2025 in Gdańsk sees Velo-city’s 45th year, and the 9th that BYCS has attended. In this piece James Crossley, Creative & Comms Consultant for BYCS, looks at the programme of powerful cycling advocacy that took place in Poland, and considers the possibilities for cycling conferences of the future.
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First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. – Octavia E. Butler
Cycling to work, the market, or school, can certainly be considered a habit. However it takes quite some power of imagination to ride a cycle in a city — pushing past the myriad barriers of traffic, geography, and access, to the reward of active, free, healthy, and happy mobility. It also takes quite some imagination to organise a conference of cycling advocacy; bringing together activists and thinkers from around the world to grow what is potentially a system shaking movement. And furthermore, for that conference to situate its central theme (Energising Solidarity) in the 1980s trade union forming strikes of dockworkers in Gdańsk, draws from some of the most radical imaginations of history; those who organised, struck, and overcame the austerity and poor labour conditions foisted on workers by the state.
We have the possibility to transform the world, cities, and cycling. The following are a few highlights from the Velo-city 2025 programme that get our imaginations buzzing:
Can you imagine a city where everyone has equal access to healthcare? With cycling as a key component in enabling and supporting this? Led by Cities for Better Health, the session: Saddle Up to Transform Cities for Better Health and More Inclusion, workshopped success stories of cycling and health to inspire cities to further embrace cycling as a key lever for improving public health, reducing inequities, and fostering joy and well-being among the next generation.
Once a symbol of women’s emancipation, in many countries, statistics reveal a significant gender gap in bicycle use. Breaking barriers: Empowering women’s mobility was a session focusing on the work being done to keep breaking down the walls stopping women and gender-diverse people cycling. While it might seem wild that an imagination is needed to see a world free of the patriarchy’s gender-based inequality, this fight is still very much being fought. BYCS, representing the TandEm programme of women cycling trainers training women cycling trainers, was proud to stand on stage alongside some of those speaking, supporting women to imagine a better cycling future for their cities.
The final session to highlight here is the Cycling to School Programmes Showcase. While not the most out of the box title, referring to the idea of getting kids on bikes early, sparks an entire world of imagination. From the cognitive development children experience when they move through streets on a cycle rather than obscured inside a vehicle, to the creative education programmes helping kids (and their caregivers) reshape their cycling habits, we were thrilled to see children and their particular needs brought to the forefront at the conference. If we’re looking at imagining better cities, then who better to ask than kids, true masters of creativity!
So where can cycling imagination take us now? We know that it’s not the bicycle that needs reimagining, but what about the cities surrounding them, the policies controlling them, and the campaigning and programming to get there, including conferences like this one? What would we want to see in future editions of Velo-city? What might a cycling conference in 25 years look like? What if we go beyond incremental imagination and step into the realm of exponential imaginaries?
Who is giving the talks? We discussed programmes for children, but perhaps a plenary session with kids and crayons might bring even more insight?
Who will listen to the talks? Todays conference moves between cities mostly in Europe, which takes huge work on the part of the organisers to ensure that its message continues to spread. Of course bringing it further would be one step, with the majority of the world’s population, as well as rates of urban population growth being in the Global South.
Where will it take place? Can we dream of a conference that doesn’t need a conference centre or paying audience? A decentralised conference with talks in squares, bike rides through residential districts, workshops in community centres, and a powerful teaching from civil society to attending “experts”.
What barriers would we be discussing and breaking? While it’s nice to imagine that there will be none left decades from now, the reality of the world today means that the struggle is enormous and long going. It is with imagination on our side however that we will persevere.
When thinking in the realm of imaginaries, sci-fi, and particularly Black feminist sci-fi, is a beacon. It might seem like a stretch to try to link Black feminist sci-fi with cycling advocacy conferences, but when we push for cycling in a world of cars, we’re pushing for justice in a world of greed and violence. Themes that many authors deal with in this genre, in a form that can be understood by many, especially when “real” world examples become taboo and criminalised to discuss openly. In the words of Octavia E Butler, “Repressive societies always seemed to understand the danger of “wrong” ideas.” This reminds us that “wrong” ideas can often be the most powerful forces for positive change. If cycling is a challenge to dominant systems, perhaps it is time to embrace its radical potential and embrace the idea of cycling being dangerous; not to the person riding, but to the systems that hold us back from getting on the saddle in the first place. Car-centric urban planning, the fossil fuel industry, and infrastructure policies that prioritise speed over safety, are challenged by the simple act of cycling. In that sense, a flowing bicycle lane can be a quiet rebellion in motion.
Perhaps where the imaginary of a future we’re striving for through the Velo-city conference and connected work is most visible, is already here, in the cycle parade that happens as part of the programme every year. Conference delegates take to the streets on a semi-protected route through the city, ringing bells and sharing cycling joy for passers-by to see. For a moment, it feels like a cycling paradise; but part of the power here is that the conference is directly engaging with the discomfort of confrontation, of danger. Behind steel and glass drivers sit waiting, engines growling, experiencing cycling joy as traffic violence. Here we allow our imagination to exist in the now, as do critical mass rides around the world every last Friday of the month.
So when we imagine cycling conferences, perhaps the most radical imaginary is enacting what we already have without fear. Being on the streets, truly transforming the host city, at least for a few hours. Nothing so out of the box needed.
To finish, one final quote from Butler:
There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.
We don’t need to reinvent the bicycle, but we do need to re-imagine the world on which our wheels roll.
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Header image: A Chronocycle from The Star Diaries (1971) by Polish writer Stanislav Lem, found in https://revolutionaryfilm.wordpress.com/2016/04/18/bicycles-and-science-fiction-procytes-and-time-machines/