IN-PERSON Barcelona. Section A

Abstract

Simmel (1971) long ago noted that a unifying and timeless heritage of the city as a form of life is its unbroken continuity as a primary site of business and commerce. In this way, the city must continue to facilitate the practice of business and commerce as fundamental to its persistence. It is precisely that question of the persistence of the city that finds it, relentlessly, as a site of contestation in relation to innumerable aspects of the city as a form of life. One such contest that has been playing out in North America over the past decade has to do with conflicts over proposed bike lanes in various cities. In brief, bike lanes are seen to endanger the integrity of the city as the site and centre of production and circulation of exchange value as a consequence of the interference it is believed to represent in relation to the automobile and its capacity to circulate into, through, and out of the city, and where the automobile is seen to be fundamental to the practice of business and commerce (Featherstone 2004). The extensive literature in relation to the seemingly ceaseless conflicts over bike lanes North American cities often characterizes them as part of “urban space wars” that reflect ‘political’ battles over the issue of the allocation of road space in the city (Cox + Koglin 2020). Such a quantitative and functional conception of the problem, we propose, leaves the qualitative and aesthetic unaccounted for, what Ranciere (1995) calls the uncounted. Conflicts always reflect a crisis over meaning; in this case, the conflict over bike lanes reflects a crisis over the meaning of the city. Weber (1958) enables us to appreciate the city as two-bodied, both functional and aesthetic (Blum 2023, 30), and it is that tension, and its ambiguity, that we will explore and develop as the unspoken and untheorized impulse that animates the conflict over bike lanes in cities using a recent conflict in the city of Toronto as a case study.