A gender perspective on bicycle-powered mobility visions

This paper uses a gender lens to analyse how bicycle-powered mobility futures can be articulated as counter-hegemonic alternatives to automobility. Drawing on interviews with transport professionals and activists, we interpret participants’ visions as efforts to rearticulate dominant understandings of everyday life, space, and time. Even though automobility continues to structure the horizon, we find that it is being contested as a hegemonic formation. Our findings suggest that challenging automobility requires more than a critique of cars: it necessitates the construction of new articulations that reconfigure space, scale, temporalities and values. Participants’ visions highlight the need to centre human-scale mobility, incorporate care as an organising principle, and attend to diverse experiences, including those shaped by gender. We argue that fostering counter-hegemonic mobility also requires building alliances across professional, institutional, and national contexts, enabling shared imaginaries and collective action. Crucially, in line with Laclau and Mouffe, rearticulation is not only discursive but material: it demands shifts in urban planning, teaching, research, and everyday mobility practices. By foregrounding the gendered politics of mobility and highlighting the potential of bicycle-powered futures to destabilise automobility, this paper contributes to debates on mobility imaginaries, counter-hegemonic transformation, and the interconnections between gender, space, and future transport planning.