Vélomobility is to degrowth as automobility is to growth: Prefigurative cycling imaginaries

At the end of the nineteenth century, the autonomous mobility provided by bicycles and tricycles created a mobile imaginary that paved the way for automobility. Through the course of the twentieth century, the growth and decline of cycling mobilities was inseparably entangled with the rise of a range of motor-mobilities (two and four wheeled). Yet cycling persists and is championed widely as a contender for future mobility in post-growth societies. However, the hegemonic position reached by automobility as a dominant system has led to closure of political non-car mobility imaginaries. United In Science, the high-level synthesis report to the UN Climate Action Summit 2019, noted that the nationally determined contributions to carbon reduction made in the Paris agreement need to be tripled to reach target CO2 reduction levels: this will entail dramatic transformation of mobilityscapes. This paper consequently explores the possibilities and problems inherent in formulating vélomobility as a system of autonomobility, paying special attention to its alignment with the range of radical alternatives clustered around degrowth (D’Alisa, Demaria, and Kallis 2014) and the pluriverse (Kothari et al. 2019; Escobar 2020) as promising ways to think and act beyond the unsustainable carbon economy. It does so in three parts: first it examines the challenges of imagining vélomobility not just as a set of practices but cognitively, through its conceptual construction not as an inverse of automobility but as a system that also challenges the political underpinnings of automobility. Second, it considers vélomobility through a set of propositions and briefly explores through examples the complexities involved in reimagining mobility regimes as well as the resources from political theory that may be important to it. Finally, the last section reverses the gaze and asks what the reconsideration of vélomobility as described previously can bring to the broader discussion of autonomobility.

Citation

Cox, P. (2023). Vélomobility is to degrowth as automobility is to growth: prefigurative cycling imaginaries. Applied Mobilities, 8(3), 265-285. https://doi.org/10.1080/23800127.2022.2087134

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Journal

Applied Mobilities

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/10034/624741

DOI

10.1080/23800127.2022.2087134

Type

Article

Description

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Applied Mobilities on 16/06/2022, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/23800127.2022.2087134

ISSN

2380-0127

EISSN

2380-0135

Additional Links

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23800127.2022.2087134