Urban Design Resources

All resources (130)
  • Bicycle Culture by Design

    Mikael Colville-Andersen is an urban mobility expert and CEO for Copenhagenize Consulting. He is often called Denmark’s Bicycle Ambassador but he has learned the hard way that this title is a dismal pick-up line in bars. Colville-Andersen and his team advise cities and towns around the world regarding bicycle planning, infrastructure and communication strategies. He applies his marketing expertise to campaigns that focus on selling bicycle culture and bicycle transport to a mainstream audience as opposed to the existing cycling sub-cultures in particular with his famous Cycle Chic brand. Colville-Andersen gives talks around the world about bicycle culture, design and social media.

    Watch this TEDx talk on YouTube.

    Screenshot of Mikael Colville-Andersen’s talk
  • Great Streets

    Which are the world’s best streets, and what are the physical, designable characteristics that make them great? To answer these questions, Allan Jacobs has surveyed street users and design professionals and has studied a wide array of street types and urban spaces around the world. With more than 200 illustrations, all prepared by the author, along with analysis and statistics, Great Streets offers a wealth of information on street dimensions, plans, sections, and patterns of use, all systematically compared. It also reveals Jacobs’s eye for the telling human and social details that bring streets and communities to life.

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    Book cover of Great Streets
  • The Infinite Happiness

    Conceived as a personal video diary, The Infinite Happiness is an architectural experience. The film takes us to the heart of one of the contemporary housing development considered to be a new model of success.

    Inhabiting the giant “8 House” built by Danish architect Bjarke Ingels in the suburbs of Copenhagen, Ila Bêka & Louise Lemoine recount their subjective experience of living inside this experiment of vertical village, elected in 2011 « World best residential building ».

    As a Lego game, the film builds up a collection of life stories all interconnected by their personal relation to the building. The film draws the lines of a human map which allows the viewer to discover the building through an inner and intimate point of view and questions the architecture’s ability to create collective happiness showing the surprising results of this new type of social model of the 21rst century.

    Movie cover of The Infinite Happiness