Inhabiting Infrastructure: Exploring the Interactional Spaces of Urban Cycling

Abstract

C ontem porary cities are thick with infrastructure. In recognition o f this fact a great deal o f recent work within urban studies and urban geography has focused on transform ations in the governance and ownership o f infrastructural elements within cities. Less attention has been paid to the practices through which urban infrastructures are inhabited by urban dwellers. Yet in all sorts o f ways infrastructures are realised through their use and inhabitation. This paper argues for the im portance o f attending to the ways that infrastructures are reinterpreted through use. Focusing on a case study of com m uter cyclists in L ondon, it explores the ways in which cyclists accom m odate themselves to (and are in tu rn accom m odated by) the infrastructural orderings o f L ondon's streets. Confronted by the obduracy o f a road infrastructure designed prim arily for m otorised traffic, cyclists show a diverse range o f approaches to negotiating movement through the city on bikes.The paper describes how this negotiation can be understood in terms of the m ore or less skilful processes o f navigation, rule following, rule making, and rule bending. This involves a polym orphous mix o f practices, some com m on to driving, others to walking, and yet others unique to cycling. In conclusion, the paper suggests th at transform ations o f infrastructures found within cities need to be understood as m uch through emergent changes between their elements, and that close attention to how infrastructures come to be inhabited offers productive avenues for thinking about ways to improve them.

Elemental mobilities: atmospheres, matter and cycling amid the weather-world

“…Just think of potholes that grow through freeze-thaw actions or faded paint lines whose pigment gradually erodes as a result of innumerable footsteps falling upon them. This mediating-mediated situation of cycling infrastructure raises an important point regarding the way we understanding the relations that occur amongst cyclists, other road users, and the various forms of materiality they encounter (Latham & Wood, 2015;Simpson, 2017). Any experience of atmospheric materialities will always also be situated within a specific planned, built environment and their interactions contribute towards how the experience of movement comes to unfold for a cyclist.…”

“…4 This immersion within and experience of the materiality of the atmosphere, as well as the cyclist's experience of the broader 'weather-world', happens contextually. These interactions are staged, for example, by the specific transport infrastructure present given the way that such infrastructure bring together a variety of differently mobile bodies, bodies moving at differing degrees of speed and slowness, of acceleration and pausing, and so amid varying levels of micro-scale materiality that come to be present at any given point within such encounters (see Simpson, 2017;Latham & Wood, 2015 for a further discussion of the experience of transport infrastructure).…”

'Skills to Pay the Bills': Gender Difference in Mountain Biking on Display

“…Then another mountain biking video is briefly considered to highlight something that we do not see in the skills video -what happens when things go wrong -as I suggest this is a key part of the organisational thing under examination. situated differenCe and Multiple skills Latham and Wood (2015) explore the interactional spaces of urban cycling in London. They provide a rich description of the variety of cycling commutes, nevertheless showing how all cyclists' commuting practices occur within 'existing infrastructural configurations' where 'the central figures in this movement are quite clearly motor vehicles ' (2015, 302).…”

Diversifying and normalising cycling in London, UK: An exploratory study on the influence of infrastructure

“…A second point is that cycling environments on a local level often show little variability, so choice is limited. In the UK, there is often little separated infrastructure for cycling, and where this exists it is often in the form of recreational routes which may not link utility trip origins and destinations (Latham and Wood 2015). Hence a cyclist using a busy road may not be actively 'choosing' that infrastructure type over a separated cycle route, but using the only option that will get her to her destination.…”