How can the social sciences help us to understand the past, present and potential futures of cycling? This timely international and interdisciplinary collection addresses this question, discussing shifts in cycling practices and attitudes, and opening up important critical spaces for thinking about the prospects for cycling. The book brings together, for the first time, analyses of cycling from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds, including history, sociology, geography, planning, engineering and technology. The book redresses the past neglect of cycling as a topic for sustained analysis by treating it as a varied and complex practice which matters greatly to contemporary social, cultural and political theory and action. Cycling and Society demonstrates the incredible diversity of contemporary cycling, both within and across cultures. With cycling increasingly promoted as a solution to numerous social problems across a wide range of policy areas in car-dominated societies, this book helps to open up a new field of cycling studies.

This book examines emerging debates and questions around cycling to critically analyse and challenge dominant framings and prevalent conventions of ‘good cycling’. Cycling Societies brings to light the plurality of voices and forms of cycling in other societies, revealing the diversity and complexity of cycling across different socio-political regimes, geographies and cultures. It presents case studies from five continents and demonstrates the need of thinking comparatively about cycling and urban environments. The book pivots around the three themes of innovations, inequalities and governance and engages a diversity of voices: world-renowned academics in the field of cycling and urban mobility, cycling activists and transportation consultants. Synthesising academic contributions with policy briefs, this innovative book will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners of sustainable transportation, urban planning and mobility studies.

Technology has long been an essential consideration in public discussions of the environment, with the focus overwhelmingly on creating new tools and techniques. In more recent years, however, activists, researchers, and policymakers have increasingly turned to mobilizing older technologies in their pursuit of sustainability. In fascinating case studies ranging from the Early Modern secondhand trade to utopian visions of human-powered vehicles, the contributions gathered here explore the historical fortunes of two such technologies—bicycling and waste recycling—tracing their development over time and providing valuable context for the policy successes and failures of today.

French Cycling: a Social and Cultural History aims to provide a balanced and detailed analytical survey of the complex leisure activity, sport, and industry that is cycling in France. Identifying key events, practices, stakeholders and institutions in the history of French cycling, the volumepresents an interdisciplinary analysis of how cycling has been significant in French society and culture since the late Nineteenth century. Cycling as Leisure is considered through reference to the adoption of the bicycle as an instrument of tourism and emancipation by women in the 1880s, forexample, or by study of the development in the 1990s of long-distance tourist cycle routes. Cycling as Sport and its attendant dimensions of amateurism/professionalism, national identity, the body and doping, and other issues is investigated through study of the history of the Tour de France, the track-racing organised at the Velodrome d'hiver in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s and otheremblematic events. Cycling as Industry and economic activity is considered through an assessment of how cycling firms have contributed to technological innovation at various junctures in France's economic development. Cycling and the Media is investigated through analysis of how cyclesport hascontributed to developments in the French press (in early decades) but also to new trends in television and radio coverage of sports events. Based on a very wide range of primary and secondary sources, the volume aims to present in clear language an explanation of the varied significance of cyclingin France over the last hundred years.

From 1877 to 1896, the popularity of bicycles increased exponentially, and Boston was in on it from the start. The Boston Bicycle Club was the first in the nation, and the city's cyclists formed the nucleus of a new national organization, the League of American Wheelmen. The sport was becoming a craze, and Massachusetts had the largest per capita membership in the league in the 1890s and the largest percentage of women members. Several prominent cycling magazines were published in Boston, making cycling a topic of press coverage and a growing cultural influence as well as a form of recreation. Lorenz J. Finison explores the remarkable rise of Boston cycling through the lives of several participants, including Kittie Knox, a biracial twenty-year-old seamstress who challenged the color line; Mary Sargent Hopkins, a self-proclaimed expert on women's cycling and publisher of The Wheelwoman; and Abbot Bassett, a longtime secretary of the League of American Wheelman and a vocal cycling advocate for forty years. Finison shows how these riders and others interacted on the road and in their cycling clubhouses, often constrained by issues of race, class, religion, and gender. He reveals the challenges facing these riders, whether cycling for recreation or racing, in a time of segregation, increased immigration, and debates about the rights of women.

Cycling: A Sociology of Vélomobility explores cycling as a sociological phenomenon. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, it considers the interaction of materials, competencies and meanings that comprise a variety of cycling practices. What might appear at first to be self-evident actions are shown to be constructed through the interplay of numerous social and political forces. Using a theoretical framework from mobilities studies, its central themes respond to the question of what it is about cycling that provokes so much interest and passion, both positive and negative. Individual chapters consider how cycling has appeared as theme and illustration in social theory, as well as the legacies of these theorizations. The book expands on the image of cycling practices as the product of an assemblage of technology, rider and environment. Riding spaces as material technologies are found to be as important as the machinery of the cycle, and a distinction is made between routes and rides to help interpret aspects of journey-making. Ideas of both affordance and script are used to explore how elements interact in performance to create sensory and experiential scapes. Consideration is also given to the changing identities of cycling practices in historical and geographical perspective. The book adds to existing research by extending the theorization of cycling mobilities. It engages with both current and past debates on the place of cycling in mobility systems and the problems of researching, analyzing and communicating ephemeral mobile experiences.

A unique exploration of the history of the bicycle in cinema, from Hollywood blockbusters and slapstick comedies to documentaries, realist dramas, and experimental films. Cycling and Cinema explores the history of the bicycle in cinema from the late nineteenth century through to the present day. In this new book from Goldsmiths Press, Bruce Bennett examines a wide variety of films from around the world, ranging from Hollywood blockbusters and slapstick comedies to documentaries, realist dramas, and experimental films, to consider the complex, shifting cultural significance of the bicycle. The bicycle is an everyday technology, but in examining the ways in which bicycles are used in films, Bennett reveals the rich social and cultural importance of this apparently unremarkable machine. The cinematic bicycles discussed in this book have various functions. They are the source of absurd comedy in silent films, and the vehicles that allow their owners to work in sports films and social realist cinema. They are a means of independence and escape for children in melodramas and kids' films, and the tools that offer political agency and freedom to women, as depicted in films from around the world. In recounting the cinematic history of the bicycle, Bennett reminds us that this machine is not just a practical means of transport or a child's toy, but the vehicle for a wide range of meanings concerning individual identity, social class, nationhood and belonging, family, gender, and sexuality and pleasure. As this book shows, two hundred years on from its invention, the bicycle is a revolutionary technology that retains the power to transform the world.