Wichita Cycle Chic?

This picture and the accompanying post sparked a heated discussion of, well, how to write about women on bicycles--on a bike blog in Portland, Oregon, of all places.

The bicycle . . . became an important part of the history of the emancipation of women. The bicycle gave women a freedom of movement that few had known. Even the restrictive clothing of the day--long, flowing dresses that clearly didn't work on a bike--began to wilt before the new device. . . . Susan B. Anthony declared that the bicycle "has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world." . . . [However,] Marguerite Lindley, a professor of physical culture in New York, warned in 1896 that cycling hindered "feminine symmetry and poise" and was a "disturber of internal organs." --Jeff Mapes, Pedaling Revolution, p. 34

I am asked to volunteer on a committee for a bicycle organization “because we need more women.” The person who invites me says that he had been frantically calling every woman he knows in the bike scene, and explains that at this point, expertise matters less than gender. --Elly Blue, "Editorial: My Year as a Woman in a City of Bikes," BikePortland.org, January 12, 2010.

[W]hen more women begin riding, that will signal a big change in attitude, which will prompt further changes in the direction of safety and elegance. I can ride till my legs are sore and it won’t make riding any cooler, but when attractive women are seen sitting upright going about their city business on bikes day and night, the crowds will surely follow. --David Byrne, reviewing Pedaling Revolution, quoted here.

Navigating gender politics is tricky, as any thoughtful person will tell you. Navigating them by bicycle in Wichita may be more fraught with peril than I know.

I'll just blurt out my question: Do you know or have you seen women here in Wichita who regularly bike for reasons other than recreation?

Over the weekend, as I read the first two passages quoted above and was reminded of Byrne's declaration, I was struck by the irony that despite the bicycle's role in changing social attitudes among and about women, nowadays biking for utilitarian purposes is, even in bike-friendly Portland, a predominantly male activity. Anecdotally, I can attest that here in Wichita, I see plenty of women riding recreationally but have yet to see a female cyclist who is obviously commuting; I have seen a couple of women on bikes at the grocery store, though. Of those readers who visited here regularly, the vast majority were men. The first sentence in Byrne's quote is surely right, and it is indeed something I hope will come to pass in Wichita. But it's the implications of his second sentence--in particular, the adjective "attractive"--that also seems to have been a sticking point regarding the post accompanying the picture above. More women, we hope, will be attracted to cycling because of its practicality and because, as I have said in various contexts, cities benefit from having more cyclists, male and female, out and about. To focus on the, shall we say, aesthetics of women on bikes is potentially patronizing or demeaning. The Cycle Chic movement, as I note in particular here, with its goal of "riding pretty," seeks not to separate practicality from aesthetics but observe that, for women in particular, looking good matters no matter how they commute. Commuter-cycling would seem to present challenges for women that other modes of transport do not, especially in cities that aren't bike-friendly. Cycle Chic's implicit rebuttal is, Not necessarily.

So, Wichita. As I also note at the end of the post I just linked to, it may be too early for Wichita Cycle Chic to emerge--after all, we have no cycling culture at all to speak of--but I'd dearly love to be proven wrong. For, you see, one thing that Pedaling Revolution makes clear with regard to cycling culture is that what we might see as success at consciousness-raising is actually more akin to self-fulfilling prophecy: If you ride, they will join you.

At least, I hope so. They have to see you first.

Front Porch Cycle Chic: The Delano District as community-state

The 2003 re-zoning map for the Delano District. Click on the image to enlarge. Image found here.

For this third Front Porch Cycle Chic post (the others--and, be forewarned/forearmed, they are lengthy but not vital to have read for this post--are here and here), I want to try to link up some things said earlier to my post from April on Rob Horning's "Hobby Economy." By way of reply to the April post, Karen of Delano Wichita posted "Delanonomics," where, within the context of the Delano District's quest to have some gateways built to demarcate the neighborhood, she links to some articles about various DIY projects taken on by other neighborhoods when they got tired of their local governments' inactions. She closes with this:

I’m still not sure where to go with all that. Is it the (an?) answer to the recurring, “I’m a resident of the Delano Neighborhood/member of the Delano Neighborhood Association. What’s in it for me” question? Which is, you guessed it, the subject of another upcoming post.

She is asking, in other words, about the community's sense of itself, its identity. How can Delanonians come to regard their neighborhood as a place not merely where they sleep, but where they live?

Delano Wichita is, to my mind, very much part of that discussion--not in the sense of what in grad school we called subject-formation, but in the sense of providing the District with, well, a virtual front porch, a place where neighbors can share and comment on the news. It's the commenting-on where the work of identity begins: out of that commentary emerges, over time, a clearer sense of what is important to Delanonians as Delanonians--that is, what their commonly-held concerns are. Out of that discussion will emerge, over time, a peculiarly Delanonian sense of their common good. (For a nice discussion of the difference between common concerns (what Augustine called "loved things held in common") and common good, see the comments section, beginning at the 6th comment down, of my friend Russell Arben Fox's Front Porch Republic post, "Communitarianism, Conservatism, Populism and Localism: An Updated Survey.")

But, as Delanonians' frustration with not having gateways shows--indeed, with there being some confusion even at the official level with the very boundaries of the Delano District--it's difficult to establish what common concerns are without the existence of common goods--which, as I just said above, ideally arise from and as expressions of common concerns. This is why the Delano Clock Tower (image found here) has become so iconic: for now, it's the only public-space expression of the District that signifies with anything like adequacy that one has arrived in the District. But the tower isn't in the center of the District but on its eastern end. Meanwhile, there are street signs that say "Delano" along Seneca on the approaches to Douglas, but they point only east: as if to say that "Delano" consists only of Douglas from Seneca to McLean. And to my knowledge no signage, accurate or not, of any sort appears on the western edge of the District.

So, the need for some sort of prominent--and accurate--gateways, or at least signage, for the Delano District: that will define a space mutually acknowledged not only by Delanonians but by Wichitans generally . . . a visible first step in establishing a community-state's distinctiveness. But boundaries are as much (more?) for other people as they are for the residents who live within the space they delimit. Communities are defined not just by boundaries but by what they contain. And besides, you may be thinking: what does all of this have to do with bicycles?

Well: as I said at the beginning of this post, I think of Delano Wichita as being something like the District's virtual front porch, but it still needs a physical space that performs that same function, one of such a nature that people would bike/walk to and in it--in other words, a space seen primarily as Delanonian (though not to the exclusion of Wichitans, of course). The long-proposed, till-now-delayed bike path, which I first mentioned here and and recently spoke with Janet Miller about here, is a good example of what I mean: the path, plus what the path would have the potential to foster as people propose and develop residences and businesses physically and conceptually oriented toward the path and its traffic. A space distinctively, clearly Delanonian, because it would be a destination as well as a thoroughfare, in which, via not only residences and commerce but also public gatherings of whatever sort--some integrated with Wichita events, some more neighborhood-oriented--Delanonians cultivate and participate in the communal life of the District. Such a space might also provide impetus toward the development of the urban village called for in the District's revitalization plan. The bike-path and the space on either side of it would by its very nature not have to be car-centric in the way Douglas's recent re-design is; it would be the sort of space that people so inclined would regularly want to walk or ride their bikes to, and not just for recreational purposes--especially if there were residences on the path as well as near it, and especially if basic shopping were provided . . . like, say, a corner grocery store.

There'd be no other part of Wichita quite like this. It'd be cooler--because more livable--than any other part of the city. I'd think that Delanonians would be quite all right with being identified with such a space.

Turn-of-the-century Topeka Cycle Chic

Earlier today Randy of Kansas Cyclist, apparently noticing the pictures accompanying the Front Porch Cycle Chic posts, decided to humor me surprised me with an e-mail that had a link to this picture (click the image to enlarge it), from Kansas Memory (a service of the Kansas Historical Society):

The accompanying caption reads, "Mr. and Mrs. George Hackney posed with their bicycles, Topeka, Kansas.//Date: Between 1900 and 1905."

In his accompanying note, Randy writes, "Regular folk riding bicycles in everyday clothing ... the days when bikes were respectable adult transportation, even for the elderly... Cool old pic!" Yes, indeed. These people exude Cycle Chic as Randy describes it here: It's hard to escape the sense as you look at this picture that these bicycles were more than simple props for the Hackneys.

Seeing it jogged my memory of something I gave a little thought to as I was looking for images for the Front Porch Cycle Chic posts and I ran across lots of images taken in Wichita of people pictured with their bicycles--individuals, families, and riding clubs: gather up and post a collection of them as part nostalgia trip but also as a subtle reminder that bicycles were once a part of people's everyday lives here. Not such a bad thing to be reminded of. Anyway, look for that sometime down the road.

Front Porch Cycle Chic: A bicycle on every autarchist's front porch

[Welcome, visitors from Streetsblog(!), which was kind enough to honor this post with a plug on its current front page [update: and welcome to visitors from Carbon Trace, too]. I hope you enjoy your visit.]

The Roberts and Gregory families, Kentucky, early 20th century. Click on image to enlarge. Image found here.

What follows isn't exactly a continuation of yesterday's post. It's more like a picking up of another thread and unraveling a perfectly good idea from Front Porch Republic so as to hastily (and, no doubt, clumsily) re-weave it here in combination with other recent concerns of mine as a garment to hang in cycling's metaphysical closet. I'm not sure, incidentally, whether the following, famous injunction from Thoreau's Walden--"I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes"--implicitly condones or condemns that re-weaving. But if the latter, I take some presumptuous hope from George Bernard Shaw's statement, "All great truths begin as blasphemies."

Enough preambling. On with the ambling.

One of the central causes of what the writers of Front Porch Republic contend is our current cultural and political predicament is a perversion of our understanding of property and the resulting policies and politics arising from that perversion. This matter gets addressed directly in James Matthew Wilson's "The Need for Autarchy": Following Hannah Arendt, Wilson argues that that perversion is the result of "the specious conflation of the idea of private property (which Aquinas was right in defending as necessary to a good society) with that nefarious invention of modern usury, unlimited wealth accumulation." Here's Arendt, as quoted by Wilson:

Private property is not a euphemism for anything I happen to acquire, but a reference to the place in the world that is necessarily mine if I am not to be reduced to dependence on another. The way to secure such property is not usually to expand it and widen its frontiers (though that may sometimes be the case), but to fortify it, to fill it with the productive means necessary to maintain it and for it to maintain me. That kind of security and self-sufficiency-in a word, autonomy and autarchy-requires stewardship and conservation rather than expansion and avarice. Such virtues serve the purpose of having the property remain my property with a permanence approximating to the solidity of its literal foundations. [. . . ] [W]e reply to the capitalist that he does not defend private property but, instead, rationalizes endless wealth accumulation, and in so doing he does not defend the one, best hope for the wide distribution of private property. He advocates, rather, the source of its usurpation and dissolution.

Wilson then sums up Arendt's argument: Private property, once freed of market capitalism's co-opting of it, "is a public good but also provides for the individual household the basis for what is itself a great good, the foundation of a family’s liberty: autarchy [which literally translates from the Greek as "self-sufficiency" and thus is not to be confused with "autocracy"]. And the autarchy of the family household, I contend, is the analogous foundation, the microcosmic model, for still another public good: the sorely needed autarchic independence of our country." (Wilson's italics)

So: what does all this have to do with cycling in particular and, more broadly, issues of livability?

In the first "Front Porch Cycle Chic" post, I noted toward the end that "bicycles' practicality and portability create that version of independence that arises not from mere mobility but from self-reliance in all its senses." Surely one of those senses--or, perhaps, better put, that which is essential to self-reliance--is self-sufficiency. The automobile, while it evokes in the American psyche images of freedom and independence, in fact requires a massive, state- and corporate-maintained infrastructure in order to sustain those images on a mass scale; paradoxically, then, car culture has made us more dependent on both government and business, and less self-sufficient. Moreover--just to revisit the picture you see here within this slightly different context--car culture is both symptom and cause of our consumerist mindset: the automobile consumes and occupies those resources known as raw materials and not just the physical space it happens to occupy but, by extension, the physical space the automobile's infrastructure occupies as well: not just roads and parking lots, but car dealerships and repair shops, gas stations (and, for that matter, a goodly proportion of the petrochemical industry) and, in a more virtual way, the state bureaucracy devoted to the regulation of automobiles--even, indirectly, the space and resources occupied and consumed by the fast-food industry. Yet, as the events of the past year have made abundantly and painfully clear, if no one is interested in buying cars anymore--at least, not this country's current version of cars--suddenly they don't seem nearly as essential as they once did . . . even as their revenue-generating centrality to both commerce and the state has likewise become painfully clear via the loss of much of that revenue. The centrality of car culture to American life thus encroaches on the individual's access to private property as defined by Arendt; moreover, the direct and indirect expense of participating in that culture puts at risk our independence (both individual and national) from others--if not actively excluding many from autnomous participation in it by forcing them into dependence upon others.

As I have mentioned before, it was last summer, when I really paid attention to the fact that many of Wichita's street people and working-class folks use bicycles, that cycling revealed its practicality as transportation to me. Without at all meaning to suggest that we should not be concerned for the welfare of these people, clearly bicycles make their lives a little easier than they would be otherwise: they can cover more ground in search of work and shelter; and, as cheap as bus fare is, owning bicycles allows them to save that money for food and other expenses. A reorientation in our collective thinking in the direction of cycling as practical personal transportation and, at the governmental level, a rethinking of infrastructure (in the form of retrofitting existing streets, planning future streets, encouraging high-density, mixed-use development and discouraging suburban sprawl via zoning and mass transit) would, first of all, have the effect of freeing up some of the space and resources car culture demands. That freed-up space thus becomes more truly public in that greater numbers of people can utilize it. Granted, public space, very broadly defined, is not private property, but in its status as commonly-held property it enriches us, at its best, in a way best described as "aesthetic": culturally, intellectually, emotionally.

[Just a quick aside here: My misgivings about Critical Mass as a concept are connected to this idea. If it's an assumption of Critical Mass that motorists monopolize public roads at the expense (and to the endangerment) of cyclists and pedestrians and thus, in political terms, constitute a tyranny--one I don't necessarily disagree with--it's counterproductive to what should be cyclists' larger cause, gaining and earning the respect of motorists as equal users of those roads, when Critical Mass events in other areas (I cannot speak of Wichita's Critical Mass), at their worst, supplant the tyranny of motorists with a tyranny of cyclists. The fact that it occurs for a few hours on one Friday night a month doesn't make it any less tyrannical. Public space by definition should--and must--always be safely open and accessible to all who seek to use it.]

So, then, due to their lower costs and vastly-reduced demands for resources and infrastructure, the increased and encouraged ownership and use of bicycles presents itself as a means by which many, many more of us can enhance our holdings of private property as Arendt defines that term: that which frees us of dependency on others. At the same time, I'd like to suggest, larger numbers of folks going about their daily business by bicycle also fosters a stronger sense of and appreciation for place and, ideally, can lead to an enhancement of that place's self-sufficiency, its autarchy. In "Cycling in the rain" I try to make the case that cycling by its very nature shapes the cyclist's thinking according to a localist bent. By way of winding up that post's recognition of the Delano District's need of one/a few small full-service grocery store(s), I wrote:

No: cycling can't make corner markets appear in a neighborhood. But I think that cyclists, by being alert to and patronizing their neighborhoods' products and services, can play a role in affirming the community as a place unto itself, with a measure of (economic) sovereignty relative to the city that surrounds it. To tar with a broad brush: cars encourage us to leave the immediate area, to perhaps even see that space as in some way lacking, and don't encourage us to get to know the neighbors--they insulate us from a community's "weather," from its nature. Bicycles encourage their riders to take stock of that same area's resources and, at least in my own brief experience as a cyclist, to see it as richer than they once thought it to be. Far from being "flat" economically, the business topography of healthy communities is varied and often surprising.

Car culture, and all that car culture hath wrought, will not disappear any time soon. But it seems clear that in the decades to come it will not be as pervasive a presence as it currently is; it will no longer be the designated driver, as it were, of the thinking behind infrastructure decisions. Given the enormous individual and collective costs of car culture, I am far from mourning this. So, while I share much of the collective dismay of those over at Front Porch Republic regarding the enormous economic, political and cultural mess in which we find ourselves, I also see signs--and, via the seat of my bicycle, some of the means by which--we can begin to work our way out of those messes . . . and reinvigorate our understanding of and appreciation for community and, in the bargain, become more individually and collectively self-sufficient.

UPDATE: Here is Andy's Springfield-centric version of what I'm after and will pursue in a future post. Thanks again, Andy, for the plug and kind words.

Front Porch Cycle Chic: The revolt against lifestyle

[Welcome, visitors from Carbon Trace(!) and Copenhagen Cycle Chic(!)--and thanks to Mikael for his kind mention of this post. I hope you enjoy your visit.]

Two people converse next to a high-wheel bicycle at the fence of the first home of Alfred W. Bitting, 259 North Emporia Avenue, Wichita, c. 1882. Unknown photographer. Click image to enlarge. Repository: Wichita-Sedgwick County Historical Museum. Image found here.

I don't know whether the bicycle in the picture belonged to the Bitting family or to their visitor. But it doesn't matter. What matters for purposes of this (very long) piece is what that bicycle suggests to me and, indeed, what cycling has come to embody for me: an easy, practical means for its owner to maintain a connection with others who don't live within its owner's immediate vicinity.

Something I'd never before imagined myself seeing was a philosophical kinship of any sort between Copenhagen Cycle Chic and Front Porch Republic. But that was before this morning. As strange a confluence as this is, though, it matters to you--or should--if you share my interest in trying to shift the conceptual frame cycling gets placed in by Wichitans--even by most cyclists--known by the insidious term "lifestyle." Until that shift occurs, we'll continue to see really, really nice bike paths built that don't really go to places where people live, work and shop and, at the same time, a continued lack of on-street infrastructure for cyclists that would facilitate their getting to places where they do live, work and shop.

As recent visitors to this blog know, I've written approvingly in a couple of posts over the past few days about the Cycle Chic movement. The idea, despite the name, is really very simple: You don't need a fancy bike or clothes; ideally, you don't even need a helmet. Just put on the clothes and shoes you'd usually wear for work or shopping, dust off your one-speed cruiser, and go. The coolness of Cycle Chic is precisely that the rider wears what s/he usually wears, goes where s/he usually goes and does what s/he usually does--just on a bicycle. There's absolutely no affectation involved with Cycle Chic, no "in" crowd, no special gear; the entire point is not muss and fuss, but the absence of it. Or, as Henry David Thoreau memorably put the matter regarding the general affairs of one's life, "Simplify, simplify!"

But as many of you know, in-town cycling is now, well, chic. Those of us who want to cycle as a practical and inexpensive means of getting around town to do what needs to be done are now a Market: a group of people who need Stuff, whether or not they in fact need that Stuff. And yesterday Mikael of Copenhagen Cycle Chic put up a lengthy post identifying a couple of the more disturbing manifestations of this fact that have recently appeared: Shimano (the company that almost certainly manufactured your 21-speed bike's shifters and derailleurs) is now apparently marketing "'Cycling shoes' that were completely normal shoes, just with a Shimano logo." Or this passage from a recent Reuters story:

In keeping with the city's efforts to promote cycling, luxury apparel maker LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton asked students at the Fashion Institute of Technology to create chic yet affordable cycling gear.

"We want to do everything we can to raise the profile of biking in New York," Janette Sadik-Khan, commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation, said at the news conference to announce the winning design.

"Having functioning, attractive gear so you can arrive at work looking stylish should be very encouraging," she said. "No one wants to show up at work looking like bike messengers."

To which Mikael replies, "Unbelievable. '...functioning, attractive gear'? Open your closets. Buy a chainguard. Fenders. Off you go."

In the face of market capitalism, Mikael concludes, "Let's sell bicycles and bicycle culture. Let's make our cities nicer places to live": activities not usually thought of as being among the contributive causes of the wealth of nations. In other words: the buying and selling of bicycles aside, Cycle Chic is very much about its participants' extricating themselves, if only a little, from the consumerist dynamic.

This idea has been one of this blog's central assumptions almost from its very beginnings:

Because Nature matters to cyclists, they become different sorts of consumers of their world. Topography and weather and their bodies' and bicycles' needs, not fantasy, shape their choices--indeed, those factors reacquire an immediacy that, [Fredric] Jameson argues, postmodern culture had assumed for them. The local and immediate are what catch and hold their attention. Theirs are pragmatic sorts of choices, and being compelled to make such choices has a way of revealing just how superfluous and self-indulgent most people's choices are. This, of course, is something the vast majority of manufacturers, marketers and merchants would prefer we not dwell on too thoughtfully or for too long.

I'm not arguing that serious cycling is at its heart anti-capitalist but, rather, that it goes against the grain of how consumerism has come to shape our thinking about wants and needs and how to meet them. It thus opens up a space for the individual to see him- or herself relative to those dynamics and respond with a bit more autonomy than s/he might otherwise have.

It's here that we perhaps can begin to see why the term "lifestyle" is so unhelpful as a frame for contextualizing cycling. Within the context of economics, that term has the effect of re-inserting cyclists back into the very dynamic that we're trying to remove ourselves from; within the context of debates about city infrastructure, that term makes it all the easier for the skeptical to respond, "No one's making you ride your bikes" or "Get on the sidewalks, then, if the streets are too unsafe."

A quick perusal of the OED is very instructive here: "Lifestyle" first appeared in the 1920s as a term from psychotherapy "to denote a person's basic character as established early in childhood which governs his reactions and behaviour." It was only in the 1970s, though, that the word acquired its current, more familiar meaning, "A way or style of living." Though it's true that, strictly speaking, there's nary a whiff of consumerism in that latter definition, the mere existence of "Christian Lifestyle" stores--I mean, really: ponder the implications of such a concept--is all you need to know about the extent to which consumerism pervades our thinking about how we live: we live as we do because we choose that manner of living; it is our "style." An entire economy has thus emerged whose purpose is to produce and market items that will outwardly mark for others the style we've chosen.

How we live is sold to us rather than constructed by us; "lifestyle" is designed more to say something to impress others than to say something essential about us as individuals.

Front Porch Republic's "About" statement in effect makes these same arguments about consumerism and/but also identifies Big Government as complicit with corporations: an aiding, abetting co-conspirator eating away at the vitality of what, in this blog, I've been calling communities:

The economic crisis that emerged in late 2008 and the predictable responses it elicited from those in power has served to highlight the extent to which concepts such as human scale, the distribution of power, and our responsibility to the future have been eliminated from the public conversation. It also threatens to worsen the political and economic centralization and atomization that have accompanied the century-long unholy marriage between consumer capitalism and the modern bureaucratic state. We live in a world characterized by a flattened culture and increasingly meaningless freedoms. Little regard is paid to the necessity for those overlapping local and regional groups, communities, and associations that provide a matrix for human flourishing. We’re in a bad way, and the spokesmen and spokeswomen of both our Left and our Right are, for the most part, seriously misguided in their attempts to provide diagnoses, let alone solutions.

Yes indeed. To link these sentiments more directly to the concerns of this blog: It is a sad irony that our cities, entities deliberately planned by and for human beings, in fact more often than not feel denuded of their humanity--assuming they had any humanity to be denuded of in the first place. This has happened because, too often for the past 100 years, city planning plans not with human beings but with automobiles in mind.

Another essay at Front Porch Republic, Patrick Deneen's "A Republic of Front Porches," examines what it takes to be the signs and symptoms of the dissolution of community (broadly defined) in the U.S. via Richard Thomas's 1975 essay, "From Porch to Patio." In the italicized passage below, Deneen quotes Thomas directly, then comments afterward:

When a family member was on the porch it was possible to invite the passerby to stop and come onto the porch for extended conversation. The person on the porch was very much in control of this interaction, as the porch was seen as an extension of the living quarters of the family. Often, a hedge or fence separated the porch from the street or board sidewalk, providing a physical barrier for privacy, yet low enough to permit conversation. The porch served many important social functions in addition to advertising the availability of its inhabitants. A well-shaded porch provided a cool place in the heat of the day for the women to enjoy a rest from household chores. They could exchange gossip or share problems without having to arrange a “neighborhood coffee” or a “bridge party.” The porch also provided a courting space within earshot of protective parents. A boy and a girl could be close on a porch swing, yet still observed, and many a proposal of marriage was made on a porch swing. Older persons derived great pleasure from sitting on the porch, watching the world go by, or seeing the neighborhood children at play.

By contrast, the patio reflected both new settlement patterns and the increasing desire for privacy and withdrawal from interaction with one’s neighbors. “In communities with high rates of mobility, one did not often want to know his neighbor. The constant turn-over of neighbors worked against the long-term relationships which are essential to a sense of belonging.” The patio, it was believed, was a symbol and practical expression of our independence, our liberation from the niggling demands of neighbor and community. Yet, Thomas insightfully notes that it was just as much a symbol and reality of a new kind of bondage, the bondage especially to the automobile and to the grim necessities of mobility, including long commutes and increasing isolation from a wide variety of bonds.

At the end of his essay, Deneen challenges us "to revive our tradition of building and owning homes with front porches, and to be upon them where we can both see our neighbors and be seen by them, speak and listen to one another, and, above all, be in a place between, but firmly in place." I would like to suggest, in keeping with my sense of the picture that begins this post, that bicycles can play a significant role in that revival by in effect serving as a kind of virtual extension of our individual front porches: as we cycle through our communities, we have an intimacy with them simply not possible when in our cars--and those neighborhoods through which we commute become, if not our own, then certainly something more than some streets with houses on them that automobile travel converts them into. Indeed, I have come to feel an emotional tie to that part of south Wichita I regularly ride through that, I feel certain, simply would not have occurred had I driven that same route. Yet, bicycles' practicality and portability create that version of independence that arises not from mere mobility but from self-reliance in all its senses.

Bicycle-riding thus, to my mind, has a significant role to play in the reviving of the importance of place as envisioned by the writers of Front Porch Republic--and the Cycle Chic movement is, to my mind a version of that role--assuming, that is, that it not be co-opted by consumer capitalism. Far from being merely a "lifestyle," cycling is, in the deepest senses of the phrases, life-enhancing and life-affirming in ways no lifestyle ever could be.

If you've read this far, you probably wouldn't mind reading some more about the self-sufficiency of Cycle Chic. Here you go. Andrew's own gloss on these ideas is not only also worth your time, it's a whole lot shorter than what you just read.

Some new links you may be interested in

Pirates' Alley, in New Orleans' French Quarter. Imagine some spaces like this--a mix of shops, restaurants, and residences, through which automobile traffic is severely restricted--in Wichita's downtown, the Delano District, the 21st Street area, etc. A fella can dream, right? Image via the Project for Public Spaces, about which more below.

Over the past couple of days, I've run across various places and linked to them over in the right gutter. I don't have a real sense of how often those link lists even get looked at, much less used, so I wanted to round up a few of the more significant ones here.

First and foremost, I want to note for you the recent appearance of River City Cyclist in the still-small but expanding Wichita cycling-blog universe. Though it's still early in its existence, Robert, its creator, is thinking big: he even has a separate forum set up. I hope you'll link to him and pay him a visit.

As I mentioned a couple of days ago that I would do, the gutter now features a list of U.S. blogs in the style of the venerable Copenhagen Cycle Chic. Yes: the pretty-girls-on-bicycles aesthetic has its own immediate and obvious virtues; my larger intention in linking to them, though, as I said the other day, is to encourage Wichitans during these days of envisioning what a more livable city could look like to look at these images and ask ourselves, Why can't we have an urban core and a Delano District that foster this, too, along with paths and bike lanes from outlying areas into those areas--and not just on weekends? A city whose streets feel safe enough for women to ride bicycles in street clothes becomes a safer city, period [EDIT: Right on cue . . .]--and, not coincidentally, a city where people (and their employers) will want to live and work.

More imagination-candy: Take a gander at the Project for Public Spaces--a visual treat for those of us who look at all those wasted or underutilized lots and buildings in Downtown, the Delano District and elsewhere in the city and imagine what could be done with them. The concept is a simple one: Attractive, multi-use public spaces not only attract visitors; with the right planning, they attract businesses and residents, too. Located at or near transportation crossroads (in our city, that would be things like intersecting bus routes and bike lanes/paths), they can become the focal points for high-density development that, if done right, creates spaces where people genuinely live--like, for example, shop for food there and not have to leave the neighborhood to get groceries--and not just sleep in overpriced loft apartments.

At any rate, Project for Public Spaces is part of a small gathering of links over in the right gutter called "Community, Urbanism, Policy, Politics." If this sort of stuff is at all interesting to you, I hope you'll spend some time clicking and following links . . . and not forget to attend some meetings.

Charleston Cycle Chic

[W]hen more women begin riding, that will signal a big change in attitude, which will prompt further changes in the direction of safety and elegance. I can ride till my legs are sore and it won’t make riding any cooler, but when attractive women are seen sitting upright going about their city business on bikes day and night, the crowds will surely follow.--David Byrne

Yessir:



(Hat-tip: Andrew

(Be sure to have a look at their images of vintage cycling posters.)

Imagine, if you will, a revitalized downtown or Delano District that looks like this, not just on weekends and not just in Old Town . . . There's clearly an obvious aesthetic appeal here, but the not-so-obvious but just-as-aesthetic appeal is of an urban core in which, in such an environment, the streets become, yes, a little slower-moving, but a whole lot safer for everyone.

The "Cycle Chic" blogs are beginning to pop up on this side of the Pond--yet another sort of Critical Mass that serves to emphasize cycling's practical value. I'll soon be posting links to them over in the right gutter.