Researcher(s):
Tom Rodrigues
ENVS course(s): 400 Initiated: September 2013 Completed: May 2014 Go to project site
|
Many environmentalists justify their love for bicycles through decreased carbon emissions. City planners proclaim bicycles as a healthy transportation method and a boon for the economy. Cycling has a range of images and meanings to different people in different regions and different times, but what are the meanings that make bicycling popular? Cycling in Europe and America have seen the bulk of scholarly research on bicycles. We have seen economic analyses, histories, and symbolic analyses of bicycles across these regions, but as Bogota, Columbia is proving, South America is a hot-bed for bicycle growth and research (Klaus 2012). In the spring of 2013 I went to Cuenca, Ecuador to explore the nascent bicycle community there through a variety of methods.
Cities across the globe have embraced bicycles in an effort to attract this new socioeconomic class of knowledge workers named the “creative class.” I examined Portland, Oregon and Cuenca, Ecuador through semi-formal, expert interviews and a public survey to explore how each uses bicycles to gain this particular status. These locations offer two different perspectives to situate the study of the bicycle as a reputation-building tool. As “America’s Bicycling Capital,” Portland is a relatively mature bicycle community, while Cuenca is just beginning. I found that the meanings of the bicycle were more varied in Portland, and Cuenca’s motivation for propagating the bicycling community as a reputation-building tool has significantly impacted infrastructure decisions, arguably for the worse.