Amidst the first summer days of 2024, 57 alumni from the “Planning the Cycling City” summer school, returned to the busy halls of the University of Amsterdam with one goal: to unite their multidisciplinary expertise to create a list of tangible policy actions for cycling futures. To guide their thinking, they used six alternative mobility narratives: Mobility as Play, Mobility as Social Interaction, Mobility as Commons, Mobility as Unnecessity, Mobility as South-North Nexus, and Mobility as Political. The days were spent brainstorming policy actions related to each narrative. Generating policy actions required the participants to be succinct and dynamic, considering potential futures that would be the consequences of such actions.
Now, in March 2025, the Urban Cycling Institute is happy to present the publication of these policy actions, collected in “A Manifesto for Cycling Futures”.
For the past 10 years, the Urban Cycling Institute, in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam, has been busy organizing “Planning the Cycling City Summer School”. And every July, around 20 professionals and students from all over the world meet in Amsterdam to follow a three-week intensive and immersive course in the world’s cycling capital. This unique environment, where practice and theory are fully merged, creates unbreakable bonds between the participants, and leads to the development of creative ideas and hopeful mindsets towards the future of urban cycling. For the 2024 reunion, alumni came from all the corners of the globe: Sydney, Puebla, Washington State, Singapore; to investigate current cycling realities, look towards cycling futures, and most importantly, reunite with friends.
Before arriving for the Global Learning Forum, alumni were asked to participate in interviews and submit writing to be compiled in the precursor to this publication, “Planning the Cycling City: A Field Guide to Learning for Transitions”. The field guide is filled with reflections on taking the Planning the Cycling City summer school, early memories of cycling, why people cycle, and what it takes to create more lasting cycling futures. The interviews, conducted by Michela Grasso, asked participants to speak about their decision to take the course and what challenges they’ve witnessed in implementing learnings in their hometowns.
You are holding our shared visions of urban mobility futures
What better way to encourage the development of creative ideas than thinking about the future? This is why, a starting point for the brainstorming process was simply imagining ideal and utopian mobility futures. Thinking about the future allows us to go beyond the borders and restrictions of the present, it gives the opportunity to imagine utopian worlds. These different visions had to be merged together to create a shared mobility future, but how exactly do we get to this ideal future? The answers are the policy actions, both concrete and utopian, presented in each chapter.
Narratives as Deep leverage seeds
The 50 policies of this manifesto are divided into 6 precise narratives, which were chosen due to encompassing the many dimensions of our daily life on the street. These narratives are Mobility as Play, Mobility as Social Interaction, Mobility as Commons, Mobility as Unnecessity, Mobility as South-North Nexus, and Mobility as Political.
Narratives are the deepest leverage points, they are at the core of our worldviews, societal beliefs and shared assumptions. And as such, they have shaped the space around us, including the mobility system that we are familiar with. The current and dominant mobility narrative focuses on streets as efficient pipelines that should enable individuals to move as quickly as possible from A to B. For this reason, Urban Cycling Institute decided to start from narrative seeds to reimagine a radically different future. From constructing streets were children can freely play, to corners where elderly people can sit and observe, to recognizing the fundamental inequalities shaping our streetscape, to changing the narratives in the media; this manifesto presents a series of policy actions that aim at transforming the street from a place to go through, to a place to linger and let life happen.
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