ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the rise of cycling in Taiwan, where the past 15 years has seen a concerted push to promote cycling at a variety of scales. Somewhat differently from the UK and cities like London, Taiwan’s adoption of cycling culture is not a strategy geared solely toward maintaining urban productivity, but potentially one with a much broader impact on its nationally significant bicycle manufacturing industry. Hence from an empirical viewpoint we are concerned to emphasise the links between place image and the performance of cycling at different scales from the corporation to the nation.
In the first section we discuss some of the theoretical antecedents that inform the chapter, most notably place marketing and ANT approaches to ordering. We then go on to discuss why Taiwan, Taipei and the domestic bike industry need to promote themselves as possessing a cycling culture. In the following section of the chapter we discuss different events, materials and practices through which associations are made between cycling, industry and place to present a cycling culture. In line with previous chapters, we see this as a process of mobility fixing that emphasises a cultural mode of economic ordering intended to solve problems of capital accumulation by creating a more culturally embedded domestic industry, and by presenting an image of Taipei as a global ‘liveable’ city and Taiwan as a Cycling Paradise through educating citizens and visitors about new ways of moving.
