The museum as a free space to imagine velotopia

The Museum as a Free Space to Imagine Velotopia The paper presents findings of a study that has sought to understand the role museums can play in the urban cycling renaissance. It has been in museums’ remit since the UNESCO 2012 forum identified them, through their cultural partnerships, as vital enablers of sustainable development. It would help the museums and bike planning sectors to know if museums provide a more cooperative space for blue sky thinking workshops than city halls, where, we hypothesize, stakeholders are more likely to revert to an adversarial style of communication.

The research team includes a leading author on public engagement in the museums sector, the curator of a national travelling exhibition telling the history of one nation’s cycling, and a leading author on ways futurist visions can inspire a bicycle urbanism and architecture. Our project has involved following the travelling exhibition and using it as an occasion to draw civic and community leaders together to discuss the ambitious notion of the host city having Velotopian spaces implanted within it.

The exhibition explores how historical events, cultural perspectives, social processes and political-economic dynamics have shaped not just how people have thought about, interacted with and produced bicycles, but also how cityscapes and attitudes towards mobility technologies are being challenged and rethought because of concerns about rapid social and environmental change. It has been curated in the knowledge that museums hold considerable promise as places that might help our societies re-imagine themselves in order to meet the challenges of the Anthropocene. They are recognised as places of sociality, of shared learning and discovery, that have the capacity to propose and normalise new understandings of the world.

Regarding the idea of Velotopia, this is an imaginary concept like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre or Ebeneza Howard’s Garden City. It has been developed by asking how a city with the same population as the ultimate car-based conurbation, Dallas Fort-Worth, with 6,000,000 people, might have the same average commute times (30 minutes per trip) while relying almost exclusively on slow (15kph/9mph) bicycle transport. The dense-yet-permeable urban morphology, and 15kmØ urban growth boundary resulting from this line of thinking could, hypothetically, be implanted in redevelopment districts linked via greenways in any city.

The images below show the chain of heterotopias (“other spaces”) that result when this idea is applied to one of our case study cities.

Workshops begin with a bike tour to gather a sense of the scale of the city and the strongest available non-vehicular routes. In most cities we find these follow former bulk haulage routes (rivers, rail corridors, etc.) and thus have the potential of unlocking low use industrial land for

some bicycle oriented redevelopment. Participants then have a guided tour of the exhibition and talks, before working with maps to identify a sphere of influence and the potential therein for the pursuance of the velotopian dream.

Transcripts of interviews conducted during these workshops reveal a willingness to corporate on this task by otherwise adversarial parties. Reasons citied include the historical perspective provided by the exhibition, the broad-brush nature “Velotopian� planning, and the free space provided by the museum.

The Museum as a Free Space to Imagine Velotopia

By Prof. Dr. Angelina Russo, Dr. Daniel Oakman and Dr. Steven Fleming Corresponding Author: Angelina Russo, PhD Professor of Cultural Practice Associate Dean Research Faculty of Arts and Design University of Canberra ACT 2601 Telephone +61 (0) 6201 5504 Mobile +61 447 177 860