Commoning Cycling: Grassroot Initiatives for Inclusive Mobility Transitions Among People Facing Barriers to Cycling

Improving the conditions for sustainable mobilities is the focus of considerable political and public attention. This paper identifies various ways that civil society initiatives promote cycling inclusion for marginalized groups facing barriers to cycling. An emphasis on commoning of cycling and cycling inclusion highlights how grassroot initiatives and their “commoners” take action to achieve an ambition to make cycling more inclusive in a bottom-up approach. In total, 12 initiatives have been studied, broadly categorized as bike kitchens, bike schools, bike to school, and bike promotion initiatives, located in Belgium, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Romania, and Sweden, respectively. These initiatives address groups that experience marginalization in the current mobility system (i.e., women with immigrant background, children, people with disabilities, seniors), and promote cycling through various forms of learning activities and skills to lower the thresholds to cycling and making cycling more diversified. The paper takes a holistic approach to shed light on the various ways that grassroot initiatives promote cycling inclusion, and, based on the experiences of participants and facilitators, explores what such initiatives may achieve given differences in context and target groups. While the results show that cycling was mainly available for those participants that managed to adjust to the presumed norm of the confident, able-bodied, and individualized mobile subject, the initiatives had unexpected impacts on social dynamics of relevance to social justice. The results show the importance for cycling policy and planning to support concrete actions to improve the conditions for cycling to realize the full potential of cycling in the green transition.