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.

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 than 30 minutes by bike.The 15km limits define an area of 177 sq km. Development control guidelines are designed to ensure that at least 30,000 people live in every square kilometre, the average density across Manhattan (including the parks).