Latin America is driving the promotion the use of bicycles as a means of transportation, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and creating cleaner and healthier societies. Costa Rica has a progressive national policy that promotes the use of bicycles and road safety education. Here is a little more about what is happening there. Very inspiring! Enjoy! NG.
Photo: Gabo G./Shutterstock
Costa Rica: leading the way with national bicycle policy
Costa Rica is driving bicycle riding and policy action in Latin America.
Costa Rica is leading the way with its national policy to promote the use of bicycles.
The country is offering tax incentives for companies that encourage their staff to use bikes. This initiative forms part of the strategy to decarbonize the country by 2050.
More and more businesses are providing exclusive parking slots, showers, and changing rooms for their employees, among other facilities.
The aim is to encourage more people to use bicycles instead of cars, which generate more than 40% of greenhouse gas emissions in Costa Rica.
Road safety education
To further promote the use of bicycles, the government is calling for better street infrastructure and road safety education.
This education will be mandatory for all students in public and private schools. The government is also encouraging and regulating municipal systems of public bicycles. Public and private initiatives that promote the use of bicycles are already booming in Costa Rica.
BiciBus, a company that provides advice to those who want to replace their cars with bikes, is one of them. Another is the Cycle-Inclusive badge, which is granted to cycling-friendly businesses.
In addition, a team supported by both BiciBus and Cycle-Inclusive travelled 917 kilometres by bicycle from San José to Panama City to raise awareness of the role of bicycles in creating cleaner and healthier societies.
This initiative shows the positive impact that bicycles can have on communities and how they can help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Making positive change
The initiatives highlighted in the UN Environment Programme report demonstrate the positive impact that bicycles can have on communities.
Costa Rica’s national policy to promote the use of bicycles, better street infrastructure, road safety education, and municipal systems of public bicycles are all effective ways to promote the use of bicycles as a means of transportation.
This report is a perfect example of how bicycles can create positive change, and this initiative is a model that other places should follow.
By encouraging the use of bicycles, communities can live better lives while creating a cleaner and healthier environment for future generations.
An example for other countries
These initiatives taken in Costa Rica to promote bicycle usage are a remarkable example of how a country can take concrete steps towards decarbonization and creating a more sustainable future.
By offering tax incentives to companies that encourage bicycle use by their staff, improving street infrastructure and road safety education, and promoting public and private initiatives that support cycling, Costa Rica has set an impressive benchmark for other countries to follow.
It’s heartening to see the positive impact that bicycles can have on communities, and how they can play a crucial role in mitigating climate change.
This case study from Costa Rica provides valuable lessons and inspiration for other cities and countries looking to embrace clean mobility and create healthier and more sustainable environments for their citizens.
In the bustling city of Edmond, it can be difficult to keep up with watering all of the urban planters. However, one man has come up with a solution: a solar-powered tricycle that can reach even the most hard-to-reach planters.
Edmond local, Travis Kennedy, has devised an ingenious solar-powered plant watering bike after noticing that the big watering trucks that serviced the curbside planter boxes couldn’t reach them all.
He came up with the idea after meeting a local cafe owner who was using an e-bike to deliver coffees – and so put two and two together!
With the help of Travis Kennedy’s bicycle and some solar power, Edmond residents are now able to water their hard-to-reach urban planters from the bike lane.
The tricycle has a 70-liter water tank run by a solar-powered electric pump. The attached hose pushes the water with the help of this electric pump. The bike is one-seater and it carries its solar panel and is a great investment in the environment. It is outfitted with a tank of water and a hose, allowing users to pedal around and water their plants while they get some exercise. The solar-powered pump ensures that the tricycle can be used even on cloudy days and doesn’t require any extra energy to operate.
The tricycle is also available for use by anyone in the Edmond community, and it has already been put to good use by residents who are passionate about keeping their plants healthy.
In addition to watering plants, a similar style of tricycle could be used for other tasks such as delivering food or supplies to people in need and so is a valuable asset to the Edmond community.
With this new invention, keeping Edmond’s urban planters and community happy is a breeze!
Regular readers of this blog know my bicycles-for-education PhD fieldwork was with the local people and riders of Lunsar, Sierra Leone.
The Lunsar Cycling Team has been gaining increasing attention recently, especially with the upcoming, ever popular annual Tour de Lunsar cycling event.
I was delighted to see AFRICAP is a Tour de Lunsar event supporter. AFRICAP cycling caps was founded by Hammer (from Sierra Leone!) who started it out of a love for cycling and a desire to bring something special to the sport.
Africap was created to merge two passions: African prints and cycling. Cycling caps are not traditionally made with African prints, so Africap saw an opportunity to change that. They create beautiful and stylish cycling caps made from traditional African fabrics.
Image: Africaps
Ankara Prints
Each Africap product is made with a unique African print. The prints are sourced from all over the continent, so no two products are exactly alike.
These cycling caps are handcrafted from Ankara material which is a traditional African fabric. Ankara textiles are wax-printed cotton fabrics commonly used across West Africa and each region has its own distinctive design. The material itself is great as it is very light, airy and absorbent which helps keeps riders cool.
Each cap is named after a particular region that the fabrtic is from. Africaps are not factory made, but released in limited editions so are collector’s items and highly sought after.
Image: Africaps
There are so many different African prints and textiles, it can be hard to know where to begin. One of the things that makes African prints so special is the range of colours and designs. Whether you’re looking for something bright and bold or more subdued and traditional, there’s an African print out there for you.
Ankara prints are unique for many reasons. One reason is that they are handmade. African prints are also usually made with bright, bold colors that reflect the vibracy and diversity of African cultures. Ankaras often have geometric patterns that are created by both hand-painting and block printing. African prints usually have a lot of symbolism. For example, certain animals may be used to represent different ethnic groups or ideas. All of these factors combine to create some truly beautiful and unique fabrics.
Image: Africaps
Africap’s STORE has a range of musettes and their groovy cycling caps are named after the regions the material comes from –such as Bo, Ngor, Cocody, Abduja, Odu and Regent.
I was super impressed to see that Africap supports sustainable practices and that no plastic materials are used during production or sales cycles. I can see why these caps have quickly become a favorite among cyclists in Africa and for those ‘in the know’ internationally.
Africaps is working to expand its reach beyond Africa, and has already partnered with several international cycling teams.
The company’s mission is to promote cycling in Africa and to help African cyclists reach their potential. And it was great to see them doing this with their renewed support of Tour de Lunsar 2022.
See more about Africaps and Hammer in Sylvie D’Aoust’s video below.
This session: Key to addressing human impacts on climate change is changing human demands on ecologies. My project is exploring how participating in ocean sports shapes peoples’ relationships to and knowledge of ecologies, and their ways of thinking about our responsibilities for environmental care (Olive). In particular, this project is aimed at challenging white-settler relationships to place (Kimmerer, Kwaymullina), and the ontologies that underpin how we understand ourselves in relation to the world.
Swimming and surfing remind us in deeply personal ways that we are part of ecologies, not separate from them. This includes learning to make kin (Haraway) with threatening aspects of place and space, such as sharks and various forms of pollution (Tsing).
For this discussion, I have suggested a lot of quite short readings, often from much longer texts. I have also set a recent essay that gives a good overview of my current work. You might not get to them all, but reading across at least a few of them will be helpful.
As part of this meeting, we dicussed: How can we better communicate knowledge with relevant communities and the public?
Image: Rebecca Olive
My session notes and thoughts
Below are two worldings I wrote about this session to give sense of what emerged.
Nature returns revisited
We’re discussing nature revisited and tainted returns. I’m traversing Ecofeminisms and thinking in habit(at)s. ‘Proper’ places. Sarah Jaquette posits climate anxiety is a white-person’s phenomenon. A culture of denial. Our vulnerability offsets our humility. Confusion about Margaret Howe Lovatt and Peter the dolphin’s more-than-pleasurable interspecies relations. People actively speaking about creative connections and kinships beyond family and humanness. Healing traditions. Tsing’s challenge of ‘living in the precarious ruins’. Reassuring exclusionary ethical participation. Hydrofeminisms. Definitions and distinctions between ‘locals’ and ‘imports’. PolesApart. Activists, stewards, custodians, collectors. Val Plumwood resituates humans in ecological terms. Putting humans back on the inside of nature.
Surfing ontological waves
I’m considering Rebecca Olive’s work. Surfing intensities. Reflecting on human impacted climate change and changing human demands on ecologies. Briny netroot polemics. Explorations of environs question peoples’ relationships, knowledge and responsibilities of ecologies and environmental care. Transnatural perspectives.Much needed challenges of white-settler relationships to place and the ontologies of how we understand ourselves and our actions in relation to the world. Moving Oceans. Natural environments affect us in deeply personal ways. Making kin. We are ecologies-with, not ecologies-from. Facing fears.Choices that either support or threaten ourselves, each other, creatures, plants and environments. The benefits of swimming with sharks.
Not many people know about Ride Nation. Ride Nation is a national Australian school-based bike education program designed to get more students on bikes.
Ride Nation is pitched to schools as being ‘a fun and interactive learning experience that teaches young people to develop their riding skills and confidence – supporting kids in their independence and giving parents peace of mind.’
Ride Nation is also a wonderful exemplar of a comprehensive and well-thought bike education program that could be implemented more widely, or modified for different contexts.
The focus of Ride Nation is to improve engagement with physical activity and sport with bicycle riding. The aim here is to shift generational beliefs and behaviours from sedentary and inactive to be more active, happier and healthier. By working in schools, Sport Australia is using bike riding programs to reinforce and emphasise a healthy lifestyle, fundamental movement skills, environmental awareness and physical literacy – all of which are important skills for transitioning through life and into adulthood.
This program not only promotes regular and safe use bicycle riding for students, but also have a robust focus on building the skills and professional development of teachers and adults too. For example, they offer Cycling Australia School Teachers (CAST) and Introductory Skills Instructor (ISI) accredited programs.
There is also a Ride Nation blog, which is regularly updated stories of local families riding, ideas on where to go and other useful information.
The Ride Nation website has a ‘download zone’ where you can get free resources to get kids started with bike riding, a good load of teacher resources to help extend learnings from the courses, and coach resources to help assist with connecting and delivering these programs. These resources are well worth a look for anyone who has young kids learning to ride.
Ride Nation in-school bike progams develop key skills such as:
Movement and mobility skills
This program is 6 x 1-hour sessions. The focus here is on foundational bike handling skills. Using a game-sense/experience approach students are able to practice: riding in a straight line, riding through a salem course, riding slowly and in control, emergency braking, scanning (looking) left and right, standing and pedalling, and precision braking.
Confidence and hazard perception
This program develops rider situational awareness and response to the moving environment. This program has a mix of classroom content and riding activities so student-riders can understand, identify and respond to different hazards, such as bike control skills, precision maneuvering, signalling, scanning traffic/hazards, hazard perception, and entering roadways.
Exploring places
Where the previous sessions have a focus on road safety and skills, these final two sessions, Explore Places focus on riding opportunities in local communities. The core competencies in this module are: safe route planning and risk assessment, riding in groups, riding of active transportation and riding with other roads users.
I’d love to see Ride Nation being enshrined in the national curriculum of all Australian schools – after all, riding a bike is an essential life skill everyone should learn!
If you haven’t heard of Ride Nation before – check it out.
If you have kids in school or are a teacher – consider getting your school involved.
It is never too early to be safe and confident on a bike!
But not many people know that March 21st was the UN International Day of Forests.
So to commemorate both Women’s Month and Day of the Forests, I put the call out to three inspiring female friends (Nix, Alex and Wendy) who work to improve gender and environmental imperatives – and invited them to come for a night-time ride along our bayside foreshore to visit the ‘Tree of Light’ to honour the ‘every tree counts’ key theme for this year’s Day of Forests.
And so we did – and we had a great time!
It was low-key, colourful and super fun.
I let them know I was dressing up and they were welcome to join me if they wanted to. I know dressing up is not everyone’s jam – but they all arrived at my place dressed up as well! Not only was this a way to have fun, but it was also a subversive ‘up-yours’ to social expectations of what is ‘appropriate’ for a woman to wear in public and traditional views of women dressing ‘properly’ and ‘conservatively’.
My idea was to go for a night ride ‘reclaim the night/bike path’ style. I deliberately arranged our departure for 7.30 pm – when it was ‘darkly’ – and after dinner – a time most women are socially trained to stay in as it is ‘not safe’ to be out at night.
There were four of us for this ride. On the ride were myself and the formidable Nix (who you might remember from the New Materialists Garden – PhD Retreat), as well as Wendy and Alex, who are two of ‘Green Aunties’ from my community garden. Both Wendy and Alex are in their legacy years and rode pedal-assist bikes.
Nina & Leki (L), Nix, Alex and Wendy (R)
Time for a chat
Alex cruising in style
Wendy and her ‘climate emergency response vehicle’ (bike)
Nix was resplendent!
Nina and Leki (flower bike) en route
Celebrating Women’s Month and Day of the Forests at our local ‘Tree of Light’.
Bight bike path lights
Leki’s caboose in the gloaming
Not so darkly female bike riders!
As if the aunties weren’t brave enough doing this ride, I also found out just before we left that Wendy and Alex had never been for a night ride before. This was a big win for women-them-us-community claiming public space – at night – in a super positive and direct way!
It was a stunning evening – clear, warm and inviting. The moon was out and our community was safe and welcoming.
We saw a few people as we started out, but the more we rode, the less people there were about until we saw no one on our return trip at all. We had the whole place to ourselves! While we rode we discussed what it felt like to be ‘out alone’ and ‘roaming the streets.
It was brilliant!
We rode 6kms along the foreshore, then stopped at the ‘The Tree of Lights’ to have a break where we joked, enjoyed, paid homage to women’s month – and trees and forests. Then I rode my guests happily home.
Our ride was a small, but wonderfully personal way to honour and celebrate sisterhood, forests, and being free to ride our bikes wherever and whenever we want to.
If you have not been out for night ride recently – I highly recommend it.
Grab a mate and your bikes and go visit a tree in your area!
Happy riding!
Key messages of the UN International Day of Forests
The UN are promoting 8 key messages for the 2021 International Day of Forests:
Healthy forests mean healthy people.
Forests provide health benefits for everyone, such as fresh air, nutritious foods, clean water, and space for recreation. In developed countries, up to 25 percent of all medicinal drugs are plant-based; in developing countries, the contribution is as high as 80 percent.
Forest food provides healthy diets.
Indigenous communities typically consume more than 100 types of wild food, many harvested in forests. A study in Africa found that the dietary diversity of children exposed to forests is at least 25 percent higher than that of children who are not. Forest destruction, on the other hand, is unhealthy – nearly one in three outbreaks of emerging infectious disease are linked to land-use change such as deforestation.
Restoring forests will improve our environment.
The world is losing 10 million hectares of forest – about the size of Iceland – each year, and land degradation affects almost 2 billion hectares, an area larger than South America. Forest loss and degradation emit large quantities of climate-warming gases, and at least 8 percent of forest plants and 5 percent of forest animals are at extremely high risk of extinction. The restoration and sustainable management of forests, on the other hand, will address the climate-change and biodiversity crises simultaneously while producing goods and services needed for sustainable development.
Sustainable forestry can create millions of green jobs.
Forests provide more than 86 million green jobs and support the livelihoods of many more people. Wood from well-managed forests supports diverse industries, from paper to the construction of tall buildings. Investment in forest restoration will help economies recover from the pandemic by creating even more employment.
It is possible to restore degraded lands at a huge scale.
The Great Green Wall for the Sahara and the Sahel Initiative, launched by the African Union in 2007, is the most ambitious climate-change adaptation and mitigation response under implementation worldwide. It seeks to restore 100 million hectares of degraded land, sequester 250 million tonnes of carbon and create 10 million green jobs by 2030, while greening landscapes in an 8 000 km belt across Africa’s drylands. Vast areas of degraded land elsewhere would also become highly productive again if restored with local tree species and other vegetation.
Every tree counts.
Small-scale planting and restoration projects can have big impacts. City greening creates cleaner air and more beautiful spaces and has huge benefits for the mental and physical health of urban dwellers. It is estimated that trees provide megacities with benefits worth USD 0.5 billion or more every year by reducing air pollution, cooling buildings and providing other services.
Engaging and empowering people to sustainably use forests is a key step towards positive change.
A healthy environment requires stakeholder engagement, especially at the local level so that communities can better govern and manage the land on which they depend. Community empowerment helps advance local solutions and promotes participation in ecosystem restoration. There is an opportunity to “rebuild” forest landscapes that are equitable and productive, and that avert the risks to ecosystems and people posed by forest destruction.
We can recover from our planetary, health and economic crisis. Let’s restore the planet this decade.
Investing in ecosystem restoration will help in healing individuals, communities and the environment. The aim of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, which starts this year, is to prevent, halt and reverse the degradation of ecosystems worldwide. It offers the prospect of putting trees and forests back into degraded forest landscapes at a massive scale, thereby increasing ecological resilience and productivity. Done right, forest restoration is a key nature-based solution for building back better and achieving the future we want.
Being an open and inquisitive researcher means I attend a wide range of SIGs, workshops and seminars. I’m open to lots of new ideas. Recently, I went to a feminist research group where a PhD candidate presented their work. The presentation gave me much to think about – and below is a 100-word worlding I wrote that explains why.
ATR WFU Women Leadership. Source: Worker’s Control
Cooperative Gap-ness
Passionate work to accelerate fair and (just) transitions to climate action using a grassroots union of Western Australian youths. Encouraging and political. Using Feminist Participatory Action Research and Cooperative Inquiry to be more culturally responsive, ethical and inclusive. Emotional labour. Green and ‘sustainable’ as false solutions. Extractivism of volunteers. Research(er)ing through-with-and-as ‘storying’. As insider-researcher-activists, I suggest Sherilyn Lennon’s ‘Unsettling Research’. Nicely messy. Critical cusps of Hope. Anna Tsing says hope can obfuscate activism. Astrida Neimanis and Jen Hamilton question hope, turning instead to desire. Tactical gap-ness. Expectant tool-processes of change and reviving neglected knowledges. Wrangling manageable recuperative action.
It is encouraging to see more local councils and state governments backing active transportation and bike riding. As well as leveraging all the well-established health, social, economic and environmental benefits of bike riding, during COVID-19, it is now more important than ever to be improving public spaces that are equitable, accessible and practice social distancing. In June, NSW Government put out a call for activation grants and here are some of winning applicants. I hope there are more initiatives like this and other states follow suit – here’s to hoping! Great start NSW! Enjoy! NG.
Image: Bicycle Network
What is the Shared Streets Spaces program?
The Streets as Shared Spaces program in NSW is part of a wider suite of initiatives in NSW looking to boost public access for the community during COVID-19.
Through the Streets as Shared Spaces program, the NSW Government has awarded grants to councils for temporary activation projects that support the community during COVID-19 and also test ideas for more permanent improvements to local streets, paths and public spaces.
This $15 million program launched in 2020, and was a pilot to enable improvements across NSW during COVID-19 and into the future which:
support essential workers to travel to work, and people working from home
contribute to NSW economic recovery in our local centres by creating vibrant streets and additional safe space to support local business
activate high streets to create better quality public space
support physical distancing requirements and encourage safe social connection
support the well-being of local communities and their ability to exercise
attract people back into public spaces in a safe way, when appropriate to do so.
Projects are intended to test and build the case for more permanent changes. Councils will lead the projects and consult with the community and stakeholders to evaluate success and make changes as needed.
The NSW Government has announced a list of urban and regional streets due for temporary transformations as part of their $15 million Streets as Shared Spaces program.
Launched in 2020, the program awards grants to councils for temporary activation projects that support the community during COVID-19 and test ideas for more permanent improvements to local streets, paths and public spaces.
Image: NSW Dept. of Planning, Industry and Environment and Destination
Streets as Shared Spaces program aims to:
support essential workers to travel to work, and people working from home
contribute to NSW economic recovery in our local centres by creating vibrant streets and additional safe space to support local business
activate high streets to create better quality public space
support physical distancing requirements and encourage safe social connection
support the well-being of local communities and their ability to exercise
attract people back into public spaces in a safe way, when appropriate to do so
Amongst the 27 regional and 14 Greater Sydney councils who have been awarded grants, there were a number of bike-friendly improvements, including:
Ballina Shire Council
Project name: A Slow Path – Not A Fast Short Cut Amount: $100,000 Description: A program of temporary works that seeks to test a number of traffic calming elements and streetscape features aimed at improving safety and convenience for pedestrian and cyclists in and around Park Lane over a trial period of 8-9 months.
Bayside Council
Project name: Place Making – Russell Avenue, San Souci Amount: $100,000 Description: The proposal is for a ‘pilot’ trial opportunity to create community parklets alongside wide off-road cycleways where families feel safe to ride their bicycles – protected from traffic, whilst exploring local cafes before enjoying the paths and natural space of the Botany Bay’s foreshore.
Central Coast Council
Project name: Implementation of a Shared Zone and activation of The Esplanade, Umina Beach Amount: $327,528 Description: This project is to provide a shared zone in The Esplanade, Umina Beach between Ocean Beach Road and Trafalgar Avenue, to provide a safer environment, great amenity and activate the road to provide a pedestrian and bike priority-based space.
Coffs Harbour City Council
Project name: The Green Spine Pilot Project Amount: $800,000 Description: The Green Spine pilot project aims to trial a safe corridor for cycling and walking access along Coffs Harbour’s Harbour Drive during COVID-19.
Ku-ring-gai Council
Project name: Gilroy Road Separated Cycleway and Turramurra Shared Path Amount: $398,000 Description: The project is to test the cycleway proposed in Turramurra Public Domain Plan. It will provide a safer cycling route for all ages and link open spaces, as well as providing a link from residential areas to local centre and station away from higher traffic roads.
Minister for Planning and Public Spaces Rob Stokes said: “It’s fantastic to see so many councils eager to provide new and improved public spaces for their communities, encouraging active transport and beautifying their streetscapes.”
These projects will transform neighbourhoods across the state, making it easier for people to walk or ride to local shops and services by creating safe, attractive and accessible streets and public spaces.”
This sets a strong example for other state governments looking to bounce back from the pandemic, particularly in Victoria where the full impact of changing transport habits are yet to be realised due to the extended lockdown.
Image: NSW Dept. of Planning, Industry and Environment and Destination
In this post, we look at how Meg Ulman, Patrick Jones, their two children (aged 11 and 2) and pet dog used an incredible 6,000km family bike tour up the east coast of Australia as a way of putting into action their ethical, environmental and social principles. This is the fifth and last instalment of our August 5-part series written by Laura Fisher exploring how bicycles are used as a dissident object in contemporary art. Previously we looked at Ai Weiwei’s ‘Forever’, then ‘Returnity’ by Elin Wikström and Anna Brag, then ‘Shedding Light’ from Tutti Arts Oz Asia Festival. The last post was on how public space is being creatively activated as sites of protest using bicycles by the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination. Enjoy! NG.
The Art of Free Travel
A final project that demonstrates the power and promise of the bicycle is the 6,000-kilometre journey taken by “Artist as Family”: Meg Ulman, Patrick Jones, their two children (aged 11 and 2) and pet dog.
As writers, gardeners and environmentalists, Ulman and Jones exemplify the ecological sensibility that a growing number of us embrace. In 2015 they decided to take up this environmental imperative as an artistic-philosophical project.
Over a period of 14 months the family rode their bicycles from their home in Daylesford in Victoria to Cape York in Northern Queensland, during which time they lived by foraging (they had extensive knowledge of edible plants), fishing, trapping, exchanging labour for food on farms, and through the hospitality of friends and strangers.
Their blog posts and book attest to the heightened engagement with the world that bicycle travel affords: two-year-old Woody was able to identify an enormous variety of animals and plants, and meaningful connections were made with the many strangers who invited the family into their homes, sharing their knowledge and stories.
The physical demands of cycling focused their minds upon the needs of the body and the available sources of energy replenishment.
As these projects demonstrate, the bicycle is a nimble tool for individual and collective agency and a catalyst for knowledge creation, self-awareness and meaningful social encounters. It is a technology that serves our need for self-reliance and exploration, without surpassing the body’s capabilities.
In an era in which we are incarcerated by our affluence – through work, debt, declining physical and mental health, and an exploitative and wasteful dependence upon the declining natural resources – the bicycle is the ultimate dissident object and symbol of freedom.
Image: Still from ‘The Art of Free Travel’ film trailer.
Laura Fisher is a post-doctoral research fellow at Sydney College of the Arts, The University of Sydney. In October 2015 she co-curated Bespoke City with Sabrina Sokalik at UNSW Art & Design, a one night exhibition featuring over 20 practitioners celebrating the bicycle through interactive installations, sculpture, video, design innovation, fashion and craft. This event was part of Veloscape, an ongoing art–research project exploring the emotional and sensory dimensions of cycling in Sydney.
The Lab is an activist organisation that has devised inventive forms of creative civil disobedience to assert an alternative to the nexus of capitalism, consumption and environmental destruction.
They try “to open spaces where the imaginative poetic spirit of art meets the courage and rebelliousness inherent to activism”.
In 2009, the Lab developed the Bike Bloc as a form of direct action for the UN Climate Negotiations in Copenhagen (the unsuccessful forerunner to the recent Paris Climate Talks).
Hundreds of people worked over several weeks to design and weld activist bicycles and practise “street action cycle choreography”.
Double Double Trouble – a Dissent Bicycle-Object
Some of these were paired tall-bikes that gave riders a great height advantage (confiscated by police before the protest), while others were equipped with megaphones that played music, sirens and abstract sounds in synchronicity.
One such bike recently featured in Disobedient Objects, an exhibition developed by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London which toured to the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.
As the video documentation shows, the Lab embraced the model of an insect swarm in order to create a dispersed field of sound and activity that drew police attention in different directions.
What makes this action so compelling artistically is the intersection of DIY cycle culture and the lessons of radical theatre and performance.
The bicycle was assessed for what kind of form it might contribute to coordinated protest, notably creating a fluid field of assembling and disassembling bodies and sound.
Laura Fisher is a post-doctoral research fellow at Sydney College of the Arts, The University of Sydney. In October 2015 she co-curated Bespoke City with Sabrina Sokalik at UNSW Art & Design, a one night exhibition featuring over 20 practitioners celebrating the bicycle through interactive installations, sculpture, video, design innovation, fashion and craft. This event was part of Veloscape, an ongoing art–research project exploring the emotional and sensory dimensions of cycling in Sydney.
