Introduction

As an increasing number of authors demonstrate, ‘infrastructure is never neutral and always inherently political’ (compare McFarlane and Rutherford, 2008; Young and Keil, 2014; Nolte, 2016: 441). Moreover, as Sheller (2018: 97) argues, ‘The politics of infrastructure concerns the politics of mobility’. Infrastructures of all types, whether hard (as in material structures) or soft (as in skills and knowledge), are those systems that support action. Infrastructures for cycling are not limited to dedicated or designated cycleways but are inseparable from wider mobility infrastructures. Building cycling infrastructures is not just a matter of providing physical spaces, but also of building the skills, competencies and confidences required for moving in public spaces.

If infrastructure is inherently political, then the ways in which different infrastructures permit some courses of action and deny others, how they route and re-route mobile practices, and how and what any given infrastructure makes possible, are matters of justice and injustice (Sheller, 2018). This chapter seeks to engage with a selected range of current theorisations of the politics of infrastructure, and to apply them to specific cases of cycle-specific infrastructures. It subsequently relates the ideas of social and spatial justice arising from these perspectives to bell hooks’ (1990) consideration of marginalisation, to consider how the patterns of marginalisation and mainstreaming revealed in the contributions to this volume might be understood through a lens of a critical and radical politics.

What does infrastructure do?

Infrastructures both provide the potential for social actions and processes and are produced by social actions and processes. In creating potential, however, infrastructures inevitably also order and govern the actions they make possible (Koglin, 2017). Infrastructures organise and shape potentials, providing for some courses of action and not for others. As infrastructure opens up some paths of action, it also closes down other possibilities. This increase and decrease of possibilities affects people differentially, which is why it must be considered in terms of justice.

The mechanism of ordering and governing action is one of facilitation: infrastructural provision being the provision of material facilities (hard) or the facilitation of actions through social development (soft). While certain actions are facilitated by both kinds of infrastructure (hard and soft), actions and practices that fall outside of its desired outcomes are simultaneously rendered unruly, ungoverned; perhaps even ungovernable and deviant.