Time and the City

The city, as the main context of contemporary life, is central to our work at Cobe. To fully comprehend any urban environment, we must understand its history and layers of time. With Copenhagen as the base for our everyday-life research, we have observed how mobility time in the city plays a central role in the experience of livability. Planning a sustainable framework for urban culture to thrive requires a deep understanding of each context’s specific temporal and spatial capacities. In (central) Copenhagen we primarily measure time through the use of the bicycle.

Time has had a substantial impact on how we think, plan, experience and live in cities. In ancient times, timekeeping was invented to sustain the lives of workers. This ‘invention of time’, quickly became a structural framework for organizing urban functions and the behavior of citizens. How many hours can people work? How much rest, or eventually free time, is needed to maintain health and productivity? Where should people live to reduce transit time? Over time, mobility became the structural base of urban culture.

Since the rise of modernity, car culture has consistently shaped urbanism. And with it, our perception of time and the city, across scales from neighborhoods to larger regional networks, expanding vastly over the past century. But today, our understanding of what it means to live well and healthily in cities is shifting. The modernist rule is being replaced by new agendas that combine the fundamentals of walking and biking with emerging technologies and optimized mobility hubs. We are witnessing a global search for a more sustainable mobility culture.

Over centuries our societal norms have evolved through the lens of time and quality of life. Today, time functions as a central form of social coding, reflected in the everyday question: “How long is your commute?” The relationship between urban scale and time lies at the core of how we design, use and perceive cities. It shapes our built environments, daily routines and social norms. In (central) Copenhagen the perception of time is (mostly) understood through the lens of cycling, from a to b, and the experienced quality of the distance. This is a core narrative for Copenhageners. But once you leave the inner city, the story shifts. A different urban landscape emerges, driven (mainly) by modernist planning and car culture. This deeply embedded coding of distance, time and perception is essential to understanding the contextual nature of urbanism. And as cities around the world face new challenges of congestion, climate and equity, understanding how mobility shapes society will be crucial for creating more liveable futures.

Cities can be more purposefully designed to support a layered mobility system: combining active mobility of walking and biking, micromobility, public transportation and eventually, cars. Yet we must recognize that the infrastructural space we design and invest in is the backbone of our everyday lives, urban identity and future.