Initial Position
Cologne is a bicycle friendly city. Very bicycle friendly.
Cycling lanes criss cross the city, and are usually the fastest way to travel from any given point in the city to another. Besides bicycle lanes, we also have park-houses, special train carrieges for long distance travelling, and many many shops and maintnence spots. Cologne is also a very young city, with the largest University in Germany and many schools - Cologne is full of students, and almost every student has a bike. Although public transportation is usually fast and reliable, a bike is still faster, and also relativly safe, since car driver are used to share the traffic lanes with cyclists.
As the city is full of bicycles, it is also full of parked bicycles. at first glance, there seemes to be no order in how people park their bicycles. Side walks and public spaces are full of locked bicycles which cannot be moved. Some bikes seem not to move at all while some change their location every couple of hours.
During this project we have spent our time walking around the city and (at first) passivly observing how, where and why people park in the way the do. Later on in the project we took on an active role, and tried to evoke more complex parking behaviour while leaning on basic human instincts that we observed in the earlier stages of the project.
Where can people park / store their bicycles? Which infrastructure is provided? Which habits do people have? What is the relation of people involved in such situations? What are rules, laws and principles? Which systems exist?
