Cycling in cities serving which ‘public’?

I don’t get the push for cycle lanes being portrayed as one of the big intelligent urbanist solutions to an improved South African city. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against cycling and cyclists. And I’m sure the people advocating cycling friendly cities can list off for me the social, environmental and economic benefits of cycling friendly cities. I do not doubt this at all.

What am I struggling with though, is how this all just feels as if it’s coming from a very particular set of positions: people with an urban interest who have seen stuff recently unfolding in places like Portland, Hamburg and Budapest and have thought that transplanting that urbanism into our cities is a good strategy. And again, maybe it is a good strategy as understood from their position and their lives; it does make sense towards an integrated city.

But again, as is my usual soap box, the reality is that we live and engage with cities that are accelerating forward on their own varied paths of social, economic and cultural modernity. A singular position or one form of transplanted approach will by its very nature fail to account for and find relevance for the cast majority of urbanites in South African cities. It will fail to engage their sense of citizenship in a way that can never be sustainable. This almost hubris-filled focus on creating open streets that connect the city for cyclists begins to take energy away from other transport dilemmas that are still so prevalent in our cities.

To put forward the disclaimer once again; I know that campaigning for ways to connect our city can only be a good thing. Yet however much cycling as a path towards green cities may be an integrated approach in concept and in practice in other cities, it is not necessarily an approach that is integrated in our contexts beyond the middle-class and urban elites who find it relevant. To me, the elephant in the room is that it just may not be relevant to broader urban majorities, it is does not seem to be a strategy that appeals and finds hooks of relevance in the hopes, aspirations and strategies of millions of other urban dwellers out in the low-middle working class boroughs beyond the wealthier urban suburbs and the trendy spots.

So then why the big push for what could actually be quite exclusionary urbanism? Is it because it is trendy and Western? That’s great, but again, I feel that hasn’t been quite well incorporated into larger urban issues being experienced from different positions that unfortunately don’t always get the chance to represent their own selves or have the same access and power to engage in urban citizenry like more well off groups do. It’s a symptom of an urban society where well intentioned well-off members of society can campaign hard for something they believe (and often is well backed up and supported by western urbanist research) is going to be the vehicle for change. This unfortunately is not necessarily the vehicle for change that is relevant to so many others that experience urban life in many different ways that certain positions can never imagine despite how insightful they claim to be. It shouldn’t be a strategy that is forced upon majority urbanite groups either to justify the intervention or plan as inclusive.

I don’t mean this to be a specific point-by-point critique, I see it as more of a discourse thought experiment to begin asking the right questions. They’re more my own thoughts and musings from my own position as a person interested in urban shit with very specific bias towards forms of realised radical democracy and power dynamics playing out through identity politics and representation. So take it from where it comes.

This has all surfaced in my thoughts after reading about Durban’s push for cycle lanes, which sector of society pushed for it and the channels they used to get it to enter the “public” sphere for debate. The general point of these meandering thoughts go beyond just cycling though. It is more concerned with how these urbanist interventions emerge, whose interest do they initially stimulate, who carries them forward, how are they transplanted, how are they sold as being inclusive and to which conceptualisation of a ‘public’ do they serve.