I recently stumbled across Chris Kenyon’s Blog about „London, cycling and technology“. His recent entries are a manifestation for his productive attitude towards the city he is living in. Readers of this blog will know how enthusiastic I have become about this in the last couple of months. I started Geek Nite and more recently urbanic out of this urge to be actively living in this city and not just passively complain about it – even though I still do that as well ;)

I also grew to believe in the power of (positive) surprise as seen so beautifully on the faces of Merton’s Improv Partners.

Anyway, Chris came up with this idea of Plantlock. His post-title explains it all – „Plantlock = Cycling + an urban garden“ – and if it doesn’t the picture at the left should do the trick. But nowadays our urban existence seems to be all about mobile – mobile phones, mobile internet, take-away food, mp3-players and so much more. So why not have a mobile garden?

Just imagine being greeted by some nice smelling flowers whenever you unlock your bike! It should be pretty easy to attach flowerbed to the back of any bike. You could grow anything in there – starting with flowers and grass, but also carrots or basilica plants – though I wouldn’t recommend eating them…

Of course this is not going to make Vienna a green city, it is merely an act of communication, signalling to every road user that you can create something beautiful with very limited resources and maybe (but really only maybe) inspire them to do something similar – democracy after all is mainly about demos.