ABSTRACT
In urban areas throughout the United States, bicycling is increasingly touted as an environmentally friendly way to enhance transportation choice. This chapter explores the context behind community tensions surrounding bike lane development in Chicago along a stretch of Division Street in the Humboldt Park neighborhood. It considers how community engagement with bicycling as a form of community-led economic development can mediate perceptions and experiences of gentrification in the Humboldt Park neighborhood. The chapter also explores the tensions surrounding gentrification, neighborhood identity, and cycling facilities by interviewing community bicycle advocates, city officials, and transportation planners. It expresses that a community-led bike shop in Humboldt Park has allowed local residents to become empowered both economically and politically in ways that impact broader decision-making processes in Chicago. The perception of bike lanes as 'white lanes of gentrification' speaks to broader concerns about how changes to the built environment may be a catalyst for undesirable neighborhood changes.
