Cycling the city,re-imagining the city: Envisioning urban sustainability transitions in Thailand

Introduction

Cities are critical sites for ‘the making’ of a sustainable future society. As great concentrations of incumbent socio-technical systems imbricated in the daily lives of millions of urbanites, they are obdurate structures that stubbornly resist changes toward sustainability (Hommels, 2005). But as cauldrons of creative imagination, they are also seedbeds for opening up new spaces for sustainable alternatives (Bulkeley et al., 2015). It is on this interface between the struggling forces of transformative change and obdurate stability that the research agenda of ‘urban sustainability transitions’ – journeys of transformative socio-technical change to set course for an envisioned future city – is situated (Bulkeley et al., 2011; Nevens et al., 2013; Rutherford and Coutard, 2014).

As a contribution to this emerging research agenda, this paper argues that the road to urban sustainability is paved by imagination. Transition pathways start out in the minds of change agents as vague conceptual images inspired by far-flung ideals, which are then further substantiated and articulated as envisioned urban futures that are able to attract a wider following (Hodson and Marvin, 2009). This paper contributes to the study of urban sustainability transitions by revealing how the notion of ‘urban imaginaries’ – shared understanding of what constitutes a desirable future city – can be productively mobilised as a powerful concept to address how these envisioned futures are put to work to reshape the present and exert their influence on ongoing transition processes.

The development and articulation of these urban imaginaries is explored by addressing the precarious re-emergence of cycling in cities throughout Thailand. Cycling offers relatively simple solutions for a host of complex and persistent urban challenges; it can be considered an environmentally sustainable and socially inclusive socio-technical system that embodies an alternative way to plan, travel and think about the city (Shove, 2012). It has been argued that a ‘cycling renaissance’ is currently underway in many cities in Europe and the USA, but little research has been conducted on the state of urban cycling in other, rapidly industrialising parts of the world such as Thailand (Oldenziel and Bruhèze, 2012; Pucher et al., 2011). Perhaps surprisingly – and despite the fact that decades of unrestrained motorisation and car-oriented development have made sure that the Thai city is a challenging habitat for the bicycle to flourish – there are signs that cyclist numbers are increasing in Thailand as well. A new vibrant subculture of cycling enthusiasm and advocacy has emerged to re-establish the bicycle as an integral part of an envisioned future cityscape.

At the forefront of this development are Thailand’s tireless cycling campaigners. ‘Transitioning’ to an urban transport system based on the bicycle, they are saying, is a sure way to bring the city that is imagined into actuality. During the summers of 2012, 2013 and 2014 I conducted six-and-a-half months of ethnographic fieldwork with cycling campaigners in and around Bangkok (the county’s one and only megacity located in central Thailand); in Chiang Mai, Korat, Khon Kaen and Ubon Ratchathani (medium-sized regional capital cities in the north- and northeast); and in Nan (a small town in the upper north). To immerse myself in the cycling activism scene, I became a cyclist myself (using a bicycle for both short and longer trips) and joined two cycling clubs that branched into cycling advocacy (cycling along with other members during weekly trips and signing up for other advocacy meetings and events). This provided the opportunity to observe cycling advocacy in action from the inside and to meet other cycling campaigners. ¹ In order to learn about their ideas and ideals I conducted 19 in-depth interviews with these cycling campaigners as well as 66 additional interviews with other ‘mobility experts’ – such as transport engineers, urban planners, policy makers, NGO employees and taxi drivers – to put into broader perspective the campaigners’ cognitive frames and views about cycling. I also collected other relevant source material from reports and archives, such as transport statistics and media coverage on cycling. ²

The findings in this paper are presented in the form of a condensed narrative, crystallised in a few ethnographic moments. In the next few pages we will follow three prolific cycling campaigners – Tum (a bicycle club president from Chiang Mai), May (an environmental activist from Bangkok) and Yut (an civically engaged architect from Korat) – who mobilise various urban imaginaries to sketch out the contours of desirable urban futures. Three urban imaginaries articulated by the campaigners will take centre stage: ‘the sufficient city’ (the virtues of a romanticised version of Thai village life in the past appropriated to the present-day metropolis), ‘the living city’ (the ecological principles of a pristine natural world extended to the seemingly artificial urban world), and ‘the creative city’ (fierce competition amongst globally connected cities to attract creative professionals as boosters of economic growth, which animates technological projects of urban renewal).

Envisioning urban sustainability transitions

The process of envisioning plays a key role in bringing about urban sustainability transitions (Hodson and Marvin, 2009, 2010; Späth and Rohracher, 2010, 2015). As coherent images of desired future socio-technical system states, visions foster collectively endorsed ambitions and a sense of shared direction amongst different kinds of change agents, which should ultimately lead to convergence in terms of action. Visions should be seen as not merely descriptions of distant future realities, but as ‘performative actants’ in the here-and-now that shape infrastructural and technological trajectories (Van Lente, 2012). While the ‘Transition Managament’ school of thought views the articulation of ‘transition visions’ as a deliberative and formally organised activity meant to create consensus on long-term orientation, the ‘Strategic Niche Management’ school thought stresses the immediate implementation and specification of ‘expectations and visions’ in real-world experimental projects (Loorbach, 2007; Schot and Geels, 2008). According to the latter, the articulation of expectations and visions substantiates the promises attached to ‘radical novelties’ – new green technologies or otherwise novel socio-technical configurations – and in doing so it brings change agents together and provides them with legitimacy and a sense of shared direction in pursuit of new technological pathways.

My perspective on the role envisioning in transitions departs from these ideas in two major ways. First, contrary to the Transition Management school of thought, productive envisioning is not necessarily a deliberative- and formally organised process to build consensus but it can also be a distributed process amongst change agents who articulate pathways to very different futures. Visions of the future are ubiquitous, individual and specific and a shared understanding is not a prerequisite for the (re)emergence of low-carbon practices (Berkhout, 2006). Like discourse coalitions of ‘bootleggers and Baptists’ – who were united in their support for an official ban on selling liquor in the USA during the era of prohibition, but for obviously very different reasons – so too can advocates of alternative socio-technical configurations (such as cycling) strive for very different urban futures while strategically mobilising each other’s visions and arguments (Yandle, 2000). Second, contrary to the Strategic Niche Management school of thought, visions centre not only on ‘new’ technologies or otherwise novel practices but also on ‘old’ technologies and mundane practices (such as cycling). Interesting questions can be found in the ‘shadows of innovation studies’ with regards to how dormant remains of past socio-technical regimes come back to life and how innovation journeys start over again as foreshadowed by ways of the past (Shove, 2012: 363).

Instead of these notions of visions and expectations, I want to use the term ‘urban imaginaries’ to engage with the process of envisioning transformations in urban settings. Edward Soja broadly defined imaginaries as ‘interpretive grids through which we think about, experience, evaluate, and decide to act in the places, spaces and communities in which we live’ (Soja, 2000: 324). Later work on ‘social imaginaries’ specified that such ‘interpretative grids’ find expression in images and stories, which are geared to foster a shared understanding of the social environment and provide a sense of legitimacy to certain practices (Taylor, 2002). Another valuable addition is provided by the recent work on ‘socio-technical imaginaries’, which adds that imaginaries are future-oriented and reflected in the propagation of specific technological projects (Jasanoff and Kim, 2009). An urban imaginary, then, can be conceptualised as a form of social/socio-technical imaginary articulated to bring about certain desirable future city. ³ Building on further insights from the fields of Science and Technology Studies (STS), Social Movement Theory (SMT), and the Geography of Sustainability Transitions (GoST), I want to further unpack to notion of the urban imaginaries in the context of sustainability transitions by highlighting three things.

First, there is a definite spatial component to urban imaginaries. Imaginaries are not only future-oriented but also spatially bounded and geographically specific – they are centred on specific geographical spaces or territories and geared toward understanding place-based dynamics (Ponte and Birch, 2014). While the early literature on sustainability transitions conceived of envisioned futures in an a-spatial way as transforming only the structures at the level of socio-technical regimes (i.e. the societal function of mobility based on privately owned steel-and-petroleum cars and the way the automobility regime is engrained in user routines and the societal fabric at large), later geographical contributions have added that this also implies a transformation in spatial structures (i.e. the urban form, the power relationships between territorially defined entities such as nation-states and cities and the ways people experience local places – see Sengers and Raven, 2015). Empowering urban sustainability transitions thus becomes not only a matter of re-thinking societal functions, but also a matter of ‘re-envisioning places’ (Hodson and Marvin, 2009: 520). As such, the notion of urban imaginaries puts places (real and imagined cities) firmly at the centre of analysis. Most of the cycling campaigners that I encountered during my fieldwork emphasised their identity as urban citizens firmly rooted in their respective home towns and they invariably stressed that establishing cycling as an everyday mobility practice would improve the conditions in these places.

Second, urban imaginaries have technological and material manifestations. A choice for certain technologies and infrastructures over others is implied in the future world dreamed up by the proponents of an imaginary. The opposite is also true: technologies and infrastructures are aligned and imbued with a particular set of imaginaries. Instead of being merely ideas that might rise to prominence in the mental worlds of social actors, imaginaries can be said to be ‘inscribed’ onto the material world of technological artefacts. Scholars from the field of Science and Technology Studies have long since argued that ‘the technical’ and ‘the social’ are deeply intertwined and that technological trajectories and future social order ‘co-produce’ one another (Jasanoff, 2004; Latour, 1990). Sheila Jasanoff’s recent work on ‘socio-technical imaginaries’ – which she defines as ‘imagined forms of social life and social order reflected in technological projects’ – suggests that imaginaries are highly political as well (Jasanoff and Kim, 2009: 120). She argues that imaginaries not only describe attainable futures, but they prescribe what kind of futures ought to be attained. Imagination, then, features as a type of cultural resource for change agents to project onto a technology ‘visions of what is good, desirable and worth attaining for a political community’ (Jasanoff and Kim, 2009: 122–123). An urban imaginary thus fulfills a dual function: on the one hand, it features as the aim/outcome itself (a certain desirable urban future) and on the other hand it helps in providing the tools/means (legitimising certain technological projects) in order to achieve this (Kuchler, 2014). The urban imaginaries that surround the practice of cycling should be seen in terms of this dual function, prescribing how a desirable future city ought to be ordered with the help of a mundane technology such as the bicycle.

Third, urban imaginaries imply agency. The sustainability transitions literature highlights the emergence of alternative ‘structures’ (alternative socio-technical systems geared toward dislodging incumbent regimes), but also the role of ‘agency’ (individual or collective action in setting up experiments with alternative technologies and in envisioning sustainable futures). Transitions toward sustainability are paved by imagination and the crucial first step toward breaking with the structures of incumbent socio-technical systems lies in mobilising the creative capacity of change agents to imagine an alternative future. Therefore, I want to highlight this type of ‘cognitive work’ by individuals, who are articulating and co-opting alternative ideals in order to tell persuasive stories of how their city ought to be reshaped. In social movement research, such advocates are called ‘movement intellectuals’. Social movements emerge on the basis of intellectual activity and through the agency and activism of movement intellectuals whose role ‘is that of providing a larger framework of meaning in which individual and collective actions can be understood’ (Eyerman and Jamison, 1991: 115). Social movements and their intellectuals are important actors in supporting (or frustrating) certain technological innovation journeys and socio-technical transition pathways (Elzen et al., 2011). They are actively involved in the reshaping of the ‘cognitive territory’ or ‘conceptual space’ that surrounds social issues and technological artefacts (Eyerman and Jamison, 1991). Movement intellectuals can be considered especially effective creators and mobilisers of imaginaries, thus paving the way for these ideas to become embedded in the minds of others as the next step to convert what is imagined into actuality (Harvard STS Research Platform, 2015). The cycling campaigners whose voices echo throughout the next sections of this paper are movement intellectuals who are in the business of reshaping the cognitive space – as well as the physical space on the streets – where the struggle for sustainable urban futures is being waged (Aldred, 2013).

Cycling the Thai city

It is six o’clock on a Sunday morning and Chiang Mai city is quietly waking up. My neighbour, Mr Kung, is already up and about and he greets me with a smile as I step outside. After sharing some breakfast on his porch, I ask Kung if I can borrow his bicycle today. He nods and after briefly searching his shed, Kung returns with an old two-wheeler. By the look of it, the bicycle has not been used for some time. ‘There’s no air in the tyres’ says Kung as he hands me a pump. The state of Kung’s bike nicely captures the state of the practice of cycling in Thailand’s cities: taken to road once more after years of neglect and decline. Although the non-motorised two-wheelers had largely disappeared from the streetscape in the last three decades, they were not ‘gone’ to the point of no return. Like Kung’s bicycle, they were parked in dusty corners, waiting for somebody to mobilise their idle capacity. With minor efforts, such as pumping the tyres, they could enter the cityscape once more and reclaim part of the lost road space. And this is what has happened over the last few years: old bicycles as well as new ones have been unleashed upon the roads, and many cities in Thailand are witnessing the precarious re-emergence of cycling. ⁴

After pumping the tyres of Kung’s bike, I hop on the saddle and say my goodbyes. There are no bicycle lanes and, to get to the other side of the main road, I lift the bike over the high concrete slabs that separate the one-way traffic lanes, dodging the honking cars that zoom by. Chiang Mai and other Thai cities present a challenging habitat for the bicycle to flourish. Decades of ‘unrestrained motorisation’ (i.e. automobile-oriented development combined with ineffective land-use planning and control) and newfound comfort in the motorbike and the motorcar were accompanied by changes in travel patterns and urban form as the mixed-use streets and a tightly women urban fabric gave way to congested inner-city highways and urban sprawl. To reclaim the streets, cyclists are fighting an uphill battle for new rule sets (e.g. bending the traffic laws to allow bicycles to ride contra-flow on one-way streets) and dedicated bicycle-friendly infrastructure (e.g. bicycle lanes and bike-sharing systems).

Upon arrival at Tha Phae Gate square, the former main entrance into the walled city, I spot a group of cyclists perched atop their bike saddles. As members of a local bicycle club that has branched into cycling advocacy, they gather here every Sunday morning before venturing out together in their brightly coloured lycra outfits. ‘Long live the King’ is printed on a blue-and-yellow jersey; ‘stop global warming’ (leik lok ron) can be read on a steering-wheel-mounted basket; and a metal bike frame is creatively decorated with bamboo strips so that it looks like a wooden bicycle. The bicycle club president, a kind middle-aged man called Tum, rides up to the front of the group and picks up a megaphone. The ancient city wall looms behind him as he gazes across the crowd. After a brief speech, he mounts the megaphone on a bicycle and signals that it is time to go. Instead of his voice, the club’s song now echoes through the megaphone speaker: ‘get on the bike saddle and ride, ride, ride! With harmony, brothers and sisters, all for the campaign!’. The cyclists ring their bells and roll out of the old gate and into the city. Before leaving the square, one of the cyclists removes his helmet to wipe the sweat off his brow. Tied around his head is a red bandana with the words ‘two wheels looking at the city’ (song lor phor muang).

The claim on the bandana implies that the bicycle is more than a vehicle to move around town, more than a mere means of urban transport. Cycling can be viewed as socially produced motion that extends beyond ‘the brute fact’ of physical movement and includes the experiences and representations tied with up riding a bike (Cresswell, 2006). For those involved in cycling advocacy, the bike represents a way forward – not merely from A to B but in the direction of an imagined urban future (Furness, 2010). By explicitly linking cycling to a way of seeing the city, the bicycle on the bandana becomes a lens through which to look at urban development with new eyes. It becomes a tool for re-imagining the city.

Re-imagining the Thai city

The sufficient city

After heading out of Tha Phae Gate and riding their weekly round through Chiang Mai city, the cycling club sets course for the Huai Lan reservoir. This reservoir is one of the many Royal Projects littered across the mountains that surround the northern Thai valley city of Chiang Mai. Building on the prestige of the Thai king, these high-profile projects are geared to support local traditional livelihoods and they enable the construction certain kinds of technological infrastructure.

When we stop for a morning snack, I sit down beside Tum – the cycling club president. Tum tells me that there is more to a cycling campaign than infrastructural technicalities but that underlying ideals are an important starting point. Part of the ideals that Tum stands for are revealed when a kid on a brightly coloured fixed-gear bike rolls by. ‘These youngsters’ he says ‘they cycle more kilometres in their daily life than we do; they achieve our Sufficiency Economy ideals without trying to do so’.

The Sufficiency Economy (settakit pho piang) evoked by Tum alludes to a way of life propagated by the Thai king. Mobilising the Sufficiency Economy in the context of cycling thus creates the association between the bike to the auspicious persona of the monarch. As Tum explains: ‘the King recommends people to live in the sufficiency way and cycling in everyday life is a good way to respond to our King’. The Sufficiency Economy is essentially a ‘localist’ philosophy that stresses the need for an economic system based on a ‘firm foundation of self-reliance’ (Hewison, 2000). It presents a romanticised picture of village life in the past as the key to Thailand’s future. Or – in line with the re-emergence of cycling – as the King himself put it: ‘We have to go back to do things which are not complicated and which do not use elaborate expensive equipment. We need to move backwards in order to move forwards’ (King Bhumibol’s 1997 birthday speech, as quoted in Pasuk, 2005: 161).

According to Jim Glassman the notion Sufficiency Economy effectively challenges ‘a long-standing geographical imaginary’ in which cities are viewed – as the trailblazers of economic development and modernity – pave the way to the future for lagging rural areas. Instead, it produces ‘a counter geographical imaginary’ in which cities are dangerous sites of social and moral decay whereas small villages are hailed as pristine sites of traditional community, social simplicity and moral strength. In this way, ‘rural Thailand was pictured, at least in its ideal form, as a repository of positive social values being lost in the scramble towards urban modernity’ (Glassman, 2010: 1302). Especially compelling in this respect is the way in which an illustrated book about the King and his sufficiency ideal depicts the Thai city (presumably Bangkok) as a place of ‘greed and extravagance’ (see Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

The Thai city as a place of greed and extravagance. ‘A demon of the dark called “GREED” came and visited and asked the people to leave the village. Most of the villagers abandoned the village and went to live in the “City of Extravagance”’.

Yet, despite all this preoccupation with virtues of village life, the Sufficiency Economy can also be mobilised as a philosophical guide to promote a particular kind of urban future. An interview I conducted with an official at the Traffic and Transportation department in Bangkok, who regularly cycled to work, nicely illustrates this point. This transport officer expressed a clear concern with the modern development pathway upon which Bangkok – the alleged city of greed and extravagance – had embarked and went to some length to explain the King’s ideal version of a self-sufficient model farm. ‘Normally the King applies this to farmers’, he added ‘but this can also apply to the cities’. While lamenting the loss of a sense of community his words carry us back to the days before neon-lit skyscrapers and chronic traffic jams – a time when Bangkok was as allegedly a serene collection of homely neighbourhoods with orchards situated along a network of canals. The interviewed official duly concluded that the city’s future lay in returning to this imagined past (‘move backwards in order to move forwards’ as the King had said). This implies a culturally conservative urbanism that is more ‘self-contained’ with relatively sheltered neighbourhood communities.

The corresponding transport system revisions he proposed in order help to realise these ideals tell us something about the possible material manifestations of this ‘sufficient city’. Besides ramping up water-based transport and re-instituting the old network of royally decorated trams, the official argued that cycling provides an excellent addition. It would seem that the humble bicycle fits the bill as a simple and inexpensive machine (‘do not use elaborate expensive equipment’ as the King had said) and as a vehicle suitable for travelling within a self-sufficient tight-knit urban village community. It is in such ways that rural sufficiency is drawn into the urban realm. ⁵

The living city

Although trumped by the staggering amount of motorcycles, university campus grounds in Thailand are hotspots for bicycles and cycling promotion. These ‘protective spaces’ are seedbeds for experiments with innovative non-motorised transport infrastructure and with new ways of using old bikes (Smith and Raven, 2012). One technical university in Bangkok features a particularly active group of students and lecturers, who set up an on-campus bike-sharing system and a range of other measures to increase bicycle use and visibility.

It is on the campus grounds of this technical university that I first met May, an environmental activist who branched into cycling campaigning. In order to stress the symbiotic relationship between being a spokesperson for both bikes and trees – for both the promotion of city cycling and the conservation of pristine nature beyond the city walls – May lays out her story:

We have worked from the mountains and rivers to the sea, but now we want to come back into town … We decided to start campaigning for cycling in Bangkok because it would address directly the environmental problems and the bad air quality … and also because we want to stimulate a paradigm shift. We want to change the perception of the road from a space for cars, to a public space and a common resource.

The notion of urban space as ‘a common resource’ resonates with broader ideals of democracy and equality, but it is positioned here as first and foremost an environmentalist ideal. Other life forms besides humans should also be able to tap into the common resource in order to thrive within the city. ‘We live where the wild things are’ May reminds us ‘the ultimate sustainable development indicator is biodiversity and that includes other life forms’.

To present the ideal of ‘the living city’ – a bustling ecosystem habitat for humans and other species – to the public and to attract a wider following, May and other environmentalists have enrolled citizens throughout Bangkok in a participatory exercise of air quality mapping. The exercise mobilised the people of Bangkok to count the number of species of ‘lichen’ – micro-organisms highly sensitive to air pollution – on the trees in the city. Keeping in mind that techno-scientific knowledge and imagined forms of social order are ‘co-produced’ (Jasanoff, 2004), this illustrates how an ‘ecotopian’ interpretation of ‘the good city’ is reflected in the way knowledge about the city is produced.

May’s articulation of the ‘the living city’ is not conjured up out of thin air, but it has its predecessors. Scholars of the city have long since stressed the parallels between the natural world and the modern metropolis – from Ebeneezer Howard’s garden cities to Robert Park’s urban ecology. Even as early as the 18th century, the medical discovery of the blood circulation system convinced city planners that blockages of various sorts of mobilities were bad for the health of the urban body (Sennett, 1994). It would seem that the urban body is alive with the flow of traffic and people through its road veins and street arteries while green areas, while parks and green areas function as its oxygen-producing lungs. The metaphor of the lungs is especially compelling from the environmentalist perspective; it suggests that the encroaching of dead concrete and cold steel on urban greenery is tantamount to self-mutilation.

This discursive weapon was employed by May and her friends when ‘developers and speculators’ converged on Bang Krachao – a lush green expanse, which has been dubbed ‘the lungs of Bangkok’. Satellite images and aerial photos reveal a green oasis seemingly untouched by modern development around it. This is also what it was in the old city plan: a large green dot on the map that was off limits for the construction of high-rise condominium buildings and housing estates. Seemingly unnoticed (or deliberately kept silent) the old plan expired and some members of Bang Krachao’s local community started to sell their lands to well-paying developers. Upon hearing about this, environmentalists and engaged citizens spurred into action to stop the new plan from facilitating the ‘devouring of the city’s lungs’ (see the campaign picture in Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Devouring the lungs of the city. Campaign picture to save Bang-Krachao: ‘new city plan geared to devour the lungs …Bang-Krachao… past-and-future’. While the colourful part on the left represents the green city of the past, the grey part on the right is presented as a dystopian future.

A collective bike ride through this pristine oasis was organised as a way to back up the demand to undo the new plans. This highlights another relationship between spokespersons for the bicycle and environment: the bicycle is not only articulated as the preferred mode of transport for the imagined ‘living city’ but it is also a vehicle that is literally mobilised in the fight to achieve it. An environmental activist, who helped to organise the Bang Krachao bike ride, explained this in the following way:

The strategy has to be something that people can ‘get’ easily. It’s not the green area, it’s not the sidewalk, but it’s the bike. Because it’s fashion nowadays for people to bike … and the media love bike tours. In making the green area issue appealing, we use biking instead of the green area directly.

After the bike ride, cyclists, environmentalists, local residents, journalists and politicians gathered under the rooftop canapé at a forest clearing in Bang Krachao. A former prime-minster and a spokesperson for the Bangkok Bicycle Campaign both gave a speech about the need to retain this space as-is for sake of all of Bangkok as an essential green area with good cycling paths; a tranquil oasis for wildlife and for city dwellers who want to get away from the city’s hectic buzz. Finally, the microphone was given to a local resident. She humbly presented herself as ‘just a villager’ (chao baan) and she voiced a different set of concerns and reasons for conserving Bang Krachao:

I have seen a lot of people who sold their lands: at the end they are poor and they do not succeed in life. It’s like the ghosts of their ancestors cursed them because they sold their lands for money … Let’s launch a campaign not to sell the lands of our parents and grandparents [and] teach the children not to be overambitious or high-flown or fraudulent. Please save the land, grow trees, tend gardens and work for a living in accordance with the Sufficiency Economy. Then we can live on this piece of land happily and then it will be sustainable.

The campaign to conserve this green area thus features an interaction between two distinct urban imaginaries. While some are mobilising the green image of ‘the living city’ to prevent the grey, lifeless city from closing in (Figure 2), others are mobilising the royal image of ‘the sufficient city’ to prevent being engulfed by the city of greed and extravagance (Figure 1). And while the campaign slogan of the environmentalists is directed outward (citizens, politicians and media throughout the whole city need to be mobilised to stop the lungs of the urban body from getting devoured), the proposed campaign slogan by the villager is directed inward (strengthening the moral fibre of local youngsters, who should be convinced not sell the lands of their parents and grandparents and act in accordance with the will of their ancestors and the King’s Sufficiency Economy principles). Taken together, they seem to be saying that both the majestic forest and the traditional lifestyle of the local community are rooted in soil of Bang Krachao and that both should be conserved.

Although there is a degree of complementarily between the ‘conservationist’ ethos preached by the actors who give voice to either of these two urban imaginaries, this might be best characterised as an opportunistic coalition consisting of local residents, traditionalists and environmentalists. While not all local villagers ascribe to the green image and associated environmentalist values, hardly any of the interviewed environmental campaigners ascribes to the royal principles of the Sufficiency Economy. One environmental activist – a self-identified ‘Napoleon’ in the discursive battle for Bang Krachao – explained in a Machiavellian way that ideas such as Sufficiency Economy can be used instrumentally for other purposes: ‘I use it all the time … nobody in this country wants to be up against the King’s project’. In a similar vein, it might be the case some of the local residents also adopt a pragmatic approach to dealing with sources of power and expertise when they deliberately position themselves as ‘just simple villagers’ who adhere to the Sufficiency Economy principles. This might be a way to imbue their cause with royal power and as a way to get the bicycle-riding environmentalists to use their knowledge of the law to dispute the new land-use plan in court.

The creative city

The night sky lights up with bright pink lights bouncing off the Ya Mo statue in the city centre of Korat. A few dozen hip youngsters are lounging around on their fixies and BMX bikes, waiting for tonight’s collective bike ride to begin. A civically engaged architect-cum-cycling campaigner called Yut arrives on the scene. He is seated on a retro-styled racing bike – complete with a flower basket mounted to the steering wheel and a vintage leather bag slung across the luggage carrier on the back. Yut tells me that these Friday night bike rides are part of his overarching aim to turn Korat into a ‘creative city’.

The notion of the creative city is inspired by the work of urbanist Richard Florida. As cauldrons of innovation and creative capitalism, cities should aspire to attract ‘the creative class’ (a highly mobile group of creative professionals, technology workers, artists and bohemians) in order to attain a higher level of economic development (Florida, 2002). In order to reshape itself in accordance with the lifestyle desires of the creative class, a creative city should engage in efforts of ‘placemaking’ and urban renewal (some would say gentrification) as a way to outcompete other aspiring cities. The logic of economic competition within a globally connected world is at the heart of these ideas. Take, for instance, the Chiang Mai Creative City initiative – the most comprehensive creative city effort in Thailand – with the ambition to ‘build a new economic system based on knowledge and creativity [as] the key to create our opportunity and advantage in the international arena’ (Thailand Creative & Design Center (TCDC), 2012). Accordingly, the physical layout of the urban environment ought to be reshaped with this goal in mind (see the creative city map, Figure 3).

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Figure 3.

Turning Chiang Mai into a creative city. An envisioned map of the old city centre of Chiang Mai based on various kinds of creative businesses, institutions for higher education and sites for tourists. The makers of this map present an image of how the city should be ordered in accordance with their creative city ideal.

Back to Yut and ‘his’ city of Korat. Much like Chiang Mai, Korat is a rapidly growing medium-sized town. It is situated on the road between Bangkok and the remote northeastern part of the country (Isan) as passage point for the many urban-rural migrants who shuttle up and down between quiet villages and the hectic megacity. While the ‘mundane city’ of Korat is traversed by a multitude of domestic labour mobilities, the ‘creative city’ of Chiang Mai has been able to tap profitably into the transnational flows of capital and tourists. What would it take for the city of Korat to steal Chiang Mai’s thunder and become a similar node within such a global network of circulation? Questions of this sort were posed one hot summer evening, when Yut and a motley crew of other engaged citizens and creative professionals – academics, city planners, musicians, B-Boy dancers (i.e. the creative class) – gathered in a café in Korat to discuss the future of their hometown as a creative city.

Though inspired by the work of Richard Florida, Yut articulates an interpretation of the creative city differs in a few respects. In Yut’s view, creativity is not the preserve of the creative class, but a distributed resource that resides in every urbanite and villager. The challenge for Korat might lie not so much in attracting creative professionals from far and wide, but rather in preventing outflow of its local people. Seated on the saddle of his vintage bike, Yut formulates the quest for the creative city in the following way:

Turning Korat into a creative city means that local people do not have to go to Bangkok to work as labourers in a factory or on a construction site. They can be proud of their own city and have creative opportunities here … This also means we can solve the problems of the nation.

Building a bustling creative city in Korat, Yut would argue, is a way to keep local creativity and economic energy contained within the poor northeast of the country. It would stop these energies from draining away toward Bangkok where they could supercharge further feelings of discontent between this peripheral region and the all-absorbing capital megacity. Urban imaginaries are thus neither fixed nor limited to reshaping cities; they require local ‘translation’ to fit with other priorities and they interact with socio-spatial configurations at other geographical scales, such as nation-states and transnational networks of exchange (Sengers and Raven, 2015).

Architects like Yut are keenly aware that new transport systems and material infrastructure have the power to transform the urban fabric. He envisions a prominent role for a radically novel bicycle-based mass transit system (a ‘bike rapid transit’ system) in spearheading the transition that would turn Korat into a creative city. To substantiate this idea, he sketches out a comprehensive network of bike lanes and bike-sharing systems encased within glass-and-metal tubes towering above the roads on concrete pillars – literally elevating the bicycle above the car. The promotional pictures for this revolutionary transit system are presented to the Mayor and to other creative professionals gathered at the Korat creative city meeting.

These pictures reveal multiple urban imaginaries – the creative city, the living city and the sufficient city – in interaction. The first image shows lively buzz around one of the elevated stations generated by a coming and going of creative professionals and other users (the creative city in action). Another image represents a birds-eye view of the system, revealing that large chunks of the rooftop are covered with lush green vegetation (the living city in action). Yut has also brought a large poster depicting three farmers wearing straw hats while wading in a paddy field, seemingly out-of-place next to the glittering steel-and-concrete structure carrying the elevated bikeway, which has been labelled as a ‘sufficiency route’ for the occasion (the sufficient city in action). Taken together, these images illustrate that seemingly irreconcilable urban imaginaries (especially the outward-oriented creative city and inward-oriented sufficient city) can be mobilised (in partial and re-worked form) alongside one another in the design of one single infrastructural project geared to transform the city.

Conclusion

Urban sustainability transitions are journeys of transformative socio-technical change to set course for an envisioned future city. These journeys start out in the minds of change agents as vague conceptual images inspired by far-flung ideals, which are then further substantiated and articulated as ‘urban imaginaries’ – shared understandings of what constitutes a desirable future city – that are able to attract a wider following. The creative capacity of change agents to imagine alternative urban futures – and to project these ideas onto technological artefacts and material infrastructure – is critically important in bringing about transformative socio-technical change.

I have argued that this notion of urban imaginaries provides a valuable addition to literature on urban sustainability transitions, because it highlights that visions of the future are ‘anchored’ (i.e. place-based, spatially bounded and geographically specific), have a ‘politics of materiality’ to them (i.e. they are normative and aligned with particular kinds of infrastructural development) and to be realised they require ‘agency’ (i.e. cognitive efforts by intellectuals to persuasively articulate how the proliferation of a particular technological artefact, such as the bicycle, is aligned with the articulation of an urban future worth striving for).

To illustrate this point I mobilised my ethnographic fieldwork with urban cycling campaigners in Thailand. Inspired by what Büscher and Urry (2009) have called ‘mobile methods’, one part of this fieldwork was conducted ‘on the move’, visiting relevant campaigning events and cycling along with the actors to observe their ‘wheeling and dealing’ real-time in physical space. Another part of the fieldwork was conducted whilst immobile, sitting down to conduct in-depth interviews and retrieving contextually relevant background information to map how the bicycle is suspended in discursive space. This combination of mobile and immobile methods proved valuable not only in learning about the prospects of urban cycling but also in sketching out the contours of cognitive territory where the battle for the future city is being waged.

The voices of the Thai cycling campaigners that echo throughout this paper illustrate how transitions are envisioned from the bike saddle; how bicycles become connected to certain urban futures through their imagination of these campaigners; and how their discursive repertoire of tactics and strategies is geared toward presenting these imaginaries in a convincing way. Their ideas about what cities in Thailand ought to strive for are informed by a seemingly disparate set of urban imaginaries related to the economy (‘the creative city’ as a competitive node in a global economic system); the environment (‘the living city’ as a pristine part of the wider natural world), and rural society (‘the sufficient city’ ideologically represented an extended version of a tight-knit village community, reminiscent of a rural utopia). In such ways mundane technologies such as the bicycle enable the flows of foreign capital, of untamed nature and of rural virtue to seep through the proverbial city wall, thus nourishing an array of imagined urban futures.

But whilst the persuasive articulation and proliferation of such well-nourished imaginaries might be a prerequisite for achieving fully fledged ‘transition’, it is not a sufficient condition in and of itself. Despite the recent buzz around cycling in Thai cities, we should be modest in terms of claims about a fully fledged transition toward various cycling utopias. By definition, transitions revolve around an uphill struggle between the forces of change and the forces of stability. In this case, the forces of change are puny and fragile: they are represented by the precarious process of institutionalising the bicycle, which – though by now widely considered as promising alternative – is currently still insignificant in terms of modal share. The forces of stability, on the other hand, are formidable and deeply entrenched: they are represented by the principle of ‘unrestrained motorisation’ and find expression in the rapidly growing numbers of privately owned cars and motorcycles – a trend which is projected to continue for years to come – as well as highly a favourable set of industrial policies to expand the domestic market for cars and motorcycles made in Thailand (Sengers, 2016).

Even the alleged growth in modal share that underpins the increasing momentum of the cycling niche might be called into question. The campaigners stress that cycling is a highly diverse practice featuring an array of ‘mobile subjects’. They have devised various stylised categories of bike users, such as the designer (who is interested in vintage bicycles and attracted the new hip-and-progressive image associated with cycling), the hardcore cyclist (who sports an expensive racing bike for leisure purposes, riding fast and covering large distances, perhaps as part of cycling club) and the mae baan or housekeeper (who rides an old bike, slowly covering short distances to buy groceries at the nearby market). Since the recent buzz around cycling implicates especially the designer and the hardcore cyclist, it might – in absence of reliable modal share numbers – still be the case that mundane everyday cycling by housekeepers and other social groups is not rising but declining, thus frustrating a broad societal transition toward sustainability.

Yet, Thailand’s tireless cycling campaigners soldier on. Undeterred by these adversities, they are nonetheless optimistic about the prospects for urban cycling in the longer run. It is evident to them that especially many young people are at the forefront of the alleged cycling boom. A cycling club president from the city of Nan – a sturdy man in his 60s wearing a traditional blue cotton mon hom shirt with the text ‘Nan: the old city lives’ – made a sharp distinction between traditional older villagers (chao baan) and modern-day youngsters (wailun). In his view, the former draw on local custom and live in accordance with the King’s localist ideal of Sufficiency Economy, while the latter are inspired by popular culture drawn from the wider outside world. Yut – the architect from Korat – makes a similar distinction, but firmly pins his hope on the these young cycling enthusiasts. ‘One day these young people might grow up to become big powerful people (phu yai)’ says Yut, ‘I don’t think we can make any change in the next ten years; this generation is already stuck in the old way of thinking … But the next generation may have the power to mobilise a cycling society. When they grow up, they will be the true change agents’.