Vélomobility is to degrowth as automobility is to growth: prefigurative cycling imaginaries

Abstract

At the end of the nineteenth century, the autonomous mobility provided by bicycles and tricycles created a mobile imaginary that paved the way for automobility. Through the course of the twentieth century, the growth and decline of cycling mobilities was inseparably entangled with the rise of a range of motor-mobilities (two and four wheeled). Yet cycling persists and is championed widely as a contender for future mobility in post-growth societies. However, the hegemonic position reached by automobility as a dominant system has led to closure of political non-car mobility imaginaries. Reaching targets for Carbon reduction. will entail dramatic transformation of mobility scapes. This paper explores the possibilities and problems inherent in formulating vélomobility as a system of autonomobility, paying special attention to its alignment with the range of radical alternatives clustered around degrowth and pluriversal thought as promising ways to think and act beyond the unsustainable carbon economy. It first examines the challenges of imagining vélomobility not just as a set of practices but cognitively, through its conceptual construction not as an inverse of automobility but as challenge to the political underpinnings of automobility. Second, it considers vélomobility through a set of propositions to reimagine mobility regimes and assess relevant resources from political theory. The final section reverses the gaze and asks what the reconsideration of vélomobility as described previously can bring to the broader discussion of autonomobility.