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This chapter seeks to engage with a selected range of current theorisations of the politics of infrastructure, and to apply them to specific cases of cycle-specific infrastructures. It subsequently relates the ideas of social and spatial justice arising from these perspectives to bell hooks’ consideration of marginalisation, to consider how the patterns of marginalisation and mainstreaming revealed in the contributions to this volume might be understood through a lens of a critical and radical politics. It is concluded that the political challenge of cycling infrastructure provision is to balance between a series of contending needs. Provision is required that provides protection from the very real fears and dangers produced by the dominance of automobility. Simultaneously, this needs to be both inclusive and to send a message that all users are valuable. Yet both of these also need to recognise and communicate that the ultimate goal of cycle infrastructure provision should not be to provide a safe and comfortable means to ride whilst maintaining a world dominated by automobility. Instead, in the context of the paradigm shift needed in transport thinking, cycling mobility and its infrastructures need to present a radical challenge to automobility.
This book offers a critical examination of existing cycling structures and the current policy and practices used to promote cycling. An international range of contributors provide an interdisciplinary analysis of the complex cultural politics of infrastructural provision and interrogate the pervasive bias against cyclists in city planning and transport systems across the globe.
Infrastructural planning is revealed to be an intensely political act and its meaning variable according to larger political processes and contexts. The book also considers questions surrounding safety and risk, urban space wars and sustainable futures, connecting this to broader questions about citizenship and justice in contemporary cities.
This chapter concludes the volume and explains the issues that have been touched upon by the authors of the chapters of this book. It explains that it would be easy to assume the superiority of European cycle infrastructure provision and that generally, European cycle infrastructure has been presented as good or as much better than the infrastructure provided in countries like the United States of America, Canada or Australia. However, it is concluded that this volume has shown that also the bicycle infrastructure in countries like Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden or Austria also fails to fully recognise the bicyclists’ needs for active and daily mobility. Further, this opens a space for shared critique, rather than focusing on the search for a mythical universal best practice allows dialogue between perspectives. It also permits (and insists on) analysis of the backstage of infrastructure construction. The conclusions raises also questions like What processes and assumptions are behind the plans drawn up and the decisions made? Who are the people involved and what considerations drive them? How are these considerations justified? Furthermore, it is stated that this volume has begun a comparative assessment of existing and historic struggles.
This chapter introduces the topic of this volume and the issues touched upon in the different chapters. It explains today’s situation for cycling and the wider context of cycling infrastructure. Moreover, it also shows how this volume was put together and why there is a need for this book. Furthermore, it places the book in context to existing literature and shows what gaps exists in this literature and why this volume is an important contribution to the current publications on cycling and infrastructure. Additionally, this chapter gives an overview of the content of this volume, introduces briefly each chapter and explains the structure of this volume. In the end of this chapter, a note on language explains the terms used in this volume for different parts of cycling infrastructure.
This chapter discusses the basic biology of ageing. First, it examines the social construction of age which emphasises that what biologists or biogerontologists understand as ageing, cell senescence, is only one manifestation of a complex phenomenon. Second, it provides an overview of the biology of ageing from theories of ageing processes to the idea of normal ageing. Third, it considers what might be done to modulate cellular ageing, such as calorie restriction, inhibiting stress and supplementing the immune system. It concludes by discussing the ethics of interventions in the ageing process.
