Our class has now been in session in Copenhagen for a week and it feels simultaneously like a blink of the eye and feels like we’ve been here for an entire lifetime. From an instructor perspective, I am appreciating the group – we have a collection of really interested students, curious and creative, serious about the material yet finding many opportunities for fun and joy, and overall have gelled into a cool, collected, mature, easy-going whole.  It’s been a real pleasure to get to know students individually and watch the friendships develop easily.

The brief overview of what we’ve been doing:

• Lecture by local professional on regional super cycle highways – the average bicycle commute is 13km while the average train commute is 12km. These regional cycle paths with minimal if no stops when traveling at a constant speed helps facilitate these distances easily.
• Lecture and walking tour by staff at Gehl Architects – getting the context of why and how to design cities for people is always inspiring. Their basic message: start with the behavior and life of a city you want to exist and then design the built spaces and transport infrastructure to enable it.  This is in contrast to building buildings, responding with transportation infrastructure, and then thinking about how to activate a city or street or neighborhood for people. It’s a simple, but profound, twist on the order of operations.  For example, a typical US community will approve a big development project as an isolated building (say, new commercial building or multi-family student housing building) and then run a calculation of how many car trips that development will generate (never how many bike or walking or transit trips), then respond with requirements to widen roads and intersections to accommodate these fictional car trips (if you don’t widen the road those new car trips won’t exist), and after those things happen, perhaps there is thought about how to turn all of that building into places for people to enjoy.  For those in Eugene, this is easily seen just about anywhere, though Franklin Blvd. is the most clear example of a ton of needed housing along a transportation corridor that is unsupportive of life happening on its edges, and the whole thing doesn’t add up to much joy, happiness, or life.  The proposed redesigns of Franklin continue to disregard the reality of people wanting/needing connectivity on a human scale (happy to provide more detailed thoughts).
• Visit to a Traffic Playground and talk with enthusiastic staff about the opportunity to help kids (and sometimes adults) learn to ride a bike and learn how to use the city’s bicycle  transportation system through the mini-city built to scale, with traffic signals, cycle tracks, bus stops, and hedges representing buildings to help kids understand you can’t always see what’s coming from around the corner. This is probably one of the most instantly cute things (other than puppies) that exists.
• Students had several assignments designed to explore all these topics while continuing to feel what it’s like to explore an entire metropolitan area (and beyond) by bike easily, comfortably, safely, and with zero need to think about or worry about cars, and all the positive benefits that accrue when a city is oriented that way.  Students had to find five examples of play spaces for kids, find the end of a regional cycle superhighway, find where the single family homes are, etc.  (You can read all about their experiences here: Class Blog of Blogs.
• We had a rooftop social event with a UO alum which was a great way to engage with a Dane and see what an actual apartment and rooftop social space look like.
• We had a traditional Danish dinner at the wonderful Restaurant Kronborg that students really enjoyed; this special meal was made possible by the Scan Design Foundation – thank you!!!
• And we are about to take a tour of the Copenhill waste treatment and energy production facility – a place so clean that it is surrounded by housing, has a rock wall up the side, a hiking trail to the top, an artificial ski slope on top, and at the tippy top of the ski hill a cafe to enjoy a drink and have a relatively high vantage point to look over the flat city of Copenhagen.
• We also had a meet up with another study abroad course from Portland State University so that students could meet others working to make our cities great places for people. We also asked the four Oregon transport professionals accompanying the classes to share out loud their own thought processes of what they are seeing in Copenhagen and how they are thinking about bringing insights back home.
• And in between all of this has been plenty of laughter, great insights, fun adventures, trying new things, and more.
• Here are some random pictures.