Dams and bicycles: Environmental politics and contested mobilities on the Four Rivers Bikeway in South Korea

ABSTRACT

What if cycling infrastructure such as nationwide bikeways becomes part of an engineering project that is an antithesis of sustainability? How do cyclists reconcile between their pride in cycling as a healthy way of appreciating nature and the environmental destruction observed along their cycling paths? This paper complicates the familiar characterization of cycling as easily compatible with sustainability agenda by examining South Korean cyclists’ response to the construction of the Four Rivers Bikeway. The Bikeway was planned as a part of the Four Rivers Restoration Project, the largest and most controversial environmental engineering work in the nation’s history. Whereas environmental groups, academics, and concerned citizens strongly opposed the so-called restoration project for its potentially devastating impact on the rivers’ ecosystem, many cyclists welcomed and then enjoyed the nationwide network of cycling paths built along the rivers. In doing so, the cyclists came to consider the new bicycle haven as a space insulated from broader environmental politics within which their riding was made possible. The healthy, nature-loving cyclists on the Four Rivers Bikeway manifested a peculiar kind of “cycling citizenship” – “the links people make between cycling and the worlds outside the bicycle” – that endorsed the state’s investment in cycling infrastructure while evading the question of the state’s responsibility for environmental destruction. This paper suggests that the future sustainability of cycling may not be considered separately from the broader concerns for environmental sustainability and the inevitable political debates around it.

KEYWORDS:

• Cycling infrastructure
• mobility
• environmental politics
• Four Rivers Bikeway
• Four Rivers Restoration Project
• South Korea

Acknowledgement

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at Harvard University, Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, and Cycling and Society Symposium Lancaster. I would like to thank all my colleagues who have offered feedback and help, especially Yeonsil Kang, Ruth Oldenziel, Victor Seow, Dennis Zuev, Sungeun Kim, and Miryang Kang. Editor Sven Kesselring and anonymous reviewers were very helpful for revising the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Karl Ulrich suggested the notion of an “environmental paradox” of cycling, according to which cycling might not contribute ultimately to the betterment of the environment partly because cyclists would become healthier, live longer, and consume more resources. My usage of the phrase differs from Ulrich’s and is intended to ask if some bicycle riders’ self-claimed environmental cause may conflict with, or even renounce, other groups’ environmental concerns.

2. There was a strong disagreement between the government and the critics on what to call the structures built in the rivers. The government claimed that it would build “weirs” – relatively small structures that would help regulate water flow – whereas the critics argued that they were actually “dams”, which are larger than weirs and considered to block the flow of water (Choi 2011).

3. Therefore, the literal translation of gukto will be “national land” or “nation’s land”, but here I choose to use “homeland” for the sake of readability.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) [NRF-2018R1A5A7025409]