ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews two overlapping sets of literature related to cycling and mobility. First, it summarises the transport literature as assuming a narrow ‘productivist’ framing of cycling in the shape of commuter-focused infrastructure and promotion. It argues that this literature has until recently been uncritical of the exclusive nature of much bicycle promotion, with little emphasis on equity and justice, and still ignores the incorporation of cycling into global circuits of capital as a process requiring critical engagement. Indeed, in such accounts, the qualities that are valued and deemed important in cycling (zero emissions, healthy, space-efficient) are seen to be self-evident in such literature rather than constructed by particular actors (including academics). Second, the chapter reviews the mobilities literature in relation to cycling. It argues that whilst this literature has provided new theoretical and critical insights around embodiment, diversity and governmentality in relation to cycling, it has until very recently marginalised the relationship between cycling and broader political-economic formations. Building upon this, the second section brings together work in political economy, governmentality and economic sociology to provide a framework for understanding why mobility matters to urban economies, and more specifically, through processes of economisation and agencement, how ostensibly social mobility practices become instrumentalised and enrolled in circuits of capital accumulation and/or exclusion.
