The  Circle line presents the ideal 'city wall' to generate new circuits for cycling. To begin with, bike nodes can be at points outside one or two stations and grow out sideways so that the Circle is completed. The bikes can be picked up outside any station and dropped off at any. The Circle acts as a new kind of 'wall', not of controlled movement but a civil resource

Despite its congestion London abounds with 'left-over' spaces or dead spaces which have potential for fulfilling new social functions. Dead spaces are the consequence of bureaucracy and proprietorship of public space. However the small scale of a dead space is ideal for generating new lines of micro-social activity outside of consumer exchange

Bicycles: colour coded like the London tube lines - thus yellow bikes – circle line, the bikes act as working symbols.
Different colour bicycles threading through the city map out different social circuits in the city.    

Locations and communities: creating nodes and hubs for cyclists: this would generate necessary facilities to coordinate a culture of cycling as a form of mass transport. This is missing in the architectural landscape at present

London: the London Underground map ironically gives us the best single portrait of the city : of how London works as a city and more importantly how it does not work in a new century. The tube map may be likened to a trapped rhizome: it gets you there but the user is both a passive and captive consumer. Cycling on the other hand is a reversal of this. The ideal is to create an integrated model of the two.








 

August 2004