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.