Abstract
Reviewed by: Anne-Katrin Ebert, Technisches Museum Wien, Austria
For a long time, the bicycle as a means of transport was neglected in studies on transport and mobility, but in recent years, there have been a number of studies on cycling and the history of cycling. The field is thriving, not only in academia but in urban planning and politics as well. The bicycle, once a marker of poverty, is now an indicator for liveable cities.
Cycling Cities is a reflection of these current trends both within as well as outside of academia, and it builds on previous historical research on the subject. In 1999, Adri Albert de la Bruhèze and Frank Veraart published their study Fietsverkeer in beleid en praktijk in de 20e eeuw (Bicycle traffic in practice and policy in the 20th century) 1 about the similarities and differences in the use of the bicycle in eight European cities and one region, Amsterdam, Eindhoven, Enschede, Antwerp, Manchester, Copenhagen, Hanover, Basel and the region of Southeast Limburg. Still available on the internet, the Dutch study was a milestone in scientific research on cycling and forms the backbone of this collection of case studies. For this edition, the original Dutch team has been joined by authors from Belgium, France, Britain, Hungary and Sweden. Added to the original sample of cities were Utrecht, Malmö, Stockholm, Budapest and Lyon. Dutch cities were the focal point of the first study, which was financed by Rijkswaterstaat, the Dutch Ministry of Transport and Water Management, and they are still dominant in this revised publication. In contrast, cities from Southern and Eastern Europe are underrepresented, an imbalance familiar to the research on the history of cycling in general.
This visually appealing, large-size volume also includes many photos, historical as well as contemporary, highlighting the range and diversity of cycling in Europe throughout the 20th century. All the original case studies have been updated in data covering the last 15 years, and in the appendices, Frank Veraart provides the refurbished data on cycling in the aforementioned European cities between 1920 and 2015. Authors have clearly been instructed to pay attention to and include certain aspects, so that the articles in general have a common approach. The case studies usually introduce the city’s geographical outline and cycling tradition, provide available data and statistics on cycling between the 1920s and 2015 and discuss city politics and cycling activism. Many authors also analyse visual sources such as photos and films of cyclists and cycling in their respective city.
As is the case in many collections by different authors, the quality of the articles is a bit heterogeneous. Some articles provide thought-provoking and illuminating case studies of cycling politics and practices, such as Maxime Huré case study of the Vélo'v system in Lyon or Katalin Tóth’s account of cycling activists in post-Socialist Budapest. Others, such as the case study on Hanover, remain more on the surface of what we already know about the car-governed approach to traffic engineering and city planning in post-Second World War Europe.
Readers familiar with the original work by de la Bruhèze and Veraart may find this volume a bit less systematic and less ambitious in its analysis of what factors contributed to high cycling numbers in the cities. The two authors had called for more research on the ‘image’ of the bicycle, which they identified as a key factor, informing city politics and urban planning as well as bicycle use. Clearly, the absence of a strong public transit system also worked in favour of cycling, but apart from that, it is hard to identify the similarities and differences in European urban cycling in the 20th century. As Ruth Oldenziel points out in her concluding remarks, Europe’s cycling practices show enormous diversity. Still, as a reader, one would have preferred a little more audacity in identifying contributing factors to high levels of cycling. Oldenziel and de la Bruhèze argue in the case of Amsterdam that cycling numbers rose despite city planning. In other cases, bicycle-blind city planning is cited as a reason for declining numbers. And what about the role of the nation-state, which seems to be the big white elephant of this volume? Oldenziel in her concluding remarks briefly mentions Dutch and Danish cycling politics and their role as leading cycling nations in the current debate, but the historical intertwining of urban and national politics are not investigated in any systematic way in this volume.
Many different actors shaped cycling in the city: city planners and traffic engineers, party politicians, cyclists’ organisations, users and non-users as well as broader social movements’ activists. There were very different groups of cyclists – working-class or middle-class, middle-aged man in Lycra, housewives with their children, students – as well as very different kinds of cycling activities, such as racing, utilitarian and recreational cycling. How did these aspects form the ‘image’ of cycling? Oddly absent are also analyses of the way in which perceptions of the city informed mobility and how – vice versa – different kinds of mobility informed the sense of the city. One of the characteristics of all the European cities included in this volume is that these cities are fairly small compared to the metropolitan cities in Asia or South America. May that in fact be the true European aspect of the story that you are still able – and determined – to manage and experience the city on a bicycle?