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.