Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures, Tables and Box
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Theorising Infrastructure: a Politics of Spaces and Edges
- 2 The Cultural Politics of infrastructure: the case of Louis Botha Avenue in Johannesburg, South Africa
- 3 Spatial Dimensions of the Marginalisation of Cycling – Marginalisation Through Rationalisation?
- 4 Mental Barriers in Planning for Cycling
- 5 Safety, Risk and Road Traffic Danger: Towards a Transformational Approach to the Dominant Ideology
- 6 What constructs a cycle city? A comparison of policy narratives in Newcastle and Bremen
- 7 Hard Work in Paradise. The Contested Making of Amsterdam as a Cycling City
- 8 Conflictual Politics of Sustainability: Cycling Organisations and the Øresund Crossing
- 9 Vélomobility in Copenhagen – a Perfect World?
- 10 Navigating Cycling Infrastructure in Sofia, Bulgaria
- 11 Cycling Advocacy in São Paulo: Influence and Effects in Politics
- Conclusion
- Index
Conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 March 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures, Tables and Box
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Theorising Infrastructure: a Politics of Spaces and Edges
- 2 The Cultural Politics of infrastructure: the case of Louis Botha Avenue in Johannesburg, South Africa
- 3 Spatial Dimensions of the Marginalisation of Cycling – Marginalisation Through Rationalisation?
- 4 Mental Barriers in Planning for Cycling
- 5 Safety, Risk and Road Traffic Danger: Towards a Transformational Approach to the Dominant Ideology
- 6 What constructs a cycle city? A comparison of policy narratives in Newcastle and Bremen
- 7 Hard Work in Paradise. The Contested Making of Amsterdam as a Cycling City
- 8 Conflictual Politics of Sustainability: Cycling Organisations and the Øresund Crossing
- 9 Vélomobility in Copenhagen – a Perfect World?
- 10 Navigating Cycling Infrastructure in Sofia, Bulgaria
- 11 Cycling Advocacy in São Paulo: Influence and Effects in Politics
- Conclusion
- Index
Summary
The politics of cycling infrastructure
In her work Mobility Justice, Mimi Sheller (2018) devotes a whole chapter to ‘Infrastructural Justice’ highlighting the degree to which infrastructure shapes not only the quality of life, but more fundamentally locates one within social structures of (in)equality. Differential provision and differential life chances are intertwined. Sheller writes of infrastructuring as an active process, involving kinopolitical struggle in order to build infrastructures of hope for just and sustainable futures. Kinopolitical struggle is the work done to create the politics of mobility justice: mobility practices have the capacity to change people's lives for better or for worse and Sheller demands that infrastructuring be undertaken with constant reference to effects of inclusion and exclusion
Many of the narratives in this volume can be re-read as illustrations of those processes of this kinopolitical struggle. To reinforce this point, mobility struggles are not just about the place and existence of physical infrastructural construction, but the mobility practices and the mobile relationships that different arrangements create. The struggles play out through narrative (Freudendal-Pedersen; Koglin) or through organisational structures and processes (Emanuel; Feddes, te Lange and te Brömmelstroet). They are historical (Morgan) and contingent (Plyushteva and Barnfield; Lemos). They work through ideological frames (Brezina, Leth and Lemmerer; Whitelegg).
The richness of the contributions to this volume is that each of them also crosses those categories. A narrative analysis also demonstrates an ideological frame; organisational focuses reveal the contingency of decision-making. Each chapter could easily be reassigned to another form category from the above listing, or defined as a combination of different readings. What they all have in common is the degree to which infrastructures are constantly in flux, contentious and contended. The directness of bodily contact with the physical environments of travel and with other travellers experienced by those who ride cycles lends a particularly passionate and emotional tenor to many of the discussions held about cycling infrastructure. While the politics of cycling infrastructure may be analysed in terms of abstract political discourse and power relations, what all the contributors to this volume also show is the degree to which that politics is also embodied; lived out in the spaces of mundane and everyday travel.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Politics of Cycling InfrastructureSpaces and (In)Equality, pp. 235 - 238Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2020