Cycling for daily transport (as opposed to leisure or sport) has accumulated attention in recent years – in both academia and practice – as a technology and mode with economic, environmental, and social benefits. However, cycling rates in most cities remain very low, indicating a disconnect between knowledge accumulation and application. Urban planners, academics, and government officials across the world struggle to apply available cycling research, navigate mobility innovations, and find appropriate best practices. All these efforts are embedded in underlying assumptions, rationalities, and worldviews of (futures of) urban mobility.
Mobility is at the heart of many challenges cities are facing. To create sustainable, inclusive, healthy, equitable and economically prosperous places for all citizens, it is widely agreed that urban transport must move away from planning for cars to planning for people.
However, this aim – and the policies and practices underlying it – is not value free. . On one hand, we can understand and structure efforts towards more people-oriented mobility through the existing, traditional lenses used to study mobility. On the other hand, we could also use people-oriented mobility to reorient our narratives, methodologies, and understandings of what mobility means, why, and for whom. When we propose that radical changes are needed in our mobility systems, we need to question our underlying rationality. Cycling can then be seen as a case to explore those fundamental understandings, rethink traditional causal pathways, and reorient narratives towards novel frameworks of transformation.
This collection invites contributions from multiple perspectives to better understand the role of cycling in radically transforming urban systems and vice-versa. The collection welcomes inter- and trans-disciplinary original research contributions that demonstrate creative approaches to studying urban cycling, using cycling as a case to challenge or rethink assumptions about mobility, and/or critical perspectives to transport technology and innovation narratives. Themes may include, but are not limited to: the art and craft of developing cycling policy, building capacity, and/or encouraging institutional reform in favour of cycling; navigating (contested) public engagement or public acceptance strategies; street/public space experiments to enhance cycling and/or as agent of transformational change; the role of gender, equity, justice and inclusion (could be in combination with other topics); cycling and children, migrants, women and vulnerable and oppressed populations; and the social, spatial, and sensory experiences of cycling. The collection especially welcomes theoretical and research design approaches with innovative qualities that leverage knowledge from disciplines tangential to, or outside of, transportation and urban planning disciplines.
