departure City Hype ideas competition

Last year, departure, the creative agency of the City if Vienna launched a series of ideas competitions to bring forward creative ideas for urban innovation in Vienna and beyond. The 2013 issue of the ideas competition - Cycling Affairs - received more that 200 submissions.

With this year’s ideas competition departure launches a project that provides participants with the opportunity to reflect on what the brief calls a "solidarity city" - City Hype  - invites creative professionals and city enthusiasts to formulate their ideas for coexistence on an equal footing, to provide the city with a multifaceted, modern identity and to actively participate in shaping its future. 

The ideas competition is open for individuals, start-ups or collectives from various disciplines located in Vienna or internationally. The submission of multiple entries is possible. Please find the registration form here. 

To steer inspiration for first ideas of potential participants the team of departure came up with core areas and specific questions as relevant to the overall theme of the competition. These questions can be taken as points of departure for working on the ideas competition:

THE SOLIDARITY CITY
Which measures focus on justice and solidarity as basic prerequisites for the social interactions of the city dwellers?

THE NETWORKED CITY
How do technologies react to the requirements of a network society, to its high degree of innovative dynamism and advancing digitalization?

THE FLEXIBLE CITY
How can the requirements imposed by the revolution of the working environment be turned into practice and which new models for work, leisure time and life planning are imaginable?

THE OPEN CITY
Where is room for actively participating in the creation of communicative locations and how can we succeed in making the city a modern ‘place of action’ for all its inhabitants?

THE INTELLIGENT CITY
Which sustainable solutions can be developed for the future of a ‘smart city’ in terms of infrastructure, distribution and organization?

THE DETERMINED CITY
What are the tools and strategies required to meet both the needs of individuals and the challenges of the 21st century in a creative way and which lead to personal initiative for the benefit of the civil society? 

The competition's expert jury will be analysing the submitted projects according to the following criteria: 

• Creative quality

• Sustainability

• Potential for change

• Potential for activation

• Added value for the civil society

There are three jury prizes for the competition:  

1. prize: EUR 7,000
2. prize: EUR 5,000
3. prize: EUR 2,500

As well as one "Public’s choice award" which will be awarded by a public vote and which will win € 3,000.

The timeline for the competition is as following:

• Launch of ideas competition: April 15, 2014
• Deadline for submissions: June 18, 2014
• Public voting (for "Public Choice Award"): June 27 – July 20, 2014
• Jury meeting (For defining three jury prizes.): August 2014
• Award ceremony: September 2014

Read more about the ideas competition here and fond an English description here. 

Bogotá

the vello foldable bicycle test.

Smarter Than Car - An Open-source Bicycle Urbanism Think Tank

We are gladly launching Smarter Than Car as a Think Tank engaged with questions of Bicycle Urbanism and Future Urban Mobility.

See our new beautiful website:

As an open-source Think Tank we reagulary host events bringing together people to discuss ideas and brew up projects. We are also preparing some projects for the upcoming months so keep an eye out on the new website. I will also keep some updates on flolo.org.

Talk "The Promise of Bicycle Urbanism" @ TEDx Vienna - The City 2.0

I recently gave a talk at the TEDx Vienna City 2.0 event. Running through this process and meeting the inspiring team and other speakers made me learn a lot. Thanks to everybody who supported me in preparing the talk and of course to the whole team at Smarter Than Car! :)

Here is the video.

"The mainstreamed bicycle as a tool for creating future cities is just starting to take-off. Can we imagine a city where the benchmark for successful urban development is how we are able to use pedal-powered vehicles?
The idea of such a bicycle urbanism is what Florian is working on with the Chinese-Austrian NGO Smarter Than Car. He will make you understand why the bicycle is the most effective way to restructure our cities to become fit for future urban challenges.
Florian explains why he believes that the bicycle is still massively under-explored in contemporary urban planning and administration. He shows examples of what we can learn from bicycle cultural exchange with a city like Beijing to re-think our cities along the lines of pop-up urbanism on two or three wheels."

A Day with The DJ Trike in Vancouver

Urban life can be rewarding and full of surprises. While staying in Vancouver, Canada this June to present the work of Smarter Than Car at Velo-city 2012, I had such a spontaneous urban encounter which demonstrated the power of (bi)cycles as urban tools to (temporarily) program sustainably functioning and culturally active urban landscapes animated by pedal-powered vehicles.

The day after the Velo-city 2012 conference all the stress was gone, participants had cheerfully wrapped up the conference and could still enjoy one day roaming around the city on their BiXi bikes provided to pedal-power Velo-city participants in Vancouver. So I left my hotel with this indestructible bicycle turning towards downtown Vancouver on Burrard street and; What?! I see a Chinese tricycle (sunlunche) on the sidewalk, adapted with a white box to be usable as a mobile DJ console. Very quickly it dawned on me that this must be Jonathan Igharas, a designer from Vancouver who creates (amongst others) cycles as adapted urban tools and who obviously was about to have a good time with one of his creations: The DJ Trike. 

With the work of Smarter Than Car we had previously even quoted The DJ Trike as an example of an autonomous urban infrastructure which is able to exploit the advantages of pedal-powered vehicles for cultural events in public space. What we found interesting back then was that The DJ Trike interpreted the diverse Chinese cargo bike (sunlunche) culture in a modern and beautifully designed way, whereas in China the multitude of cargo cycles appeared as backward and from the past (read more about it in this article by Smarter Than Car). 

As Jonathan Igharas puts it on his site, the DJ Trike is “a vehicle and platform for urban communication and interaction, as well a method to transcend common perceptions associated with current pedal powered transportation.” 

In this post I want to give you impressions of the urban play session which Jonathan Igharas lately performed for a wedding and which I was able to witness. This was not the ‘typical’ urban play session which the collective Labour of Love is performing with the DJ Trike, but showed the flexibility of pedal-powered vehicles when they are used as autonomous cultural devices at spontaneous (urban) events. The awe of people who just left the church being confronted with the DJ Trike playing love songs on the sidewalk of Burrard street was not to miss and showed that great cities need more culturally productive pedal-powered vehicles in operation. 

In this sense I want to wish Jonathan and the Labour of Love soundsystem all the best for their future endeavours! To keep updated on the DJ Trike please refer to the DJ Trike’s facebook or twitter and the facebook page of the Labour of Love Soundsystem.

The DJ Trike's home: Chinatown in Vancouver.

The DJ Trike has just been recovered (via social media) from being stolen and therefore the branding had to be renewed.

The Labour of Love soundsystem crew; Jonathan Igharas and Tobias Ottahal.

Serk Space Beijing

SERK – a new hybrid space – bar / cafe / bike shop south of Lama Temple in Beijing opened June first. Since speaking to Shannon Bufton and Liman Zhao (founders of SERK) about their latest project for the first time, I am curious to see SERK space evolving as a place for new cycling cultures in Beijing (and the World). The hybrid space between bar/cafe and bike shop was inserted into Beijing's inner Hutong districts as a space for catalytic exchange between traditional and modern cycling cultures in Beijing. It provides manifold potentials for enriching Beijing's cycling cultures and is a great leap forward to making cycling sexy (again) in Beijing. For the work of Smarter Than Car this new space will allow for new kind of advocacy work as SERK space enhances bicycle cultural diversity in Beijing (bicycle mainstreaming) and creates a physical space communicating a cycling lifestyle to the urban context of Beijing (bicycle urbanism).  

The founders of SERK – Beijinger Liman Zhao and Australian Shannon Bufton – have been working hard over the past 2 years to promote cycling culture in Beijing. They co-founded Smarter Than Car, Beijing Bike Week and have undertaken research on Beijing’s bicycle cultures which has been presented around the world. The SERK space represents a focal point for their activities and a meeting place for those interested in bicycles and in reinvigorating the two-wheeled culture of the former bicycle kingdom, Beijing. The space was set up as melting pot of ideas for bicycle cultural exchange between East and West. The SERK space is an architectural insertion into a traditional Hutong still flourishing with two-wheeled culture. It’s open at the front and invites the passerby to engage with the concept and think about the bicycle in a new light. Thereby the SERK space becomes much more than a traditional bicycle shop, bar or cafe. It is a place of exchange, wonder, learning and promotion of a newly invigorating bicycle culture in Beijing.

And here some images taken during the opening night. The space is looking very vibrant on the inside and it appears that the people in the street are really attracted by this stylish new bicycle culture radiating outwards from the SERK space.