this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2024
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Solarpunk Urbanism
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A community to discuss solarpunk and other new and alternative urbanisms that seek to break away from our currently ecologically destructive urbanisms.
- Henri Lefebvre, The Right to the City — In brief, the right to the city is the right to the production of a city. The labor of a worker is the source of most of the value of a commodity that is expropriated by the owner. The worker, therefore, has a right to benefit from that value denied to them. In the same way, the urban citizen produces and reproduces the city through their own daily actions. However, the the city is expropriated from the urbanite by the rich and the state. The right to the city is therefore the right to appropriate the city by and for those who make and remake it.
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Yeah if bicycles had been discovered before fossil fuels I think history would look very very different and it is a great point.
It is interesting looking forward too, 20th century might have been all about fossil fuel burning cars but the future is electric bicycles and tricycles. After all, the bicycle as a form of human powered transportation was perfected in the development of mountain bike, road bike and cruiser bike types during the later half of the 20th century, and so as a “cutting edge” technology electric bicycles take almost no new development and R&D to figure out what works.
Certainly a myriad of forms of electric bicycles will arise (like the bakfiets), but it is interesting how titanic a shift the adoption of electric bicycles will be and yet they didn’t require the development of totally new technologies to make this transportation technology function. Take a mountain bicycle, strap a battery to it and boom you have by far the most effective form of transportation ever developed in terms of a human carry-able vehicle that can transport you hundreds of miles over virtually any kind of terrain (so long as people have at least walked that route enough to make a trail).
The battery pack slots on electric bicycles will become the place people strap the power banks everyone is increasingly carrying around to power their mobile devices. I heard someone describe their perspective as a tank crewman about how infantry carrying around big heavy rifles is silly, they pointed out “why carry a gun when your gun can carry you?” and I feel the same exact way about electric battery banks on electric bicycles.
I know most of this reply has been in relation to the future of the bicycle, but the incredible explosion of electric bicycle use that is happening (and will continue to happen all over the world in rich and poor countries) I think necessarily points to the fact that bicycles were an innovation with a lot of latent possibility that was passed over by history for quite a long time (and bicycles just kept getting better mostly in the background). I think it points to the validity of your question, what would have happened had history focused on the bicycle sooner?
We had bikes before cars, that wasn't the problem. People wanted the luxury of cars. You could go faster in heated comfort along with your entire family and cargo for hundreds of miles with next to no effort in virtually any kind of weather, something bikes still can not do.
Even if we had modern tech with bikes 200 years ago the rise of cars was inevitable due to their convenience and low cost at the time. Combine that with the push of the car industry and that most people were unaware of the true cost of the damage cars were causing, and bikes never stood a chance. Even now, bikes simply can't replace cars for everyone but at least they can make a dent in the problems that got us here.
Modern armies still have infantry despite what the tank and artillery crews say because they are useful.