Architecture, Building and Planning - Theses
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ItemBuilding resilience through Community Bike Workshops: the grassroots case of The Bike Shed in CERES( 2021)In light of the urban challenges to overcome the climate change crisis, car dependent societies require an urgent behavioural shift in the transport paradigm. Supporting this aim, Community Bike Workshops (CBW) seek to empower existent and potential cyclists through technical bike educational strategies, increase their sense of security on the streets and provide a space to foster a community. Based on Sustainable Transition approaches, these niche innovations may contribute to large-scale urban transitions by increasing on street cycling demand and pressuring top down efforts for more and better cycling infrastructure. CBW could potentially trigger deep substantial system change for building the required adaptive capacity of societies in a changing climate. Despite their multiple benefits, they are poorly acknowledged and lack support from transport strategies and general top-down efforts. Intertwined to the outcomes of these environmentally friendly initiatives, is the slippery yet useful concept of Resilience, a key aspect in climate change management. This notion has guided policymakers in understanding cities’ vulnerabilities and opportunities to orient their strategies, plans and projects. Through an adapted mixed evaluation method, developed based on the analysis of resilience at three measurement scales -City, Community and Socio Ecological System- this research seeks to answer to what extent CBW are influencing the resilience of cities. Building on the experience of my own community as a case study -The Bike Shed in CERES-, this protocol will help understand how these community organisations are influencing the adaptive capacity of the wider city scale and potentially provide policymakers the incentives to further support these initiatives. Considering the dynamic nature and ethos of these types of organisations, and to further promote the identified potential of CBW, this research and general recommendations aim to improve the resilience of the communities that gather toward cycling activism.