Introducing the Erotic City

This single post can be considered a preambule of our upcoming series about the so-called ‘Erotic City’. Get prepared.

According to the Times, the blog Cycle Chic Copenhagen belongs to the Top 100 Blogs Worldwide. Cycle Chic Copenhagen reports about biking culture in Denmark’s capital Copenhagen. But after the fact that Copenhagen is a real bicycle city, most of the 3,623 frequent readers that Feedburner reports, must be especially interested in the sexy way the message is put forward: by portraiting ‘cycle chics’. To me it’s interesting that the blogger understands what the single most important quality of a city’s public domain is: people on the street, for this particular situation the presence of pretty girls (not hard to find in Copenhagen though). In fact, Copenhagen Cycle Chic focuses on the erotic dimension of the city. And because it’s not done to just take pictures of nice girls in a voyeur-like way, the biking theme is introduced. It’s a great contribution to Copenhagen’s city marketing to represent the city as a progressive bicycle city with plenty of pretty girls. It makes you wanna ride a bike yourself.

The Erotic City
We’re writing a series of articles reporting about what we would call the ‘Erotic City’. Doing so, we aim to discover the importance of sultry experiences in public space of the contemporary world city. In scientific terms, this means that we try to find an explanation for our assumption that sex, as one of the most clear and definite human needs, has almost never been an issue in the building of our cities. In policy terms, it means that we try to find out how cities can perform better through understanding and using our ever-changing perception of sexuality.

Our collective need to do at least something with the concept of sex is being shockingly ignored in the discussion about the contemporary city. For decades sex has been considered an act of altruism, with the single purpose to create offspring and to enlarge the family’s or religion’s chances to survive. This old-fashioned conception is still leading in recent planning, urbanism and architecture perceptions. Time has changed though. Within all kinds of societal domains we find new ways to deal with sexuality. Sex has changed from a strictly private affair to a more public form of societal behaviour, with a wide range of purposes as intimacy, interaction, opposition and expression. This could mean that another idea about the way we compose our cities is needed. We might, in the most extreme interpretation, even need erotic spaces. Coming to this point, city planners show to be extremely prudish. On the other hand, there are a lot of contributions to this discussion already, mostly coming from the worlds of lifestyle, art or fashion. Besides that, some enterpreneurs try to meet sexual needs and contribute to the discussion. As no one else they know that sex sells and come up with rather perverse or creative erotic interventions in the city (ever heard of ‘love hotels’?). We will surely find a lot examples of erotic spaces, interpretations, facilities, buildings and concepts, to share with you on this blog. Stay updated or share your ideas with us!

—Photo: Cycle Chic Copenhagen