Bicycling for transportation in American cities has grown dramatically in the past twenty years, symbolizing the return of capital investment and commercial vitality to formerly disinvested urban ...cores. The cycling ‘renaissance’ taking place to the greatest extent in gentrifying neighborhoods has been noted, but the processes relating cycling and gentrification have gone largely unexplored. This paper examines the early role that bicycle advocacy organizations in San Francisco played in articulating the specifically economic value of bicycle infrastructure investment. This narrative is now commonplace, and widely applied both to neighborhood revitalization and urban competition for ‘talent’. This alliance of bicycle advocacy with the ‘livable’ turn of gentrification raises serious questions for those who would pursue a more democratic and socially just politics of the bicycle.
Public-private transportation megaprojects such as toll roads and rail networks have received attention as expressions of neoliberal urban development processes, but what we call "mesoscale" mobility ...infrastructures have become increasingly common in the United States. Such infrastructures are large enough to have systemic qualities (e.g., fixed nodes, instrumented networks, and operational requirements) and complex institutional arrangements but small enough in cost and impact that they do not systemically transform urbanization patterns. In this article, we analyze one such mesoscale infrastructure system, bicycle sharing, across three urban regions in the United States: Austin, Texas, Philadelphia, and the San Francisco Bay Area. We argue that bicycle sharing systems in the United States have three key features: (1) widespread expectations of fiscal self-sufficiency restrict their geographical reach to urban centers; (2) they largely follow existing patterns of racialized uneven development, leading to major service gaps; and (3) their implementation involves contingent institutional configurations that create modest openings for steering them in more equitable directions. At the same time, newer venture capital-funded "dockless" competitors have exploited the coverage gaps of station-based bike sharing without departing from their basic market-driven logic. Mesoscale infrastructural experimentation is increasingly central to efforts to increase mobility options in the United States but, when implemented within existing urban political economies, tends to produce scales of infrastructure that are at odds with more substantive forms of mobility justice.
A critical look at the political economy of urban bicycle infrastructure in the United States
Not long ago, bicycling in the city was considered a radical statement or a last resort, and few cyclists ...braved the inhospitable streets of most American cities. Today, however, the urban cyclist represents progress and the urban "renaissance." City leaders now undertake ambitious new bicycle infrastructure plans and bike share schemes to promote the environmental, social, and economic health of the city and its residents.Cyclescapes of the Unequal City contextualizes and critically examines this new wave of bicycling in American cities, exploring how bicycle infrastructure planning has become a key symbol of-and site of conflict over-uneven urban development.
John G. Stehlin traces bicycling's rise in popularity as a key policy solution for American cities facing the environmental, economic, and social contradictions of the previous century of sprawl. Using in-depth case studies from San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Detroit, he argues that the mission of bicycle advocacy has converged with, and reshaped, the urban growth machine around a model of livable, environmentally friendly, and innovation-based urban capitalism. While advocates envision a more sustainable city for all, the deployment of bicycle infrastructure within the framework of the neoliberal city in many ways intensifies divisions along lines of race, class, and space.
Cyclescapes of the Unequal City speaks to a growing interest in bicycling as an urban economic and environmental strategy, its role in the politics of gentrification, and efforts to build more diverse coalitions of bicycle advocates. Grounding its analysis in both regional political economy and neighborhood-based ethnography, this book ultimately uses the bicycle as a lens to view major shifts in today's American city.
In the contemporary American urban renaissance, formerly fringe efforts to produce place, conducted by longtime residents and "urban pioneers" alike, now shape mainstream urbanism. Gardening and ...bicycling are constitutive of contemporary excitement about the city, representing the reinvigoration of the urban neighborhood following the depredations of suburbanization. This paper draws on research in California cities to offer a sympathetic critique of these leading edges of progressive urbanism, arguing that advocates' overwhelming focus on the local creates a scalar mismatch between the horizon of political action and the problems they hope to address. Even as supporters of gardening and cycling understand themselves as implicitly allied with struggles for the right to the city, their work to produce local space is often blind to, and even complicit in, racialized dynamics of accumulation and exclusion that organize metropolises. The result is a progressive urbanism largely disconnected from broader left struggles for spatial justice.
The San Francisco Bay Area in California is undergoing a technology‐driven wave of growth arguably more thoroughgoing than the first “dot‐com” bubble, fueling hypertrophic gentrification and tales of ...a deeply class‐divided, “Blade Runner kind of society”. While Silicon Valley is still the industry's employment center, San Francisco is seeing faster tech firm growth, and is transforming its downtown to become more “livable” and promoting public space as key to innovation. In this context, this paper offers a reading of urban public space not just as a consumption amenity but also as the “shop floor” of a labor process that goes beyond the walls of the firm to mobilize the social itself in the production of privately appropriated value. With innovation now the watchword of gentrification, the stakes of this shift oscillate between the total commodification of urban vitality and the recognition of the social process of value production itself.
The rapid rise of digital platform-based transportation services over the past decade has begun to transform urban mobility. Fleets of dockless bicycles and scooters – or ‘micromobility’– represent ...the newest horizon of investment, particularly in the United States. Micromobility platforms launch rapidly, with minimal public planning or funding and no fixed infrastructure, using inexpensive, GPS-connected vehicles stored in public space. These platforms represent a deepening of the neoliberalisation of transport, in which infrastructural properties emerge biopolitically from the dynamics of private platforms. This article examines public debates over the regulation of micromobility platforms in Austin, Texas, in early 2018. Drawing on interviews with city officials and bikesharing professionals, observation of public meetings and GIS analysis of usage data, we argue that conflicts we observed over new micromobility platforms – specifically ‘clutter’, equity in geographic coverage and data privacy – obscured the deeper political economy of platformisation and the austerity that limited the effectiveness of the existing public station-based bikeshare system. In Austin, the search for ‘innovative’ micromobility transportation at no public cost resulted in the further erosion of the underfunded public system. We argue that despite their flexible, low-carbon image, existing micromobility platforms in the United States largely exploit rather than address inadequacies of urban transport.
•Much critical scholarship on highways focuses on negative impacts, but there is growing attention to removal as an opportunity to undo their harms.•The “de-infrastructuring” of urban ...highways—whether by repurposing or removal— involves contests over both mobility and urban development.•Infrastructural obduracy is shaped by political, economic, and social factors.•Reconfiguring transport infrastructure invokes distributional questions over flow and place that render highways potent sites of urban contestation.•Broadening the scale of highway removal is essential for thinking about post-car urban futures.
One of the most visible infrastructural legacies of the 20th century is the urban highway, which underpinned the massive transformations of cities and regions in the postwar period. As concerns grow about the climate impacts of car travel and urban sprawl, however, cities across the world have begun to remove or repurpose sections of urban highways to try and heal the social, economic, and ecological scars of their construction and promote sustainable urban development. These processes speak to key scholarly debates in geography and cognate fields on the relationship between transport infrastructure and processes of urban change. In this paper we explore two cases of what we call the “de-infrastructuring” of automobility: the piecemeal pedestrian appropriation of the Minhocão elevated highway in São Paulo and the ongoing political conflicts over the burial of the A-5 highway in Madrid. In each case, the peopling of highway infrastructure—whether by temporary occupation or permanent removal—is both a popular demand and a potential component of urban redevelopment strategies designed to channel investment back into the spaces that these infrastructures devalued. At the same time, these projects are ongoing, contested, and uncertain, and constitute broadly piecemeal and somewhat ephemeral attempts at repair, rather than more systemic approaches to undoing automobility and its socioecological impacts. Highway restructuring in São Paulo and Madrid therefore raises crucial questions about urban socioecological restructuring and the prospects for a just post-automobile city.
Urban highways are widely recognized to have devastating social, economic, and environmental consequences, locking in fossil energy dependence, racial and class segregation, and suburban sprawl. ...Today, as much of the infrastructure built during the peak of the midcentury road construction boom in the global North reaches the end of its lifespan, there is growing interest in removing highways and replacing them with parks, housing, and surface boulevards in the interest of economic development, repairing social divisions in urban space, and fostering more sustainable mobility. Based on preliminary research, this paper offers an empirically driven conceptual outline of highway removal projects in the United States and Spain. I argue that highway removal constitutes an opportunity for a “socioecological fix” for the emerging crisis of automobility, but in practice, highway removal projects may reinscribe the scalar contradictions of carbon-intensive urban-regional metabolisms. Through several empirical cases of highway removal projects, I examine three dimensions through which these contradictions can be understood: national policy changes in urban infrastructure planning and governance, material conflicts between demolition and tunneling and their implications for regional metabolisms, and local sustainable development politics and their distributional contradictions. Although the projects sketched here tend to fall short of their transformative promises, I emphasize that highway removal remains a critical arena of urban climate change politics.
The past decade has seen an explosion in what is popularly known as the “sharing economy,” perhaps most visibly in the realm of transport. Digital “shared mobility” platforms like Uber, Car2Go, and ...Mobike, as well as emerging, more sophisticated “mobility-as-a-service” platforms which coordinate multiple discrete services into a single portal, have risen to prominence as modes of reworking everyday urban transport in cities of North America, Europe, and East Asia in particular. This paper aims to explore the driving forces and concrete expressions of this platformization of urban mobility, as a particularly diverse and volatile component of a broader platform urbanism. Based on the construction and analysis of a database consisting of 200 urban mobility platforms drawn from across the globe, we highlight five key trajectories of platform formation, focusing on the firms, institutions, and social interests that have fueled the growth of this sector, and the modes of infrastructural organization, spatial formation, and governance that they entail. We further highlight the fragility of this particular form of “spatial fix,” and the prospects for a more redistributive form of platform urbanism. We conclude by reflecting on implications for future research.
In recent years, bicycle infrastructure has been emerged as a valued part of urban development policy in many American cities, and a process that depends on the normalization of cycling practice in ...three respects. First, the various 'less confrontational' mutations of Critical Mass have redefined the politics of cycling in cultural and consumerist terms. Second, this 'bike culture' is mediated through Internet networks that generate concepts of proper cycling practice. Third, both spatial models and standards of 'correct' ridership circulate through these networks, linking 'bike culture' to institutional networks of implementation. While positive from the standpoint of increased ridership, this may reinscribe the exclusions that are constitutive of the contemporary American city and may limit cycling's egalitarian potential.
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