• Mikael Colville-Andersen

  • Urban Designer.

  • Speaker.

  • TV Host.

  • Author.

  • Citizen.

Putting the ‘fuck you’ back into urbanism - depuis 2006

Urban Designer. Speaker. Filmmaker. TV host. Photographer. Dad.

I’ve spent two decades studying urban life. Analysing it. Documenting it. Living it. Embracing it.

I’ve written books, filmed TV series, and worked in over 100 cities on every continent, helping them become more livable, more human, more honest.

Everything I do — every project, every photo, every line on paper — is driven by one simple mission: to do whatever I can to try and make cities better for the people who live in them.

See my current work in Ukraine

It’s the nature of our online world to have labels slapped onto you. The Anthony Bourdain of Urbanism. The Richard Dawkins of Cycling. The Modern-Day Jane Jacobs. Even The Justin Bieber of Urbanism (whatever that means). La Presse called me The Pope of Urban Cycling. The Guardian? The Sartorialist on Two Wheels. All flattering, all slightly ridiculous — but at least the haters are much more direct. Does any of it matter? Nope.

My mother told me something when I was a boy: “Every day you should wake up and try to make the world a better place”. That is still what drives me every single day.

Book me as a speaker

What’s clear is that I’ve spent the last 20 years rewriting the playbook for how we talk about cities.

I don’t do diplomacy. I don’t do lifeless diagrams. I speak in stories, provocations, and pictures. I design by observing, by listening, and by trusting humans over systems. I don’t read the same playbook as you. I try to write a new one.

If you’ve come across phrases like; copenhagenize, bicycle urbanism, citizen cyclist, viking biking, the slow bicycle movement, the arrogance of space, A2Bism, cycle chic, and many more, I might have done something right. I try to keep it simple. I speak about how we should be designing our cities and streets instead of engineering them. I believe we should be using design - a human-to-human process - to improve the urban landscape more quickly and efficiently and we should team up with anthropology, sociology and transport psychology in order to force effective urban transformation.

Since 2022, I’ve been based in Kyiv, Ukraine — volunteering to help Ukraine with all the stuff I know how to do. Building tactical urbanism projects in the middle of a war, designing therapy gardens for trauma recovery, launching urban farms, and distributing thousands of bikes as humanitarian aid.

  • The Life-Sized City

    TV GUY

    I wrote and hosted four seasons of the first global series about urbanism The Life-Sized City, curating great ideas and experiences from cities around the world. My Danish TV series, Gadekamp (Street Fight) zoomed in on urbanist issues in Greater Copenhagen and he is developing his next international series called Urban Origins.

  • Author

    WRITER GUY

    My book Copenhagenize - the definitive guide to global bicycle urbanism sums up my thinking, analysing and my efforts to force urban change, using the bicycle as the most effective tool in our urban toolboxes. As the Canadian author Chris Turner puts it, “Mikael has forgotten more about urban cycling than most people will ever know.

    But there are other books, too!

  • Speaker

    PROVOCATIVE GUY

    I’ve given over 200 keynotes around the world, including three of those TED thingys and I promise to inspire AND provoke by speaking about truths we all share but never dare to speak about.

    BOOK ME AS A SPEAKER

 

All of my thinking has been translated directly into practice. From 2007-2018 I was CEO of Copenhagenize Design Company and I’ve worked directly on projects in over 100 global cities. Talking the talk AND walking the walk. Everything from planning bicycle infrastructure in cities, graphic design of logos and visual identities, product design, designing graphics for wayfinding, advising politicians on strategy and communication… you name it.

I pioneered using the art of direct observation to study cyclist behaviour and using the Desire Lines of cyclists and pedestrians as a map for redesigning cities. Through my Desire Lines Analyses of intersections in five cities, the behavioural transport patterns of over 100,000 cyclists have been mapped, analysed and quantified. It is the largest behavioural study of cyclists in history and studying cyclist behaviour continues to fascinate me.

If cities are a language, the bicycle is the compound modifier.