Archinect - News

Steven Fleming's Velotopia paints a city built for cycling

2017-08-15T13:00:00-04:00

No disciples of Le Corbusier, Harvey Corbett, Robert Moses or Norman Bel Geddes have been to Velotopia. That means there are no highways and no racks of car-parking stations. Neither have any disciples of Ebenezer Howard been there to suggest that development be clustered around satellite towns with train connections back to the core.

Steven Fleming (previously featured in our Working Out of the Box series), founder of the Dutch bike-centric planning consultancy Cycle Space, recently published a new book that lays out an utopian city built around bicycles as the main form of transportation. In Velotopia people enjoy their daily commutes, the flow of traffic is smooth and the development is mixed use and compact.

Velotopia Photograph: Courtesy of cycle-space.com

Indoor bike parking spaces match the anticipated number of beds allowing trips to start inside the home. Photograph: Courtesy of cycle-space.com

An edited excerpt in The Guardian showcases Fleming's wry thought experiment. Velotopia is as circular as the topography has allowed, for the usual reason that citizens are always clamouring to live near the civic centre.Development has been restricted to level ground and city limits have been restricted to a diameter of 15km. That ensures average commuting distances of less than 7km and average trip times of less th...

Archinect's Lexicon: "Bike-Wash"

2014-11-06T14:05:00-05:00

Welcome to Archinect's Lexicon. Architecture notoriously appropriates and invents new language – sometimes to make appeals, sometimes to fill conceptual gaps, sometimes nonsensically. But once a word is used, it's alive, and part of the conversation. We're here to take notes.

bike-wash [baɪk - ˈwɒʃ], noun: a pejorative term for the PR spin-tactic of making a design appear more bike-friendly than it actually is.

This definition was derived from what may likely be the term's first appearance, on Archinect's Working out of the Box interview with architect and cycling advocate, Steven Fleming:

Then there are people who really surprise you, like the developers I met in America a few months ago. I thought talking to them about space for bikes inside apartments, to really incentivize riding, would be going too far—that they would only want to bike-wash their project with something like a shower down in the basement. They surprised me as well. But then they're like the government in Singapore:...

Interview: Bikes, architecture, and "Cycle Space" with Steven Fleming

2011-05-26T15:10:49-04:00

The reason I'm here and in this gallery is because bicycles in this city are being custom built and designed with love and skill and intelligence in a way that architects design buildings for people when they really get things right. Portland is a beacon to so many other cities. It's easy for people to dismiss Holland or Denmark, but not Portland.