Cycling Societies

Innovations, Inequalities and Governance

Dennis Zuev, Katerina Psarikidou, Cosmin Popan, Dennis Zuev, Katerina Psarikidou, Cosmin Popan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000339895
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Bicycles & Motorcycles
• Index: Technology & Engineering

This book examines emerging debates and questions around cycling to critically analyse and challenge dominant framings and prevalent conventions of 'good cycling'.

Cycling Societies brings to light the plurality of voices and forms of cycling in other societies, revealing the diversity and complexity of cycling across different socio-political regimes, geographies and cultures. It presents case studies from five continents and demonstrates the need of thinking comparatively about cycling and urban environments. The book pivots around the three themes of innovations, inequalities and governance and engages a diversity of voices: world-renowned academics in the field of cycling and urban mobility, cycling activists and transportation consultants.

Synthesising academic contributions with policy briefs, this innovative book will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners of sustainable transportation, urban planning and mobility studies.

1
INTRODUCTION

Cycling societies: innovations, inequalities and governance

Dennis Zuev, Katerina Psarikidou and Cosmin Popan

In the documentary Bikes vs Cars director Fredrik Gertten (2015) invites us on a world tour and shows the cases of the emerging, developed and interstitial spaces of cycling societies. Clearly being on the side of two wheelers, the film director travels quite extensively to different locations and frames the tensions, conflicts and desires of the planners, activists and residents in a sort of tug of war between cars and bicycles. At the end of the film we are guided to the crucial point that it is the contested space of city that has become the key critical arena of social struggle. It is not about bikes vs. cars but about the inclusive, accessible and safe space of the city, the progressive urban space design that needs to accommodate its diverse residents, regardless of how they get around: by bus, by car, by wheel-chair, on foot or by bike.

Although the film essentially demonises cars and the automotive industry, putting forward the cycle and cycling as a practice that is on the losing side of the global mobilities shift, the automobility is re-inventing itself perhaps even faster than we think, and it will no doubt remain a ‘visible’ side-by-side accompaniment for cycling. The very fact that a system of automobility exists (and no doubt will endure in the future) makes cycling a rather difficult-to-sustain practice. The interdependence of two systems is well known – the number of bicycles on the streets will depend on the car culture in that place and the number of cycling individuals, and higher levels of cycling come with less cars on the streets (Popan 2019; Reid 2015).

But our argument is that neither the car nor the automotive industry essentially opposes the bicycle – we wish to demonstrate this complex relationship in this book.

The aim of the book is to show the bicycle as a social, technological system, not antagonistic to the automobile, a constellation of practices and identities that exist in relation but not (only) in opposition to the car. The bike as a unique sociomaterial object and mode of transportation has a life and valence of its own; however, cycling mobility is often marginalised or sidelined and/or used as a policy fix and a tool for promoting green-thinking agendas and liveable-city branding, leading to deeper and new socio-spatial divides.

The collective effort of this book is to show how multi-faceted and conflictual the world of cycling is and how cycling co-exists with other modes of movement. We do not advocate cycling vs. automobility vs. walking or public transit, but we intend to show that the cycling culture is a global phenomenon and is as complex and worth of attention as the car-based culture.

Although the book is based on the initial Cycling and Society Symposium in 2016 in Lancaster, UK, we have decided to put extra effort in expanding the geographical scope of the book to embrace all the continents with the exception of Antarctica. We also decided to go beyond a characteristic academic post-conference collection and asked relevant consultants and practitioners, with actual experience of implementing and supervising cycling-planning projects across the globe – to write and to reflect on specific cases of their involvement with cycling policies and experiments in their cities. We emphasise that this was important since despite the burgeoning academic literature on cycling in the last two decades, there is little to no dialogue between academia, activists/lobbyists and policy-makers. Many cycling policies thus remain disconnected from evidence coming from academia. And, on the other hand, many cycling researchers used to be activists but had since severed their connections with the activist world.¹

As a result, the reader will encounter two distinctive formats of papers: academic chapters and shorter ‘policy briefs’, based on specific empirical cases or experiments. We also have a number of contributions where authors have managed to combine their practical experience as cycling advocates and their academic expertise. Very few books offer voices beyond the academic discourses on cycling, and in this book, while academics offer more theory-based insights on cycling, practitioners offer a slightly different angle of the practical challenges of working with municipalities or transportation commissions.

In this book we hope to challenge dominant framings and prevalent conventions of ‘good cycling’ and explore some of the framings of emerging ‘smart’ cycling across different contexts. Thus, the book aims to contribute to such emerging debates and questions around cycling in order to critically analyse and assess its potential to configure sustainable and egalitarian cycling mobilities. However, in doing so, it also aims to explore the sustainability of the future of cycling itself (Psarikidou et al. 2020) and show the diversity and complexity of cycling across different socio-political regimes.

The book synthesises the perspectives of practitioners, activists, consultants, academics, historians, sociologists, geographers, urban planning and transportation researchers and anthropologists in order to delineate the multiple modalities of cycling. The book presents different geographic settings and practices of cycling and aims to present a systemic approach to cycling and society by addressing the questions that go beyond cycling as a mode of sustainable urban mobility:

• How is cycling being used in different societies and cities to reform mobility and land use? How does cycling advance the smart urbanism political agenda?
• What is smart innovation in cycling, and what does cycling innovation replace? What are the effects of the new things and cycling-related innovations on the city?
• What are the new inequalities that are born from emerging forms of cycling and cycling innovations?
• What is the model of cycling society and sustainable transportation we can pursue in future?

There are many models and ideas and places that accommodate cycling. We give an overview by viewing different dimensions and sociocultural contexts. Our main emphasis, however, is on social scientific approaches to cycling in addition to practice-based approaches. We suggest cycling as a powerful lens to look at diversity and plurality of forms of emerging innovations, new inequalities and new forms of governance. In the following sections, we will manifest our call for expanding cycling geographies, provide a brief literature review and outline some of the current issues regarding the urban space and cycling. After introducing the chapters in our three thematic lines, we will close with the suggested further directions for research.

Expanding cycling geographies

One of the parallel aims of this book is the call to expand cycling research geographies. While cycling mobility keeps on evolving and changing even in the landmark cases of Denmark and the Netherlands, there is a need for cycling researchers and especially those from the ‘cycling’ nations to get engaged with other settings and see how things work differently for cycling and why in other global cities: Chicago, Hong Kong, Milan, Moscow or Tokyo. If cycling utopias of Denmark and Netherlands are possible, why are they not possible yet in these cities, and what should be done?

In the European context, very few monographs and books on cycling ventured beyond Northern Europe (Horton et al. 2007; Oldenziel et al. 2016; Reid 2017) with Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands being the landmarks (Popan 2019). For instance, in his book Bike Boom: The Unexpected Resurgence of Cycling (2017), Carlton Reid explores history and the unexpected resurgence of cycling, looking primarily at the classical Northwest European cases – Amsterdam, Copenhagen, London. And surprisingly, cycling scholars have given hardly any attention to cycling in Eastern Europe (for notable exceptions, see Barnfield and Plyushteva 2016; Pojani et al. 2017). But even in Europe, many studies focused on cycling as transportation (Gerike and Parkin 2015), overlooking complex social and cultural implications and politics of cycling across the globe. And even comprehensive collections of cases focusing on marginalisation of cycling (Cox 2015) fail to embrace the global expanse and diversity of cycling societies.

One should acknowledge that cycling research focusing on urban transformations in the United States – the stronghold of automobility – has grown significantly in recent years, along with the growth of bicycle commuting and the prominence of cycling in the urban spatial politics (Stehlin 2014; Stehlin and Tarr 2017). Characteristically, cyclists in the United States remain ‘invisible’ and at the edge of progressive urbanism. And calls for ‘bicycle justice’ have become more vocal among academia and activists (Golub et al. 2016), coinciding with criticism of the problematic aspects of a cycling culture and its advocacy (Hoff-mann 2016). At the same time, China, India and other Asian countries have appeared on the radar of cycling researchers fairly recently in the period when public bikesharing schemes hit Chinese cities in 2017 (Spinney and Lin 2018) and with the middle-class uptake of cycling as a tool of social distinction (Anantharaman 2016).

Thus, the key contribution of this volume is expanding our vision beyond the European experience and looking at the plurality of voices and forms of cycling in other societies. Some of the contributions will suggest that the local expertise on these geographies of cycling is still lacking, and thus, these may become key studies to build upon for the future examination of social change and urban transformations through cycling in Brazil, China, South Africa, India and Colombia.

As Popan (2019) noted, cycling was occupying a marginal place in urban transportation policies and only recently started to play an important role in formulations of social change. There is an interest in cycling activism, cycling identities and cultural and subcultural representations of cycling (Aldred 2010; Cox 2015; Fincham 2007; Horton 2006; Oldenziel and Trischler 2016; Vivanco 2013). These appreciations have been balanced by more critical perspectives, suggesting a neoliberal agenda behind many cycling initiatives (Aldred 2012; Spinney 2016). Thus, issues of inequalities, processes of gentrification and ecological controversies linked with cycling projects have been addressed by various authors (Hoffmann and Lugo 2014; Stehlin 2014; Tironi 2015; Psarikidou 2020).

Most recently, one can observe an interest in cycling as part of the smart city agenda and related processes of datafication and smartification of cycling (Behrendt 2020; Nikolaeva et al. 2019). The use of different applications, such as Strava, allows users to participate in sharing mobilities (Kesselring et al. 2020) and informs transport planning but also potentiates new modes of invasive tracking and surveillant digital governance of urban space via data aggregation. This is particularly evident with the proliferation of public bikesharing schemes.

Currently, this emerging stream of studies on cycling innovations is dominated by cases and scholars in Western Europe and thus understandings of innovations from the Western, white male perspective. And we would stress the need for cycling researchers to look at the broader diversity of successful and innovative examples of cycling innovation and governance and learn from failed initiatives and projects elsewhere.

Cities and cycling

Cycling for urban ‘liveability’ branding

Although bicycles have been present in most of the cities around the world regardless of climate and topography, the majority of the cities did not develop spatial layouts where mass bicycle use would be prioritised in their transport networks. One must note that climate and topography are not the decisive factor for popularity of bicycles; it is rather the culturally powerful ideologies or mindsets that marginalise the bicycle as inconvenient, childish toys or vehicles for the poor underclasses (Vivanco 2013). Many cold and wet cities welcome bicycles, and many cities with agreeable climate see very few bicycles. Many topographically challenging cities have seen increase in bicycle use,² and many cities with perfect flat layouts are cycling deserts. Indeed, the urban form often is an important factor to consider, but it is not the sole decisive factor, as many cycling societies will be a set of hard and easy cases and diverse cycli...