This article is a review of Adonia Lugo's book: "Bicycle / Race: Transportation, Culture, & Resistance". The book talks about issues of race and class in bicycle culture. It is a call to refocus bicycle-planning beyond physical infrastructure to include human-infrastructure that centers on the stories and identities that shape how, where, when, and why we travel.

Key findings



Lugo argues building bike lanes isn’t necessarily going to liberate our streets if we ignore the glaring racial, socioeconomic, and cultural issues that divide us. Do bike lanes matter when we disregard the people who are most marginalized on our streets? Would bike lanes address the root cause of car culture?



A bike advocacy approach that merely focuses on physical infrastructure overlooks key questions, while the human-infrastructure strategy centers the stories and identities that shapes how we travel. Lugo says 'We carry our identities and histories with us as we mobilize into public spaces like streets…'



Lugo describes the dangers of the design-based approach, 'Focusing on urban design, rather than the people who inhabit and produce places, all too easily naturalizes their market-driven displacement.'



View



View PDF



Behind a hard paywall (paid accounts only)



Behind a soft paywall (limited views allowed until a paid account is required)