IN-PERSON: Livable Cities – New York

Abstract

This paper investigates the potential of mobility infrastructure design as a space-shaping practice to produce and sustain socio-ecological agency. On the one hand, the accelerating and decelerating sensory dispositif of mobility infrastructure (rhythm of the facades, trees and furniture, materiality, lighting…) constrains the potential sensori-motor ways of being: mobility practices, pace and attentional regimes (Pelgrims 2020). On the other hand, it triggers specific pleasure and displeasure in the interaction between body and bike or more widely with the environment -resulting from reduced stress, excitement of danger, transgression, play, physical performance, movement quality, enchanting experience of the environment, …- which have “moral” fruitage (Scott 2020). Focusing on cycling infrastructure, this paper therefore examines the renewed aesthetical relationships and affective resonance to cycling infrastructure, underlain by a tension between paradoxical values, traditionally associated with social constructions of differentiated gender categories, of (1) modern emancipation (individualist, conquering, ‘masculine’) and (2) environmental consciousness (‘feminine’: care and attention to the vulnerability of others, herself, and animal and vegetal species). Could qualitative, landscaped infrastructure design transform our relationship to the world and intensify both the aesthetical experience of movement assimilated with personal freedom and the sensitive experience of the environment and its intrinsic fragility in the context of environmental crisis, opening up therefore a third way to resonate with mobility infrastructure? Pelgrims, Claire. 2020. ‘Normativity and Aesthetics. The Political Dimensions of Mobility Infrastructure’. In Ambiances, Alloæsthesia, 208–13. Scott, Nicholas A. 2020. Assembling Moral Mobilities. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.