What are velomobile commons and why should we care?
This piece discusses the concept of the commons from the viewpoint of urban cycling. Based on a recent study I discuss the use of such concepts in action-oriented research designs, and explain why velomobile commons are about much more than road space.
Jonne Silonsaari
Postdoctorate Researcher
Representations of cycling matter. Certain kinds of bikes and identifiable biking bodies speak to local children more than others. The ”bike life” subculture was displayed in a local community center during the project.
The social and material realities of cities, people and mobilities are messy and diverse, generating phenomena that is difficult to pin down without abstract concepts. In other words, things we want study are not directly observable and without concepts, we end up with scattered, partial, distorted and superficial understandings. A well-known metaphor is that planning scholars consider concepts as ‘tools’: despite being theoretical, we want them to be practical in allowing us to understand abstract phenomena.
Keeping with the metaphor of tools, concepts can break things down. They allow us to deconstruct meanings or redescribe problems of planning. But they can also help us build things. Especially when working with participatory, action-oriented or creative research methods, in addition to being a ‘lens’, concepts can be something we mobilize. As transformative ideas they can inform researchers how to observe but also how to act and collaborate with different people. This inherent functionality of concepts is key for studies that try to understand change by putting it in motion.
I tried to do this with the concept of urban commons. The commons is a singular noun, but commoning is also a verb and commoners are the people creating the commons (see Freinberg et al., 2021). These have been discussed from myriad viewpoints, but one key notion on why cities need commons is that they allow opening up resources (e.g. infrastructures, social assets and more-than-human resources) and distributing them in an even way. The opposite of this is ‘enclosures’, and by fighting them commoning is hoped to create more just and sustainable urban futures by connecting resources to their close community of users.
Bike kitchens are self-repair places that are often used as living labs to interrogate how to change the mobility system towards less commodified and more circular and communal mobility system (see, for example, Bradley, 2018).
Velomobile commons
Mobility is rather easily understood as a resource that people need to live their lives. In my recent study in Southeast Amsterdam, I tried to use the concept of commoning as a building tool in an action research study on children and young people’s cycling. I worked with a range of actors in the municipal cycling program to evaluate why certain ‘innovative’, ‘progressive’ and highly participatory cycling initiatives had a hard time reaching local youths from marginalized and ethnically diverse backgrounds.
Cycling is often celebrated as a cheap, easy and inclusive mode of mobility, but at the same time critical scholarship has explained how especially in low-cycling cities it often mainly benefits able-bodied, white, middle-class men, ‘othering’ dissimilar cycling bodies and practices. Especially as cycling is geared towards processes of capital accumulation (Spinney, 2021; Stehlin, 2019), childish, feminine, caring, or non-white mobilities face marginalization as they deviate from the norm (Aldred et al., 2016: Pedroso & Aldrer, 2023; Ravensberger et al., Spinney, 2024).
But these mechanisms that create mobility injustices also concern the high-cycling cities such as Amsterdam, that are often looked up to by aspiring planners and politicians. In Amsterdam, a recent study unpacks why groups such as elderly, people with disabilities, and communities of colour have difficulties in accessing the cycling city (Soares & Glaser, 2025).
The point is that high cycling rates are often perceived to result simply from safe and accessible infrastructures and accessible urban form. But more and more evidence shows that the human infrastructure of a cycling city is equally important (e.g. Nello-Deakin & Nikolaeva, 2021). For example, Southeast Amsterdam has arguably the most accessible cycling spaces in the city, but the lowest cycling rates. Thus, cycle lanes are clearly not the only velomobile commons that are needed to create a just cycling city.
Commoning cycling in Southeast Amsterdam
In Amsterdam the municipal cycling program lays emphasis on three assets that people need to become cyclists: materials, meanings and competences. They make a lot of sense, both practically and academically as a vast amount of cycling and mobility research uses social practices theories that focus on these elements. And yet, no sociology is needed to infer that if we provide all children with bikes, teach them how to ride and socialize them to the positive meanings of pedaling (e.g. health, sustainability etc.), they will not automatically turn into happy cycling citizens.
A key dilemma is that cycling needs to be justified on the level of policymaking and planning as something that helps cities to become sustainable and healthy but these meanings might not be the ones that get people pedaling in the first place. Here, commoning would be an open-ended process that fits the public policy and projects in the local contexts, and not the other way around. But the problem is that suggesting open-ended approaches is quickly dismissed in policy and planning because the impact of such processes are difficult to measure.
My study operationalises commoning to study the interactions between civil servants and policymakers and local cycling advocates. The latter should be understood as commoners – everyday locals who advocate cycling in schools and other communities for children.
I analysed, first, the representations of ‘cycling’ among the actors. This is based on the simple observation that ideas on what cycling is for are likely to influence our thinking in how it is supposed to be promoted. Second, I studied the processes of cycling promotion by actively participating in a range of projects. Aligned with the practice theoretical thinking these included school cycling lessons (competencies), a bike kitchen initiative (materialities) and projects around subcultural cycling culture (meanings). Thirdly, I analysed the various knowledge resources that the different parties use in making sense of their projects – what is considered impactful, efficient, successful or failure.
The basic motor skills needed for cycling are rather efficiently acquired in cycling lessons but the action research study questioned their ability to promote actual cycling practices.
Commoning as recognition, procedures and ways of knowing
The overly simple solution of physical infrastructures is based on the notion that all we need is fair distribution of road space and other directly measurable opportunities for cycling. But as this is clearly not enough, we also need to recognize the local meanings and representations of mobility, reflect on the fair procedures of their delivery and challenge the fundamental questions of how certain people in certain places become cyclists. In this regard velomobile commons are resources that are needed to assemble socio-culturally meaningful practices.
From the practitioners’ viewpoint, the findings highlight how we should not expect wide-ranging mobility transitions if planners and policymakers cannot deploy transformative ideas (or building tools), such as commoning, that are based on understandings of social justice (Sheller, 2018). Importantly, this applies to both, ‘mature’ and ‘immature’ cycling cities.
From the viewpoint of academic practice my study highlights the role of planning scholarship in creating real change. Developing and using action-oriented methods reaches beyond conventional participation such as policy recommendations and other indirect means. This methodological tradition urges scholars to take part in change with the tools that we have: conceptual thinking. As put by the founding mothers and fathers of the action research paradigm, nothing is as practical as a good theory.
Read the full open access paper in Cities, 159: Assembling velomobile commons for young people in a marginalised Amsterdam neighborhood by Jonne Silonsaari.
References
Aldred, R., Woodcock, J., & Goodman, A. (2016). Does more cycling mean more diversity in cycling?. Transport reviews, 36(1), 28-44.
Bradley, K. (2018). Bike Kitchens–Spaces for convivial tools. Journal of Cleaner Production, 197, 1676-1683.
Feinberg, A., Ghorbani, A., & Herder, P. (2021). Diversity and challenges of the urban commons: A comprehensive review. International Journal of the Commons, 15(1).
Nello-Deakin, S., & Nikolaeva, A. (2021). The human infrastructure of a cycling city: Amsterdam through the eyes of international newcomers. Urban Geography, 42(3), 289-311.
Pedroso, D., & Aldred, R. (2023). In the opposite lane: how women of colour experience, negotiate and apply an oppositional gaze to dominant cycling discourses. Transportation research interdisciplinary perspectives, 19, 100828.
Ravensbergen, L., Buliung, R., & Sersli, S. (2020). Vélomobilities of care in a low-cycling city. Transportation research part A: policy and practice, 134, 336-347.
Soares, B. O., & Glaser, M. (2025). Beyond infrastructure: Unpacking the complexity of exclusion and implications for just mobility transitions. Journal of Transport Geography, 126, 104202.
Spinney, J. (2024). Valuing “Othered” Rationalities in the Smart City: Examining Children’s Cycling from a Justice Perspective. Journal of Urban Technology, 31(1), 51-72.
Stehlin, J. G. (2019). Cyclescapes of the unequal city: Bicycle infrastructure and uneven development. U of Minnesota Press.
