Spending what feels like forever cruising around a crowded downtown area looking for parking can be highly frustrating, but there’s an obvious solution: take alternative transportation. Decades of car-centric culture around the world have made it difficult to pry people out of their vehicles and into the seats of buses, trains and bicycles, but what if those modes of transportation were a lot easier to access and enjoy? A new collaboration between Dutch bicycle brand Union and ad agency Natwerk aims to do just that with a fun mobile parking shed for bikes.

One could argue that there’s ample space to park bicycles all over the city of Amsterdam (and most cities, for that matter) while parking spots for cars are harder to come by, therefore the pop-up is taking up valuable space. But that’s part of the point. The project demonstrates how many more people could get around if there were fewer individual vehicles on the road, especially those with a single occupant. In fact, Union argues that there are still too man parking spaces for cars instead of bicycles in a city where cycling is so popular.

Though it hasn’t been approved by the city, the mobile bike parking shed gets away with occupying parking spaces through a loophole; as required by law, it has its own license plate so the operator can pay for parking like everyone else. The parking shed was quite a spectacle while in motion, but once parked along one of the city’s poshest shopping streets, it stirred up some controversy. Dutch news site Fonk Online reports that angry shopkeepers at adjacent businesses worried their car-driving customers would be put out, while passersby complained that “the motorist is already being bullied too much.”

Frank de Ruwe, the creative network of Natwerk, shrugs off these responses. “Cycling is simply better for the world than driving. Everyone agrees.”

Since cars are still so convenient, it might take more than a little “bullying” to prompt people to consider alternatives. While bicycling is not for everyone, and some people still need to drive due to cargo or disabilities, cities would be a lot more pleasant (and emit a lot fewer greenhouse gases) if they contained fewer cars. While occupying more parking spaces for other uses would undoubtedly upset a lot of drivers, it could also provide a bit of a helpful push toward a new way of thinking about urban transit.

The Air Opus Camper packs down into a surprisingly tiny trailer box easily towed behind a vehicle, but deploys automatically in less than two minutes (then folds back up in just 30 seconds).

Using what the company calls “Air Pole Technology,” the pre-inflation process is pretty straightforward: the top panels are flipped outward and a quick-release lever pulled.

Once it is open, a few bed supports need to be snapped into place for sleeping, but the structure is otherwise self-contained and essentially ready for use immediately.

By folding both upward and outward, the design makes maximum use of a small initial footprint, roughly doubling usable area within once it is set up.

Furniture, meanwhile, is a combination of of inflated and folding, again to minimize spatial requirements, helping make the whole setup more compact for travel.

The camper retails for a bit over $20,000, so not cheap, but it offers a lot of space illuminated by built-in windows and skylights, plus a pull-out kitchen and grill for outdoor cooking (which also helps free up interior space for living and sleeping).

Does the same childlike awe and sense of infinite possibility you felt when looking at pop-up books as a kid translate to adult-sized versions of pop-up furniture, rooms and even entire houses today? These transforming objects dramatically expand from a flat package just by pulling on one end, revealing themselves to be surprisingly strong and usable three-dimensional objects.

Pop-Up Interactive Apartment

This ‘pop-up interactive apartment’ by students at TU Delft adapts to inhabitants’ needs by constantly changing functions, bending and sliding folding polypropylene panels to offer chairs, beds, desks and other furniture or fold up out of the way. The result is an apartment that transforms to use a single room for many functions, without requiring any physical effort on behalf of the people who use the space.

Folding Flat-Pack M.A.Di House

This flat-pack house comes in a folded sheet with connected roof panels that pop up into an A-frame with the help of a crane. Once the easy-to-transport 5-foot-tall package is onsite, it takes less than a day to install, and it comes in several different sizes from a 495-square-foot studio to a 904-square-foot family home. The profile and hinges are made of steel, while much of the rest of the home is made of strong and durable cross-laminated timber (CLT) making the whole structure earthquake-resistant.

De-Dimension Furniture by Jongha Choi

Take this two-dimensional geometric wall art down, unfold it in one swift motion, place it on the floor and you’ve got a piece of furniture. ‘De-Dimension’ is a series of pop-up flat-pack furniture by designer Jongha Choi representing his ideas about perspective. “If our perception of an object is not different on a plane image and an actual subject, isn’t it possible to substitute the two with each other?”

Pop-Up Shelf by Meike Harde

How much bookcase do you really need? Maybe you could use a full-height storage piece, or maybe you want it to be shorter to fit beneath a window. German designer Meike Harde’s ‘Stockwerk’ shelf comes as a flat-pack item and easily expands without the need for tools, with pieces that fit together like a puzzle.

Slinky-Style Accordion Chairs That Stretch and Bend

Like a slinky, the Flexible Love Sofa and Chair start out tightly packed into a small package and then expand to surprising lengths when you pull on either end. The furniture series is made from 100% recycled paper, yet the sofa can hold up to 4,232 pounds when fully expanded, and snap back to a mere 5 inches in width when contracted.

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Step Into A Pop Up Book 11 Furnishings Rooms Houses That Fold Up Flat

The phrase ‘Trainspotting Hotel’ probably doesn’t conjure visions of a cozy, comfortable and safe place to lay your head at night, but this hotel gets its nickname from its location overlooking rail tracks rather than anything relating to the heroin-charged cult classic film. Obviously, that’s a good thing for guests who want to enjoy a peaceful getaway on the Elbe River near the town of Litomerice, Czech Republic at this unusual pop-up structure by Artikul Architects. 

The hotel is comprised of just three shipping containers, with one forty-foot crate stacked atop two twenty-foot crates in a perpendicular arrangement to create a covered space underneath. The two ground-floor containers house the bathrooms, storage and one of the guest rooms, while four more guest accommodations are set into the top layer.

The client commissioned Artikul to produce a modular design that can be easily taken apart and moved when desired, and would have a light footprint on the land. The hotel has its own built-in water reservoir for the showers and sinks, and utilizes waterless toilets, and the bedrooms are compact but warm and welcoming, fitted with bunk beds and lined with birch plywood.

Artikul is known for producing sustainable structures, so it’s no surprise that they did something creative using recycled and natural materials. Barely any modification to the containers was necessary, preserving the ability to load them onto a truck. The top container is sheathed in reclaimed wood and features a terrace and awning so guests can hang out in the open air and enjoy the views.

The same Japanese retail chain selling household supplies like space-saving furniture, bed linens and travel toothbrushes will soon sell pop-up houses, too, so you can literally walk out with a kit for an entire, fully-outfitted home in one trip. The Muji Hut, designed by Konstantin Grcic, Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukasawa for retailer Muji, comes in three variations starting at $25K. Each offers just enough space for one or two minimalist residents.

The Japanese housing market is a little different from that of the U.S. and other parts of the world in that real estate doesn’t accrue value over time, and demand for preexisting houses is low. Not everybody has the money to knock down an old house and build a new one in its place, however, and lots tend to be tiny.

Each designer created their own version of an affordable, no-frills structure that can be assembled in short order, including one made of aluminum, a two-story timber creation and a little cabin clad in cork. Each takes inspiration from kyosho jutaku, the Japanese style of micro homes that aims to squeeze as much function out of tiny footprints as possible.

The Muji Huts are envisioned as weekend getaway destinations rather than full-time living spaces, but each contains a generous living room, bathroom and kitchen, and can be heated with a wood stove. The huts can be installed in virtually any location, from tight city lots to the banks of a river, and will be available for purchase in 2017.