Rearranging care while cycling under the Covid-19 pandemic in Quito, Ecuador

Abstract

In spring 2020, the municipal government in Quito, Ecuador added cycling lanes as a healthy urban mobility option due to the spike of deaths at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. This infrastructural intervention emerged from the state’s humanitarian care approach, also known as a ‘mobility fix’. Cycling lanes became an important mobility option for vulnerable social groups who continued to move around and became a manner that the government conferred public health solutions upon the individual. Therefore, as the city responded to daily urban mobility needs through cycling interventions, female cyclists used cycling infrastructures to move around. In an effort to understand these experiences, this article uses a feminist ethics framework to make sense of the spatial arrangement of non-traditional care-giving and care-receiving relations, between government and a group of friends. Drawing on mobile participatory research with ten female cyclists that focuses on their spatial practices, it finds that cycling lanes, along with municipal care campaigns, produced new minor caring acts, like kindness. Even as small caring acts emerged, female participants reported vulnerabilities, including the reproduction of toxic masculinity and dominance of automobility. The article finds that cycling infrastructures alone are incapable of protecting cyclists if larger socio-cultural dilemmas, such as gendered violence, go unaddressed within planning interventions. Ultimately, these findings contribute to debates within cycling geographic literature by expanding on care debates in cycling literature beyond an individual and household relation.