Themes of This Course
–Motornormativity
While this course is about the bicycle, it also has to be about the automobile.  In 1967 the French author Bernard Charbonneau claimed that the automobile was the defining feature of modern society.  That may be less so today with the advent of smart phones, but it is still worth thinking about.  What has been the relation between the automobile and the bicycle?  How can the bicycle exist in an environment that is dominated by the automobile?

–Different Groups/Different Meanings
One of the core ideas of the field of STS is called the “social construction of technology,”  which says that different groups see a technology differently.  While a bike is one thing, it means different things to different groups of people.  Bike scholar Melody Hoffmann calls the bike a “rolling signifier,” because its meaning changes “in different spaces, with different people, and in different cultures.”  To develop successful programs to encourage people to bike, it is important to understand the different groups involved and the different meanings these groups attribute to it.

–Geography, policy, history
Why do countries and cities have such widely differing levels of urban bike ridership?  Is it geography?  Government policies?  History?  We will try to untangle this throughout the course.

–How does change happen?
Many people want to change the world.  In this course we will use the example of the bicycle and bicycle infrastructure to examine how change has happened.  What role has politics played? What role have activists played?

–The Fifteen Minute City
The fifteen minute city is a concept pioneered by Carlos Moreno.a French-Columbian urbanist.  The idea is to have a city where people have every place they need to go in their everyday life within a 15 minute bike ride.  As we look at cities, and as we look at where we live, we will want to know, what can a person get to in fifteen minutes from where they live?  The idea of the fifteen minute city is a reminder that bike infrastructure by itself is not sufficient to make a city bikeable.  The city itself must be (re)designed for biking.