Springwise: Bordeaux citizens design bike for city-wide rental scheme
The City asked residents to submit their ideas for a new bike design through the official City of Bordeaux je participe micro-site, with more than 300 respondents taking part. Designer Philippe Starck was then brought in to translate the numerous suggestions into a single concept. The final design, unveiled at the second Cyclab event in Bordeaux in February, is a silver and yellow bike-scooter, with a foot panel placed in front of the pedals to enable users to safely push start the machine. Peugeot has now been contracted to put the bikes into production before they become part of a city-wide rental scheme.
The aim of the project was to give citizens an input into a service they will be using themselves, with the final bike reflecting their concerns over ease-of-use and safety. Government departments elsewhere: could crowdsourcing ideas from local residents improve your services?
The Architecture Centre as a ‘Critical Friend’: how to engage communities effectively in neighbourhood planning
Heading to the Architecture Centre tonight for this! Anyone else going?
The Localism Bill aims to provide communities with a greater influence on local planning matters by allowing them to prepare Neighbourhood Development Plans. Architecture centres such as Open-City can act as independent advisors steering negotiations toward a productive conversation that result in effective local design policy and high quality local development proposals.
Open-City will highlight its experience of formulating an effective and highly successful model of engagement around planning and development with residents and planning councillors in London, and how this can be replicated elsewhere.
Venue: The Gallery, 77 Cowcross Street, London EC1M 6EJ from 6.30pm, talk from 7 to 8pm Tickets £5
Artists Make DIY Bike Lane Along Helsinki Thoroughfare
Hämeentie is the longest street in Helsinki, Finland, and one of the city’s main thoroughfares. It has four lanes of traffic, but no space whatsoever for cyclists. There’s no bike lane between the buses and the sidewalk.
To create their own, the Finnish collective Länsiväylä poured paint along one section of the street and then invited a group of cyclists to ride through it at midnight, leaving a visible trace of where bikes would ride if there were space, and creating a colorful new boundary.
Law-and-order types, worry not: The paint they used washes away with water. Unfortunately, that means that Hämeentie won’t really have a permanent new bike lane. At least not yet: The huge turnout might make city planners take notice.
Read more here
Crowd Wise - Turning differences into effective decisions
Could be useful for development of planning frameworks at a local level!
Crowd Wise is a participative method for taking shared decisions. It produces outcomes which the participants are more likely to support or be able to live with. Crowd Wise is a tested and flexible format which can be used for a wide range of issues and decisions. It can work as a single event, or over a period of time; it can work for 15 people or 1500; it can be used to set priorities, allocate budgets or respond to a consultation.
