ABSTRACT
Taking London (UK) as the focus, this chapter seeks to connect recent developments in cycling policy to forms of bio-political and political-economic governance. In particular it seeks to understand why we see an emphasis on facilitating commuter cycling with less attention and little action devoted to other, less productive forms of cycling. In doing so it argues that cycling policy can be viewed as a ‘mobility fix’ because current incarnations of cycling represent a way of governing and ‘fixing’ that works primarily through producing alternative ways of moving rather than space to fix problems of accumulation.
The first section brings together insights on governmentality and bio-politics, with political-economic theorisations of fixing to argue for seeing cycle promotion as a principally bio-political project that seeks to operate through shaping individuals as entrepreneurs of the self. In the second part of the chapter, I situate a recent uptick of infrastructure roll-out as a kind of ‘extraction architecture’ serving to enlarge the scale and scope of cycling in relation to health, environmental and image issues as matters of concern. This places cycling in London firmly within debates regarding urban entrepreneurialism, arguing that beyond the energy required to get to work, the commuter cyclist also produces a ‘behavioural surplus’ because their labour power exceeds the labour time worked. The concluding hope of the chapter is that theorising the promotion and practice of cycling within broader processes of neoliberalisation could help to direct future research agendas for cycling (and critical mobilities scholarship more broadly) that focus on issues of inclusivity, representation and inequality.
