To a More Ambitious Place

London Debate / Wednesday 18 March / 6.30 – 8pm

Do we accept the status quo in place?

Speakers:

Warm up for the debate and kick start your exploration of the theme with our Think Pieces written especially for the Series:

Samar Héchaimé, Factors Ltd:

‘We should take the risk to imagine a different place, a better place and stop thinking that it is acceptable to do it in one particular way, since this is how it is done, the ‘Best Practice’. Best practices are what kill any potential inventions and innovations which will lead us to creating places that we only dream of.’ 

Sir Tom Shebbeare, Virgin Money Giving:

‘Our partners, and in particular the developers and planners, are unanimous that the new ‘super bits of village’ which we have designed together are simply better places than if the professionals had been left to their own devices. The ‘amateurs’ may have been aggravating or worse, but the professionals have certainly enjoyed the experience.‘

Alexei Schwab, Future of London:

‘The change in permitted development rights for office-to-residential conversions provides an extreme example of what can happen when placemaking is not part of the housing delivery process: without the need to negotiate with local authorities, developers have no requirement or incentive to meet good design standards.‘

Can’t make the London debate on Wednesday?
We’ll be live tweeting from 6.30pm sharp using the hashtag #GHdebate– add your questions and comments to the discussion!

Local partners:

National partners:

#UrbanFactorisation

On Monday 21st July the London Creative and Digital Fusion Steering Group, National Centre for Universities and Business and Factors will host Urban Factorisation; an interactive event to celebrate user centred design.

Urban Factorisation will look at the interaction between the multiple factors involved in the design of environments and the experiences of those who work, live, visit and travel in them. The centrepiece of the event will be the launch of “Urban Factorisation”, an interactive case study of how these factors create harmony or clash in one particular city. Delegates will have the opportunity to participate in a workshop focused in the area around St James, London.

The following speakers have been confirmed:
• Barry Sheerman MP (Co-chair of APDIG) who will speak on the challenges and opportunities in the creative industry as it applies to policy and the economy.
• Ben Gummer MP who will speak on the case of small cities, its ambitions and development, and the connection between the inhabitants and the process.
• Cathy Garner, Strategic Director London Fusion and Non-Executive Director of Places for People who will speak on cities as places for people and the influence of people on the place.
• Jeremy Watson, Professor of Engineering Systems, UCL who will speak on the influence of design on human behaviour.
• Samar Héchaimé (Principal of factors) who will speak on and illustrate “Urban Factorisation”.

The event will be well suited to those interested or involved in city governance and in all forms of city development such as design of the user centred city and the city as a centre of modern innovation fusing the disparate cultures, of academe, business and civic society.

Samar Héchaimé (Principal of factors) says “People interested in making cities more liveable on all these levels should attend, whether they are in policy, in design, in services, in citizen engagement, in digital, in economy, in history and culture or in tourism.”

“All attendees will be able to see the city from a different perspective and imagine a better future for it from the perspective of its people, its unique essence and culture”

Please register your interest in attending this event by clicking here . There are limited spaces available so please register ASAP. If you are successful we will confirm your place via email with joining instructions. If you have any questions please email: factors@loriho.com.

If you are unable to join us on the day but would like to contribute , follow the conversation on Twitter by using the hashtag #UrbanFactorisation.

Further details
Date: 21st July 2014
Time: 09.30 -16.30
Venue: The Work Foundation, 21 Palmer St, London SW1H 0AD

factors – urban factorisation

Rationality, the refuge of the intellectual mind, has been a driver to many endeavours from economics to creativity. Rationality has driven the international style and modernism in early century architecture and still drives the field today. It is the centre of the neoclassical economics. It governs the fields of branding and advertising. Not to mention medicine, politics, law, engineering…

The centre of all these endeavours should be people. People are local beings, cultural beings living within communities, falling to the herd mentality, governed by habit, emotion, shifting states of mind, therefore intrinsically irrationality.

In order for our creative endeavours to be more inherently adoptable they should, think locally, culturally, humanely, in essence capture our irrational beings.

Behavioural Economics

Behavioural economics has emerged as a blend between the world of economics and psychology. It has found its way into the world of advertising through the application of the same methodology in the development and creation of systems aimed at consumer behavioural change. Manifestations of this emergence are seen through a number of TED talks (the global conferences for innovation and excellence), industry lectures, treaties, as well as the establishing of a behavioural economics unit at the IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) and publishing of papers on the subject. One of the most vocal advocates of Behavioural Economics is Rory Sutherland, the Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK, whose TED Talks I have recently come across (http://www.ted.com/talks/rory_sutherland_perspective_is_everything.html) . Rory is not a behavioural economist but he wants to popularise it and get it into the mainstream. Even though Behavioural Economics is more prevalent now, he says his goal for true mass popularisation would have been reached when Daniel Kahneman (winner of Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic in 2002 for his work in developing the  Prospect Theory in Behavioural Economics) is be mobbed by a tour bus filled with enthusiastic star struck Japanese tourists. Maybe having it in songs sung by Justin Bieber pop star types to overenthusiastic teenagers is the answer. What excites me about such lectures is that it backs what I have been advocating, working on and developing with regards to user experience design and how it can affect behavioural change. I have been arguing for holistic & multidisciplinary strategies as the way to approach our designs and creative endeavours in all their forms. Those strategies then manifests themselves through all the various applications and user touchpoints that we can develop. These touchpoints could be either tangible or intangible or both.  Our holistic strategies should be human centred in order for them to render the necessary changes in behaviours and attitudes.

As it stands, when we design we seem assume working in a rational world, guided by pure Euclidean principles and inhabited by perfectly rational human beings. We count upon the notion that the conditions are going to always be optimal to experience our designs whether tangible or intangible. We think that we can choreograph these experiences to fit our ideal predefined pathways.

This is certainly untrue. The reason is that we suppose that rationality and instinctive ‘logic’ are congruent and that everyone will be able to reach the same rational conclusions we did. Nevertheless instinctive ‘logic’ is actually the driver of quite a number of decisions, not rationality. Instinctive ‘logic’ is idiosyncratic.

As an example it is irrational to think that Star Wars is anything beyond a fantasy world created by the fertile imagination of George Lucas and his team. Yet for the fans it is completely logical to unite under the banner of Star Wars, identify with characters, join conventions and even spend huge amounts of money buying paraphernalia that reference or are part of the Star Wars franchise. Therefore in order to influence any behaviour within this group it is important to appeal to the instinctive self rather than the rational self and weave the intended change within the story and timeline of Star Wars so that this behaviour change can become more intuitive and be adopted effortlessly.

Building frameworks

Seeing the importance of our instinctive ‘logic’ in our daily decision making, we should not focus so much on the rationality of our end users. We should help our clients build strategic and experience frameworks that account for the local taste, the element of choice and the shifting nature of our the user’s sense of belonging and decision making state of mind.

Whenever we cater to our global network of clients, whether they are large multinationals or local businesses, we need to think about the frameworks we develop and how these frameworks interact with the end user. The end user is inherently a local with local tastes and local frames of references. Nevertheless the design industry, seems to focus on the ‘human universal’ (the hypothetical person with behavioural traits that are only universal) rather than the human local (the more realistic person whose behaviour is coloured by local cultures, traditions and mindset). The shift in that design framework towards the human local might mean the difference in the adoption and the emotional attachment towards a brand, a corporation, a system, a product or an entity.

McDonald’s has successfully done that by first focusing on developing habit. Its burgers are certainly consistent in their quality and taste around the world. Second it focuses on local taste by adapting its menus slightly differently in different locations, again focusing on habit, whether it is a McKrokette inspired by the kroketten in the Netherlands or McFalafel based on the pervasive deep fried grain balls in the Egypt or the Nürnberger hamburger based on the local speciality in Nuremberg.

The service is also consistent, while catering to local preferences. For example McDonald’s offers valet parking in Beirut, the McExpress walkup window in China serving drinks in malls or 24hr delivery service in Singapore. Therefore McDonald’s focuses on creating a framework within which its end users are comfortable. The framework encompasses the global availability and readiness that McDonald’s is known for, with a local twist to the customer interaction, as well as the famous product accompanied by some local popular street food specialities.

McDonald’s has also been the master of nudging (term used from the book ‘Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness’ written by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein) by combo packaging its products, to super-sizing, to cues and to visual stimuli within the store and beyond. This nudging has become so powerful that now the moment its customers see the golden arches they immediately start feeling hungry.

McDonald’s has been able to bridge the borders between the instinctive ‘logical’ and the rational, the system 1 versus system 2 of its consumers (terms defined Daniel Kahneman in the Dual Process Theory). McDonald’s might not be healthy, but our intuitive ‘logic’ justifies our choice by focusing on the salad we purchased and forgetting the rest of our order: the coke, the burger, and the fries.

Therefore the concept, as demonstrated by McDonald’s, and other such successful brands, is to create frameworks that are flexible enough to allow each user to write their own story within the brand framework. The brand story becomes the culmination of the multitude of their users’ stories constantly changing, growing and overlaying each other to come and represent the brand story as a whole.

The strengths of the user interaction frameworks we develop (whether it is a brand, a communication campaign, a business framework, a digital environment or a physical environment) are thus with the element of choice we offer the end user, whether it is a true choice or the illusion of choice. We all believe we are individuals with complete control over our choices and decisions. Yet our choices and decisions are culturally conditioned by the societies and the groups we belong to or identify with and our inherent ideologies. Some of these belongings are more encompassing and large scaled like national belongings. Others are more shifting whether it is throughout the day or throughout or lifetimes.

For example throughout her day, a woman can be a mother, a business executive, a health-conscious shopper, a community activist, and then again a mother and a wife.  Her mindset, the group of people she is surrounded by, and her objectives change throughout the day depending on the role she is playing at any one point in time. This shape shifting, and focus and refocus from micro to macro and back, determines her behaviour throughout the day. .

The designers in all disciplines, creatives and advertising account executives should concentrate on understanding the context of our multiple beings which is what will allow them to create effective experience design on the strategic level and convincing nudging on the tactical level.

User centred strategies

It is imperative not only to keep in mind the dynamic nature of our end users and target them in frameworks that encompass advertising campaigns and branding strategies for consumer goods and institutions, but also to think within that mindset across all disciplines and market sectors, whether it is a service design, a spatial design, a package, a digital realm and others.

My experience has included designing complex experiences and brand strategies and systems, for entities such as universities, healthcare systems, airports and transportation systems as well as the smallest product applications and touchpoints. It has always been primordial to understand who I was communicating with and who is going to experience the brand or system. From that user perspective I am able to create frameworks of multileveled touchpoints that allow each user to engage and interact with the system according to their own pathway of choice which is flexible and ever-changing. This goes against the idea of choreographing experiences since that type of design forces the user into predesigned pathways which are not flexible and biomorphic. The pathway of choreographed experience forces us into certain behaviours in a more overt manner which users tend to resist. In order to have the users change their behaviours and adopt new ones it has to be more subconscious and operate along gentle and persistent nudging which plays upon the preexisting mental frames of reference of the user as well as their memories allowing them to build new cognitive experiences.

User experience design, is a combination of design creativity, problem solving, anthropology, sociology, psychology, behavioural finance or economics as well as business understanding. The strength of good and successful user experience design is its multilevelled experiencing. It is not only about the communication strategy and advertising, it is definitely not restricted to the digital realm, it surely encompassed the brand, its architecture and its messaging, it absolutely manifests itself in the service design and business model of the client, and naturally expands into the built environment and architecture whether it is as small as a package or a sales touchpoint, or as big as a city.

Therefore we should not only focus on nudging and its effects on a momentary basis, at the point of purchase and from a consumption perspective. Nudging can also be effective on a long term basis to change societal and cultural behaviours, like a small stream of water painstakingly shaping the shape of a rock. The focus here is the ‘system 2’ and the deliberate learning of a behaviour to turn it into a ‘system 1’ which is intuitive action.

Take for example the massive transformation in the Brazilian city of Curitiba lead by the mayor at the time Jaime Lerner, who was an architect/ urban planner by trade. The changes that he has implemented, through his three tenures as a mayor starting in 1972, with very small budgets, has created a framework which turned Curitiba into the most liveable city in Brazil. 90% of its inhabitants would not trade living there, whereby 70% of the inhabitants of Sao Paolo want to live in Curitiba. The changes in behaviour that have been instigated by that framework raised the GDP, the quality of life and the population’s attachment to their city leading to intuitive continuous enhancement emerging directly from the population.

Jaime Lerner focused on developing the city development framework around three issues: Mobility, Sustainability and Tolerance and Social Diversity.

The first issue was tackled through the invention of the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) a bus system that operates like an underground, with its dedicated stations (not shelters), lanes, and triple bendy buses. The way it was achievable was through co-responsibility. He approached the private sector asking them to fund the fleets while the city funded the routes and planned the itineraries. Residential development and businesses started developing around the system building a more dynamic and engaged city. The co-responsibility meant that the population, the private sector and the city all had a shared sense of partnership, pride and responsibility in the growth and upkeep of the system. Lerner understood that everything has to work together and that it is about successfully combining living, working and leisure. The transportation system should not act only as the link between those different facets otherwise the public transport will end up being used mainly twice a day at peak hours. ‘If you have a system that works always and connects living and working activities as well as leisure it is more of a city than a corridor of public transport.’ In Curitiba the BRT is the vein system that pumps vitality into the city. It has even lessened car ridership and usage since the cars get stuck in traffic but the buses never do.

In terms of sustainability he made sure to balance ‘the equation between what we save and what we use’. Focusing again on co-responsibility and shared partnership he did multiple interventions that have transformed Curitiba into one of the most sustainable cities. Teaching children how to separate garbage in school has transferred this behavioural shift to their parents who separate household rubbish, bringing down to a minimum the amount of separation needed to be done at the refineries. He engaged with the inhabitants of the slums and again made them partners in the system. The slums were too narrow for the garbage trucks to be able to efficiently collect trash. The inhabitants were throwing their garbage in the streams and on the small roads, the same streams and roads where their children would play. In order to stop that from happening Lerner started an exchange program. For every bag of garbage the inhabitants would take to a specified collection point where the trucks could go, they would receive either bus tokens or grocery bags. Not only has it stopped garbage from being thrown, but it was an incentive for the inhabitants to pick old rubbish and exchange it, creating a second stream of income for the families and getting the streets and streams clean in the process.

Another project was to engage with the fishermen. The deal was any fish the fishermen caught it were theirs to sell, but any garbage they fished from the water was bought by the city. On days where there was no fishing, the fishermen would fish garbage. The more they fished garbage, the cleaner the bay became. The cleaner the bay, the more fish there were. It was a win win situation.

The tolerance and social inclusion was manifested through all of these projects as he did not focus on gentrification and areas of specific income levels. The city was for all Curitibans. One of the projects that demonstrated this point the best, was the creation of new parks. Instead of building concrete walls to try to manage the floods, a method that has demonstrated its inefficiency namely in places like New Orleans, he built parks. These parks have made Curitiba more liveable and green, with nature accessible to all its inhabitants. To reduce the cost of the park upkeep the mowing of the lawns is kept to herds of sheep. Not only is it cheaper but it engages people with more nature in the city and it provides the city with another source of income.

These and many other interventions, whether long term plans or short term ‘urban acupuncture’ interventions engaged the population of Curitiba and changed their behaviour into one of co-partnership with the city, a shared responsibility and a sense of interconnectivity which allowed more grassroots interventions to emerge from within the population operating with the framework (physical and mental) that has been set.

The example of Curitiba demonstrates how a holistic strategy creates a framework which encompassed the different interventions and application, interconnecting them, thus bringing into existence multileveled experiences which constantly engage the users and grows with them.

Experience and its memory

There is value in helping our economic system to become more sensitive to human behaviour, and thus increasing its overall efficiency.  We cannot ignore individual choice, its dynamics and cultural references when analysing decision-making, whether in the simple context of shopping for consumer products, or in the larger context of developing societal systems.

Therefore we should focus on the development of holistic frameworks for our clients through which the end user can interact with their brands, consumer products, systems, policies or environments. These frameworks help change behaviours through a multifaceted experience and gentle nudging which will operate on creating memories that will help shift the user’s mindset. Building memorable user experiences is achievable though a holistic approach, with a cross-pollination of disciplines, under a centralised unifying umbrella, which acts as the facilitation in this multidisciplinary approach.

I believe that our experiences are made up of a continuous string of moments. Each one of these moments is an intersection of what I call the four cardinal points of experience. These four cardinal points are the individual, the community, the physical and the virtual. In order for these moments and intersections to leave a memorable impression and be effective in instigating behavioural change, the user experience should be the junction between human intuitive behaviour and rationality. Most importantly each interaction with the user and each experience they have has to end on a memorable positive note. As Daniel Kahneman reminds us, our experiences are as memorable as the way they end and that their time sequence is not linear but determined by the end of the experience which is what will or will not affect any change in our behaviours.

read the report of the 13 trends breaking through in 2013 by Patricia Martin, including a contribution by Samar Héchaimé of factors ( see trend number 13 – cities become more human by design)

‘The 2013 report focuses on cultural trends poised to break through in the year ahead. It’s designed to inspire anyone wanting to communicate more effectively across touch points.

While the impact of the Internet can be felt in nearly every aspect of consumer life, our focus revolves around its impact on the fabric of society—families, communities, business, education and civic life. This report presents key trends and macro themes that reveal deeper shifts in how people are making decisions and adopting new behaviors that affect how your brand is perceived. On every page is a glimpse of the turning tides that a rising generation of digital natives portends.

Our research yielded 13 break-through trends that open opportunities to build stronger bonds between people and brands: customer loyalty, knowledge transfer, digital rituals, media consumption and consumer expectations around a healthy planet. LitLamp’s consulting team spoke with experts including top researchers, pollsters, designers and creative technologists to better understand the implications; their representative comments are included.

The report wraps up with seven clearly stated ways to use the findings to advance your brand into the future. Progressive, motivated marketers should find inspiration on every page.’

13ThingsBreakingThrough.htm

ROTTERDAM, The Netherlands – Rotterdam/ Amsterdam- based urban planning firm, Stipo B.V., just released their new book ‘The City at Eye Level: Lessons for Street Plinths’ and will be available for free download or hard-­‐copy via website on 11 January 2013. The book, a collaborative effort of five editors and 43 professional contributors from the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, Demark, USA, UK and Germany, (including Samar Héchaimé of factors) delves deeply into the concepts, philosophy, and strategies behind planning the ground floors (“plinths”) of urban environments. Interviews, case studies, and first-­‐hand stories highlight important examples of best practices from cities in the Netherlands (in particular, Rotterdam) as well as Copenhagen, Antwerp, San Francisco, and elsewhere.

This books shows that good plinths require a smart strategy supported by many players including the city, the owners, the renters and the users, and introduces a host of new vocabularly to help define this innovative planning strategy. A great city at eye level requires a strategy based on three domains: software (use, the experience, the functions), hardware (design of plinths, buildings, streetscapes, hybrid zones and principles of sustainability) and orgware (organisation of functions and portfolio maintenance). The 215-­ page book offers ideas, solutions and examples of the best ground floors and ground-­‐level planning from cities across the world. The concluding chapter proposes 75 specific lessons for good plinths.

On 11 January, 2013, Stipo launched the book to the world in the city where it all started: Rotterdam. About 230 guests, including urban planners, entrepreneurs, housing associations, local civil servants, neighbours, and interested parties, all came together to celebrate. Hosted by several partners (EDBR, AIR, Deltametropool, Gemeente Rotterdam) the launch was open to the public and included a Plinth Safari for all guests-­‐-­‐parallel visits examining the best plinth planning practices in Rotterdam-­‐-­‐as well as a chance to meet a few of the book’s co-­‐authors who were also present for the evening. John Worthington, co-­‐ founder of DEGW and Director of The Academy of Urbanism in London, gave the keynote speech. He focused on how the book is relevant in an international context, in international cities.

The book is available through the publishing house Eburon and will be on bookshelves and Amazon.com in the coming weeks. It is also available for download at www.thecityateyelevel.com.

Let me start by saying I love public transport. Every form of it, well I do have a preference for those that are above the ground but under the ground is just fine when you need to get somewhere faster and in a more efficient manner. But everything falls into the realm of my love affair with sustainable public transport, bus, tube, train, plane, bike and occasionally taxis. Nevertheless my love is being tested lately and I even have been thinking I should cheat on my beloved and consider a more efficient yet individual mode of transport after spending a minimum 1 hr to move within zone 1 of London. it even took me 1.5 hrs today to go from W8 to N1!!! I could get to Paris technically with a bit more time! Quite absurd I would say. Don’t even consider flying as last week it took me 2.5hrs just to get through customs at Heathrow airport and the week before it took me 6 hrs waiting at Heathrow to get to Milan!… Goodness what is going to happen in July?

With all that I still believe whole heartedly in the communal modes of transport and have made many of my lifestyle choices around it and the flexibility it offers in terms of independent and sustainable mobility in a city. I do believe that it needs to constantly be enhanced and become more integrated and multimodal as well. I believe our roads, our city policies, and our way of life should become as car aversive as possible in order for us to build stronger communities and more greener ways of life for our children by regaining the interstitial spaces and the connective tissue of the city away from the car.

This week I attended one of the Street Talks that is organised by the Movement for liveable London in a conversation about what does the mode of transportation we take say about us. The conversation went around the gendrification of modes of transport, how biking is a majority of white men in London, how their attitude on the road is very much that of road warriors, how biking is also identified with a class that has already asserted its identity. Women and ethnic groups inhabiting London rarely find themselves on the bike for multiple and diverse reasons given. Yet moving away from that trend it was mentioned by one member of the audience that the Boris bikes, thanks to their sturdy and high design have allowed to a more relaxed, slow and elegant biking methodology that is more commuter than road warrior. You could hop on these bikes in a skirt and high heels and tackle the traffic easily from one point to another, well as long as you are in Central London. They also allow for a multimodal flexibility that allows you to bike in one direction and opt for a bus, or tube in a different direction in case weather changes or your mood and state of mind changes.

Yet these questions, and a raising debate comparing Amsterdam to London, has taken me back to my years living in Amsterdam where I immediately adopted the biking lifestyle even though I had not biked since I was a teenager, as biking was considered a child’s mode of transport at the time. It was our way to conquer the town on our choppers that had 4 gears and were wonderful to take us up and down the hills in my town. So here I was, just moved to Amsterdam in my mid-twenties and I did what you do when you get to a new place, adopt its way of life and integrate to what makes that place what it is. In Amsterdam biking was definitely one of those qualities. So much so that by the time I was moving out of Amsterdam more than 5 years later I owned 3 bikes! 3 bikes? Why would be the question you ask, and of course my answer is for my visitors to be able to bike along with me around the lovely city. At the time bike sharing schemes were not available and you would need to rent a bike for the duration of your visit, so it was cheaper to just buy an extra bike and keep it in my storage unit, and then another! Who in London would dream of being able to store 3 bikes. Storing one bike is hard enough sometimes which makes the bike sharing scheme even more valuable to the public. Yet biking in Amsterdam was not a singular way of travelling around the city. If your route was too long, or if you just didn’t feel like it you could take your bike on the metro and then bike around the centre keeping biking more leisurely. At the time the Nederlands Spoorwegen also introduced your bike can travel for free if it was a foldable bike. If you had an unfoldable bike you would have to pay for it to travel on the train. Daily commuters would bike with one bike to the train station in their town and then have another bike at the other train station they normally arrive at in Amsterdam biking from there to their office. The foldable bike travel just brought in another more integrated way of commuting that travellers adopted very readily.

In Amsterdam it is so easy use biking as a mode of transportation because of the attitude on the road which goes to bikes first. A road that is more a bike road rather than a car road is automatically a pedestrian road. The car is forced to move at no more than 20 km/hr and everyone is aware of everyone else. The bikes are mostly more upright bikes making them commuter bikes rather than sports bikes. Children have biking integrated into their lives from a very early age whether on the plastic seats, on the tag along buggies or for a bit older children either sitting on the baggage rack, the bar handles or even standing on bars coming out of the back wheel behind their parents. They have such a sense of balance and  a sense of awareness of their environment that it not only makes them intrinsically bikers but it makes them more environmentally friendly as well since they are not isolated from the environment by a car carcass but completely immersed in it and its elements. These children would bike to school, to university, and then to work later on and would not consider using other modes of transport except if the distances are too long. Biking in Amsterdam and in Holland in general is not an isolated activity. Since the family would travel together each on their bikes they travel in pack and they are aware of the rest of the bikers on the road, they interact with them and cohabitant with them. In London biking is more of an insular and isolating activity. On your bike you don’t connect with any other and you surely do not communicate. Once you have put your helmet, your lycra and your high vis you put on your blinders and get moving. This feeling of safety on the road makes bike ridership equal in all demographic, in all enthnicities and in all genders in Holland as it is the Dutch way of life you adopt from a very young age if you are born there or as soon as you arrive there. It is part of the inburgering, it is a way of becoming part of the Dutch society.  I loved my oma bike so much it has been travelling and settling with me every city I have gone to. Unfortunately she has not been feeling at home in all these places and has been shying away, as have I, from gaining the road and taking on biking as a method of transportation in the same way I used to in Amsterdam, even though in my borough of Kensington my council has attempted to make her feel at home and keeping her warm by offering her a seat cover!

In the same way that visitors to Holland immediately take on the bikes as they want to experience the place the same way the locals do, the visitors in London have been quick to hop on the Boris bikes as it is to them the way the locals do, as well as it being such an accessible mode of transport in Central London. To those who have experienced the Velib in Paris and other bike sharing schemes around Europe, once they come to London the Boris bike is just the same.

During the Street Talks conversation one of the points raised was that the free buses for Seniors and under 18s has universalised access to bus transport and made it democratically accessible to those demographics. Since all carry the free bus pass there is no segregation of class associated to using the bus. It just becomes universal. It destigmatises bus usage and removes it from perceptions as being the cheap and dirty mode of transportation, but rather the democratic and the defacto mode of transportation. The argument was that once the under 18 group grows into adults they will continue using the bus and keep steering away from a more individualised mode of transport, such as cars, since this is a mode they have already adopted from a younger age. Much like the Dutch kids and their bikes. Yet another counter argument to that is that these kids are used to adopting a bus over a more active mode of transport such as bikes which makes them lazier and less physically active. The debate went around to argue, rightfully so, that the bus allows the pack to move together, that it was a more communal and universal way of travelling. That the bike is considered the poor way of travelling and that kids would want to travel together. Yet as I mentioned earlier, in Holland Dutch kids learn early on how to move in packs on bikes and to them it is just as much a communal mode of transport as the bus or the tram is.

If this is what the free bus pass has done to democratise the bus usage for the two user groups that are the most vulnerable in the city, the under 18 and the seniors, democratising movement and making the city more accessible to them what happens if we open up the city more to them? What happens if we make the bike sharing scheme free for those two user groups. It might actually get the streets to become as democratised as the buses and open up a more active way of moving around, well at least in central london. Or it might get the youth to use the bus to get to central london then shift to the bike as a more internal mode of transportation. This will surely get the youth to regain ownership of the city and it would create a stronger sense of connection that would make them protect it rather than destroy it.

On the other hand I believe there needs to be a more interconnection between the different modes of transportation especially in London, as we need different types of transportation for different things but we would like to have the ease of one mode of payment. In Shanghai you can use your transportation car to pay for bus, metro, taxi or ferry. It was mostly very handy as you could shift easily from metro to taxi. Buses there were not very comprehensible if you could not read mandarin so you would rarely find any of us expats on the buses. But metro was a wonderful, clean and organised way of getting around the city. What was interesting in the design of the Shanghai metro is that most of the stations were also interconnected with other facets of your life. Many of the metro stops were under shopping centres which integrated grocery shopping, food courts, department stores, clothing shopping etc. This really brought together the things you needed during your daily life. As you come back from the office, at your stop you would be able get your groceries, or do some shopping as you are heading home. There was talk of that during the design of the new West entrance of Kings Cross which I visited today only to find almost the same chain stores that are in St Pancras, M&S, Boots, Paperchase, Pret A Manger… and a few other food outlets and clothes outlets. The design is nice and airy, but i would not call the station a place for the community to get together, nor would I call it a place for your lifestyle needs. The seating areas on the ground floor are so few and tucked on the side next to the escalators, which in terms of flow I do understand the need to keeping flow open but they could have created a more town square feeling along the sides. The restaurants are mainly on the mezzanine where it turns out the seating area is actually a public seating area, but that is not apparent if you are downstairs and you are not going to go up if you don’t plan on buying food, which means the mezzanine is more used by the restaurant patrons rather than by the general public. The same comments apply to the future design of the front entrance of Kings Cross. The plan there is to strip down the 1970s expansion, taking it back to the original brick facade, which is beautiful, but leaving us with a large plaza that barely has any shading, sheltering from the elements, natural shading by trees, or seating areas, eliminating what could be a wonderful town square and instead reinforcing the transience of the Kings Cross area. If you want to develop the whole neighbourhood and make it more community based, you need to give the community a more open space to commune, not obliterate it and encourage them to just keep moving on!

I do believe that we need to start looking at the design of our transportation hubs in a way that fits more the way we life and want to live. Humans are adaptable, will adapt to a place and make the best of what it offer, but that does not mean it functions properly for their needs. The transportation hubs that we have today isolate us from the city and isolate the city from our modes of transportation as if they were two separate things. The modes of transport that are on the ground level are the ones that are the most integrated with our city like the trams and the buses, yet they are the ones that we avoid as they also get stuck in traffic and take ages to get us to where we want to go. What if we start designing our stations and our transportation hubs that integrates our lives more, that integrates our cities more, that spills more into our cities and allow our cities to spill more into it, whether it is underground, overground, trains or planes? Can you imagine how different the feel of the place would become? What if we began re-centring  our lives, living and working in close proximities? We would stop creating zones that have no street life and that are empty after 6pm or in the weekend like the City in London or the Loop in Chicago. We would stop spending so much time commuting and we would be so much less frustrated and stressed during the day. We would start reconnecting with the places we live and we re-become part of communities. Our children would regain the streets and would connect with the communities they live in. They would understand how their communities function on all levels, cultural, economic and societal. We would recommune around the new town square which could just as well be the extension of our local multimodal transportation hub.