Bicycles Create Change

Recently I’ve been preoccupied with maps.

Maps are ubiquitous and we’ve all used them at some stage:  schematic maps of bus routes,  locating ‘you are here’ to explore a city, finding the nearest train station, driving to a new destination or going on holiday. As a bike rider, I use maps to check and navigate direction, connection, location or distance, and points of interest.

Maps are used to communicate information about places.

Historically, under the guise of ‘exploration’, maps enabled geo-political or economic motives such as colonial expansion, mercantile ambitions and violent extractivism. Such utility speaks to the epitome of rationality: objective, cold and calculated. 

But maps are more than just geospatial wayfaring tools.

Maps are also gendered. Mapping the physical world has been, until more recently, the domain of masculine perceptions and control of resources, governance, power and administration. Maps of yore were solely created by male cartographers for male users. In doing so, they showed a very selective promotion of what was considered ‘significant’ and detailed interpretations as to ‘what is on the ground’ or located in environments – both physical and socio-cultural. Female and non-binary ways of moving, traveling, experiencing and journeying have been largely ignored or overlooked in cartography.

Thankfully, things have changed since then – and so have maps and maps users.

As part of my bicycle research, I read a lot about bike riding in different spaces, places, terrains and environments. As a New Materialisms researcher, I’m especially interested in embodiment, relationality, movement and the affective intensities of bike riding.

This means I’m look at maps differently and I’m interested in considering how gender and emotionality feature in mapping.

Maps elicit emotions: 

• I feel anger knowing modern maps negate the abuse of indigenous peoples
• I feel frustration when the place I want to get to is not shown on the map
• I feel satisfaction when I finally get to the location I want
• I feel connected when I recognise a familiar route
• I feel nostalgia when I trace trails of past beloved adventures

Today, I am thinking of the absences in physical cartographies and considering:

How can maps/mapping better attend to the intersectionality of gendered journeys, bike riding and emotionality?

I thought I’d share a few of the initial considerations I’ve come across so far.

Cyclists’ participation in Emotional Mapping

Emotional mapping is an approach to capture how users of a space ‘feel’ or emotionally relate to spaces. This approach is used by those interested in engaging with how end uses feel as a way to enhance functionality, design and process, people like educators, policymakers and city planners.

As many cities work to encourage more bike riding, cyclists are a central target user group who have significant value to add by expressing their emotional reactions to routes and places. Cyclists experience spaces definitely to other users and have very clear reactions to lines, paths and points that are shown statically on a map of the city, but yet manifest emotionally, such as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ places, or places to avoid because of anxiety, safety fears, or desire lines for the familiar and ‘fun’ routes. Such emotionally-charged choices and behaviours are not adequately represented on static maps – hence the addition of emotional mapping.

Emotional mapping is volunteered geographical information and/or crowdsourcing as a way to boost citizen participation in urban planning and it provides a platform for alternative voices and experiences to be better accounted for.

Emotional mapping foregrounds the importance of natural and built environments for cyclists, as well as the range of feelings engendered by cycling close to car traffic or in the street with cars, or traversing natural environments and obstacles.

Emotional Cartographies: Technologies of the Self

This entry comes direct from the ever-inspiring Brainpickings by Maria Popva. Say no more.

Emotional Cartography is an excellent, free book on emotion mapping, featuring a collection of essays by artists, designers, psychologists, cultural researchers, futurists and neuroscientists. Together, they explore the political, social and cultural implications of dissecting the private world of human emotion with bleeding-edge technology.

From art projects to hi-tech gadgets, the collection looks at emotion in its social context. It’s an experiment in cultural hacking — a way to bridge the individual with the collective through experiential interconnectedness.

Download the book in PDF here, for 53 glorious pages of technology, art and cultural insight.

Bike T-shirt with Map Icons 

I found this innovative bike T-shirt design by StorySpark on Etsy.  Although not technically a map in the true sense of the word,  I found this generative for a number of reasons.  I like the provocation that instead of mapping spaces, it was using map icons to trace experiences with the bike as opposed to on the bike. I like that it’s described as a ‘Pathfinder Cyclist Graphic’  and that it’s gender-neutral. 

When I first saw it, I saw it I thought it was using cosmology and celestial constellations which I thought that was cool, but when I looked closer and realised it was using familiar map icons, it worked just as well.

It also speaks to my ethical compunctions to support artists (an innovative and unique creative output) and the environment (this eco-friendly T-shirt is made From organic cotton and recycled polyester). I see this as a wonderful example to think more divergently about ‘mapping’ and is a creative reframing of mapping bicycle experiences anew.

Heat maps for cycling flows

Cycling heat maps show the intensity of movement in spaces. Usually, a cycling heat map is city-based and created by cyclists who download an app which tracks ride data. This is then collated into a visualisation to enable new perspective and insights to emerge that might not have been considered before.

This is useful to represent changes in movement and places over time. So things that are not shown on traditional static maps, like traffic jams, peak hours, changes in routes, most used routes (and when) are documented. There are also a few women’s only heat maps underway so as to compare ‘general’ users to ascertain differences.

What I like about these heat maps is that changes in flow is foregrounded and temporality (time) can more directly be folded into the map/ped/ing experience. I also like that the ‘heat’ terminology hints at the heat of bodies (riders), warm climate (environmental temperature or humidity) and ‘hot spots’ (such as avoidances, blockages or issues). Some pretty cool future potentialities here.

Also the use of ‘heat’ body 

Here is an example of a cycling heat map project for Berlin, Vienna and Graz.

Using Strava GPS to be a bike ride map artist

This idea has been around for a while and many bike riders would have seen these before. I’m not sure how well-known they are outside of cycling communities. These are fun, dynamic, creative and wholly bike-focused, movement-based moment-in-time expressions of user (re)mapping. These approaches reinvent modern mapping with the user reinterpreting the map using technology which could not have been achieved previously. These are also freely available and shared. 

Here, bike rides transcend exercise, competition and transportation to press into more unfamiliar (and exciting) territories such as public art and performance. Kudos to the bike rider-creative-(re)mapper whose interpretation and commitment in order to produce these pieces: I  appreciate the careful planning and organisation needed to make these pieces happen. There is also a telescoping aspect of the riders understanding their trip as being (literally) larger and more significant than just the route in front of them…I love the idea of riding for a purpose that can be seen from outer space! Here, a known map which is a social product embodying a range of histories and ideologies in and of itself is iteratively reimagined by each individual rider into a (re)newed vision, commentary or reality. 

These are a few entry points so far and each have their own usefulness, limitations and possibilities. 

I’ll be exploring other ways to think differently about how mapping might better attend to gendered bike riding and emotionality and let you know what I find.

I hope you enjoyed this thought-experiment.

Enjoy mapping your next ride!