Copenhagen is today praised as a truly bicycle-friendly city. The Danish capital earned its reputation as a ‘bicycle city’ early on. The network of bicycle infrastructure developed in the first half of the twentieth century was a result not least of a thriving cycling culture and the efforts made by cyclists’ organizations. In the following car-centric decades this network made cycling a more resilient practice than elsewhere, before cyclists and their lobby organizations managed, again, to pressure policy makers to renew supportive measures for cyclists. The article thus highlights two concepts: road users as potential co-producers of the mobility system as well as the obduracy of infrastructure and its capacity to preserve habits and cultures of the past.

Making urban mobility more sustainable is a grand challenge, yet urban environments are beacons of hope in delivering this result: authorities are active partners in the mobility transition, and dense cities provide favorable boundary conditions for delivering more sustainable outcomes. A U-turn to the past may present the right recipe for such a mobility transition to take place by making the past "usable." First, this entails understanding how our currently unsustainable urban mobility has been advocated and how alternative urban mobilities have been decentered. Second, it necessitates unearthing forgotten past practices of sustainable urban mobilities, which can serve as sources of inspiration for today's challenges. Third, it warrants the analysis of "pockets of persistence," immaterial and material remnants of the past that provide welcome opportunities to ease the transition toward more sustainable urban mobility.

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about 30 per cent, then 3 per cent and then less than 1 per cent, respectively, of the total amount of traffi c. 3 How should these rapid changes be understood? How is it that bicycle use increased before the Second World War, EUROPEAN CYCLING