SENCyclo · Gender and Bicycling Aesthetics: the potentiel for the sustainable city of gender construction processes across cycling practices, equipment and infrastructure.
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2022-01-01 → 2023-12-31
- EU contribution
- €196,708
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Gender and Bicycling Aesthetics: the potentiel for the sustainable city of gender construction processes across cycling practices, equipment and infrastructure.
Since its invention, the bicycle has been presented as a disruptive force, threatening the normative framework of gender roles and identities. Yet there is still a gender gap in cycling, which is not taken into account in public policies to promote cycling in Europe. To explain this differential, the literature has highlighted the gendered socialisations to risk and mobility patterns linked to the sharing of domestic tasks within households. However, little attention has been paid to the experience of the body, the materiality and the sensitive dimension of cycling equipment, accessories and infrastructure, around which gender is constructed. The originality of this research lies in taking seriously the aesthetic experience of cycling, linking corporeal sensitivity and affectivity, and studying its impact on gender construction processes. The aesthetical approaches are indeed essential as the success of sustainable policies requires a transition from convictions to spontaneous, habitual practices. Recent research has shown that the aesthetical experience (dis|pleasure, sensibility to ambient qualities and affective investments in the objects and the practices) has a great importance in the continual transformation processes of cycle practices, equipment and infrastructure. Four case studies of cities at different levels of deployment of cycling policies - Grenoble, Montreuil, Strasbourg and Lausanne - help confirm the main hypothesis of an impact on the aesthetic dimension of cycling on the current construction of gender at the level of the body and cycling objects, and at the level of infrastructure, and to investigate the role of gender stereotypes in the recognition of cycling as a sustainable practice. This is important as the deconstruction of the unequal political categories of gender constitutes an important step towards the development of more systemically sustainable cities. As the bicycle now becomes an ordinary materiality of sustainability, better understanding of the gendering processes across cycling and their potential for the sustainable mobility transition is even more crucial. It also participates in the effort to overcome the curiously immaterial and disembodied conceptions of sustainability.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Moving towards sustainable mobility will require improved understanding of the gendering processes across cycling mobility as the bicycle is a vector of sustainable lifestyles but gender norms still restrict its development. Research on gender and mobility neglects the sensitive materiality through which gender is constructed, and aesthetical approach of mobility infrastructure takes little interest so far in gender. To investigate how gender intersects with aesthetics in the ongoing formation of bicycling practices, equipment and infrastructure will lead to a better understanding of the potential of gender dynamics as an agent of change in creating more sustainable cities. The aesthetical experience of the bicycle has a key role in the continuous infrastructuring processes of bicycling practices, equipment and infrastructure. My main hypothesis is that the aesthetical experience also creates a tension with the dominant norms of feminity/masculinity, impacting the ongoing gender formation and deconstruction. The deconstruction of these unequal political categories constitutes an important step towards the development of more systemically sustainable cities. Focusing on French and Swiss cities at different stages in the implementation of their cycling policies, the research will develop an original interdisciplinary, comparative and multi-scale approach that deploys the concept of social imaginary to explore the spatial (micro)practices in relation to cycling materialities and ambiances, embodied experiences, meanings and representations, drawing on object-based, visual and mobile methodologies. It will cast light on affective and sensible resonances between infrastructure, environment, equipment and gendered bodies. In the longer term, to investigate the aesthetical dimension of mobility participates in the effort in research to overcome the curiously immaterial and disembodied conceptions of sustainability.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITE GUSTAVE EIFFEL · MARNE-LA-VALLEECoordinatorFrance
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union