need them in a hurry.
Should we really be engineering something as human and organic as public streets?
It's the people who define the city.
Shouldn't we study their behavior, their patterns, their movements,
their desires, their needs,
in order to figure out how to further develop our cities?
If you think about it, it worked for about 7,000 years.
I think there's a pretty good chance it's going to work again.
There's two things we need:
One is basic human observation, something we all share.
Call it anthropology, sociology, fine.
But when you boil it down,
it's just a simple act of people studying what other people are doing: watching.
In 1958,
the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard described this idea of "desire lines."
"Desire lines" is the most beautiful expression in urban planning.
This is an example, from Copenhagen.
This is a street corner on the busiest bicycle street in the world.
The city discovered that a couple thousand cyclists
were cutting across a sidewalk here to get to a parallel street.
Instead of handing out tickets to them all day long,
they observed, accepting the fact that there must be a very good reason for this.
A temporary cycle track was put in to see how that went,
and it was finally made permanent.
The subconscious desire lines of just a couple thousand citizens were respected.
This is another example.
This is the view from my hotel room in Halifax, Canada earlier this year.
Fresh snow on the Common, the park in the heart of the city.
The green lines are the original pathways, perfect for 19th century promenading,
walking your dog on a Sunday, going for a run, all good things, fine.
But the red lines show you
where the people were actually walking and cycling
in the morning rush hour, from the neighborhoods to the city center,
carving desire lines straight as arrows through the snow.
A modern city would observe and redesign accordingly.
Desire lines are great; we really love desire lines at my company.
We filmed an intersection in Copenhagen for 12 hours on a random day in April,
and we mapped the desire lines of every single one of the 16,558 cyclists
who went through there that day.
That's not even a busy intersection in Copenhagen.
I can tell you it was a fascinating exercise.
We had an anthropologist working on it.
There's no mathematical model that can replace
12 hours of intense human observation - actually it was probably 150 hours,
but when you're studying and looking for new innovative solutions
for our cities, which we are.
In my work developing bicycle infrastructure and bicycle culture
in cities around the world,
I'm constantly amazed and baffled and frustrated
at how many planners and engineers have never even tried
to ride a bicycle in their city or spend any serious time as pedestrians.
It's all office work, computer models, maps.
This brings us to the second thing that we need for modernizing our cities:
design.
We all have a relationship with design.
We all make design choices every single day.
It's a part of our DNA, no matter where we're from.
And here's the thing: a designer thinks and works differently than an engineer.
A designer thinks about the end user of the product.
That human being on the other end of the design process is everything.
They work with functionality, usability, user friendliness.
They work with concepts like the four types of pleasure:
physio, socio, pshyco, ideal pleasure in everything they do.
Designing a city for bicycles, or pedestrians,
or any aspect of a truly liveable city
should be like designing any other product on the market:
a toothbrush, a toaster, a smartphone, a chair.
When you all came in here today, you found your seats and you sat down.
You didn't have to take a moment to contemplate the chair,
interpret the designer's intentions, figure out how to work it,
"Where is the ON button?"
You didn't have to worry about whether it's going to disappear
from under you in the middle of my talk.
You sat down.
It was easy and intuitive.
That's how designing cities for people should be.
Imagine if riding a bicycle or walking in the city was that easy or intuitive.
That would be cool, and it's possible.
Design is a powerful and beautiful tool if we apply it correctly.
It can also be seductive, making us forget about all sorts of other important things.
80% of us in this room probably don't need the smartphones in our pockets
but my god we saved up for them, and hurried down to acquire them
just seduced by the design.
Well designed bicycle infrastructure will seduce people to use it.
You make the bicycle the quickest way from A to B in a city,
any city in the world.
It doesn't matter how hilly, how hot, how cold, citizen cyclists will ride,
seduced by the good design, the convenience and the safety.
Good design can also improve human behavior.
I hear the same thing around the world,
"All those damn cyclists, breaking the law, running red lights,
riding on sidewalks," you know.
Nah.
I have one response to that: those cyclists do not have
adequate bicycle infrastructure, even worse, none at all;
never mind the fact that they're forced to abide by a traffic culture
and traffic laws that were invented to serve the automobile,
a completely different transport form.
In Copenhagen, in the morning rush hour,
when a couple hundred thousand people ride their bikes to work, it's different.
At every traffic light cycle, you have great groups of citizen cyclists
doing something really weird: they're waiting for the light
to turn green, checking their smartphones.
They don't need to break the law
because they're on a well-designed bicycle infrastructure,
and a whole network of it.
If you think about it, regular citizens don't want to break the law.
They don't want to be the rogues of the urban landscape
standing out like a sore thumb in society.
They just want to go about their daily lives,
go from A to B quickly, efficiently and safely.
The good cities of the future have to be based on human observation,
and on design principles, as well as listening to the thoughts
and observations of the leading minds in the field.
Like Lulu-Sophia.
She's five now.
And I've been recording her urban observations for about a year and half.
This is my daughter.
It started about a year and half ago, she was three and a half.
We were on our way to the hardware store in Copenhagen, on our cargo bike as we do.
And we stopped at a red light and she was looking around
and all of a sudden she said,
"Daddy look, it's a motorbike with two people on it."
She was three and a half.
This concept had never occurred to her in her young mind.
I said, "Cool, maybe it's nice, maybe they're friends,
it's nice to ride a motorbike together, they can talk and stuff.
Look, you and me, we're two people on a bike,
we're friends, we're talking."
"Yeah, ahh."
She was amazed.
Off we went, we stopped at a red light further along.
I realize in retrospect that she had been intensely observing her urban theater,
looking for other examples
of two people doing this, two people doing that.
Actually she said, out of the blue again, rather frustrated,
"Daddy, cars are silly."
I said, "Really, but why? Why are cars silly?"
"Because you can't see the people in them."
A three-and-a-half-year-old nails it,
the social exclusion of automobile society,
the anonymity of cars.
It was brilliant and pure.
My kids spend about five hours a year in a car.
So it's very pure observations.
Lulu-Sophia has a brother; his name's Felix; he's 10.
Earlier this year I thought it'd be interesting
to get his third grade class to redesign the roundabout
at the intersection by their school, a really badly engineered roundabout.
Without too much input from me, they went to work, dividing up into teams,
doing site visits, talking to each other, writing notes, making drawings -
actually only making drawings; they're in the third grade.
But it was fantastic.
Their solutions were brilliant.
One of them was that they wanted glass roofs on all the streets
and cycle tracks and sidewalks so they never ever got wet in the rain.
But apart from that, their solutions were logical, rational,
based on human observation, personal experience and human need.
If we allow ourselves to think like these rational and logical children,
we free our minds.
Planning for intelligent transport forms like cycling, like walking,
becomes much easier.
The glass roofs were a funny idea, but you know what?
As we speak, there are cities in the Netherlands
who are installing rain sensors on their bicycle traffic lights
so that when it rains, snows, or gets too cold,
those cyclists are prioritized, right through those intersections,
getting those people home in a hurry through the rain.
Simple, rational, logical.
In Copenhagen, we have the green wave in place
on several arteries leading to the city center.
20 km per hour, and you hit green all the way into the city,
and all the way home again in the afternoon on bicycles.
All of this begs the question,
"What would the streets of our cities look like
if our main consultants were five-year-olds, third graders,
and teams of young design students?"
I think they'd be beautiful.
They would certainly work better than they're working now
and most importantly, they would be safer
than at any single point in the last 60 years.
I'll tell you what's old-fashioned and standing in the way of progress
and that is engineering human streets instead of designing them.
But at the end of the day, this isn't about bicycles and infrastructure,
pedestrian facilities, urban planning, urban design, livable cities.
I'll tell you what this is; it's bigger than all that.
This is about erecting monuments.
Monuments that we, the people, design and erect.
Monuments to liveable cities, to the past, the present and all important future.
Monuments that make cities better and monuments that save lives
instead of wiping them out or destroying them.
If you think about it, we are the architects.
We are the designers.
These are our cities.
This isn't the Matrix.
I want to leave you with this quote:
"Cities are erected on spiritual columns.
Like giant mirrors, they reflect the hearts of their residents.
If those hearts darken and lose faith, cities will lose their glamour."
This is a 900-year-old quote, more true today than ever before.
And I ask you, is this not the noblest of goals?
Working, doing everything we can.
We know how to do it to make our cities and our heart shine.
I think that we should just take this paradigm and shift it
back to where it belongs, back to the future.
I think we should let these monuments to the future rise all over the world.
Now you will clap again, but this time, please don't clap for me,
clap for shining hearts and all the lives that we can save
and the cities that we can make better.
Thank you.
(Applause)