ABSTRACT
Earlier accounts of cycling tended to homogenise the cyclist as a subject. Concerned with recuperating cycling from low levels, a lot of research has assumed that ‘if we build it, they will come’. However, the ‘they’ in this mantra has until recently not been problematised. In particular, social and cultural differences that might preclude users from taking up cycling have been glossed over. Though the reasons for these absences are numerous and complex, this chapter emphasises the role of design as a form of ‘ordering’ that serves to manage and control the appropriate range of performances and users that are materialised and legitimised as cycling subjects.
After introducing the importance of design in the context of ANT and mobilities as a framework to understand the production of distinct subjectivities, I then go on to discuss processes of standardisation in transport design more broadly. In doing so I show how design techniques of counting and modelling have elided and excluded the affordances of cyclists, making the cycling subject de facto less likely to emerge. I then go on to focus more explicitly on the design of cycle-specific infrastructure, using as exemplars two subjects more likely to be excluded from cycling: children and the physically impaired. With regard to children, I show how current cycle design guidance fails to account for their valuations of cycling, ontologically excluding them from performing cycling in ways that, whilst ‘unproductive’, are more reflective of their desires and identities. Using the case of physical impairments, I then go on to show how design guidance creates a distinction between those able to cycle and those unable through a failure to accommodate the different ways in which impaired bodies hybridise with ‘non-standard’ cycles and infrastructure. Ultimately I argue that if we are to bring into being a wider range of cycling subjects, we need to reorder cycling, and much of that starts with the assumptions we import into design regarding the range of user performances and desires. In doing so, this chapter also speaks to the book’s broader argument regarding the exclusion of ‘unproductive’ subjects in contemporary manifestations of cycling. It is clear that children and the impaired are more or less explicitly excluded from cycling because the variants of cycling that they might perform would be too slow or troublesome to accommodate in a system that prioritises speed and efficiency above any other qualities.
