Co-opting a loose word—the Swedish concept of ‘lagom’—and redeploying it for our streets and neighbourhoods — Working on numerous urban mobility-related initiatives here in Sweden, and running design workshops with stakeholders from municipalities, regional and national government, transport agencies, Volvo, MoveByBike, Voi and many others, I started stringing together a phrase, ‘lagom mobilitet’ to describe how we might better calibrate our mobility to our spaces, looking…

Help build this collection of shared, open research about some of the multiple and diverse forms of value that retrofitting our streets might produce — This is something of an experiment. As part of our ongoing work at Vinnova funding and collaborating on new research and innovation projects around streets, we are also collating existing research. …

A recent thought on blurring streets and parks in Stockholm echoes an older thought on spatially shaping connectivity and informational intensity on Barangaroo, Sydney — In a recent piece on adapting Holger Blom’s landscaping principles from 1940s parks to today’s streets, I suggested we might think about a blurred, shifting continuum of park-like conditions—biodiverse and culturally diverse activities and environments—moving from streets to gardens to parks. …

Adapting Holger Blom’s 1946 principles for Stockholm’s park programme to inform today’s street systems — In my piece unpacking Brian Eno’s design principles for for our Swedish street mission, I suggested, as an aside, that “it feels like landscape architecture, having been unfairly downplayed for decades, perhaps for obvious if unfortunate reasons, may increasingly be the most important strand of architecture moving forward, for those…

Bringing a cultural voice into an urban planning conversation that has become narrowly technical, and diversifying the thinking around what streets are about, and what cities are for — Planning, designing, and managing cities in Sweden can be a largely joyless, technocratic affair, dominated by efficiency-oriented engineering, economic and managerial sensibilities. Although the Swedish…

How a picturesque island setting for a small Swedish follow-up to Small Vehicles of Tokyo is an unlikely contender for a 15-minute city case study. And yet … — Admittedly, it’s drawing a long bow to see anything in common between the megacity sprawled along the Honshu coastline and a tiny island at the outer edge of the Stockholm archipelago. …

A slim cataloguing of the rich diversity of small vehicles that help shape street life in the world’s largest city — Unusually for me, this is a post with little in the way of context. Rather, it is simple, recorded observation. As part of an endless enquiry into what makes good streets tick, over four short visits to Tokyo in 2018 and 2019—during The Days In Which We Flew—I started cataloguing…