Connecting City and Countryside? Faces of Cycling Mobility in Belgium, 1890–1914

Abstract

Focusing on Belle Époque Belgium, this paper analyses the changes the advent of cycling and its new mobility engendered in the sociocultural dialectics between city and countryside. By studying the interwoven, often contradictory motivations behind and representations of bicycle use, an attempt is made to determine the factors leading to cyclists’ cultural imagining of both city and countryside, how this was shaped in discourse and practice and how this evolved under the influence of the bicycle’s shifting social connotations after 1900. We focus especially on organized forms of Belgian cycling such as urban cycling clubs and national cycling associations.

Keywords:

• cycling
• countryside
• urban culture
• social policy
• mobility
• leisure

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stijn Knuts

Stijn Knuts studied cultural history at the University of Leuven. He is currently working on a dissertation on cycling in Belgium before the Second World War. His publications focus on sociocultural aspects of cycling such as the relationship between the bicycle and nineteenth-century urban spaces or processes of local and (sub)national identity formation through bicycle racing.

Pascal Delheye

Pascal Delheye studied physical education, sport management and history at the Universities of Leuven and Lyon. His doctoral research focused on the history of physical education and its origin as an academic discipline. After postdoctoral research at the Universities of Leuven and Berkeley, he became Professor of Sport History at the University of Leuven in 2008.