Fast and Slow Bicycle Utopias

Abstract

Faster cycling mobilities are framed as innovations keeping cities on the move while assisting their economic growth. Historically, cycling has nevertheless fostered an ambivalent relation with speed, representing the location of multiple values: modernity, women’s emancipation, and working classes’ participation but also obsolete technology and “poor man’s” transportation. This article problematizes fast cycling and advances a slow utopia as a heuristic framework to reconsider the future. It uses analysis of cultural representations and policy documents to question the underlying assumptions in currently trending visions of cycling. Two policy areas where cycling legitimizes the ideology of economic growth are examined: the mobility policies in London and the British cycling economy. SF literature, graphic novels, and other artistic representations are then used to suggest that slow cycling futures are equally possible. This article is an invitation to outline alternatives to the narratives and practices of speed embedded in late capitalist societies.