Mobile therapeutic ‘home’ territories during the COVID-19 pandemic and moments of being well pedalling

ABSTRACT

This paper moves beyond biomedical accounts of cycling health benefits to consider the situated, emergent, embodied, and relational notion of being well. In doing so, we draw on Deleuze and Guattari’s account of affect to advance a conceptual framework of mobile therapeutic ‘home’ territories. We understand moments of being well as an emergent affective capacity generated by the coming together of socio-material relations in the process of territorialization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Our rhizoanalysis is based on semi-structured interviews and sketches of cycling reactivation research in inner-city Sydney, Australia, in 2020 during the first pandemic lockdown. We demonstrate that for those working at home with access to coasts and parks, riding a bike became an important enabler of becoming and being well in moments of competitiveness and playfulness. Such moments emerged from the intensified affective force of social-material relations that comprise pedalling ‘home’ territories as ‘lifestyle sport’ or as ‘active free-play’. In doing so, we contribute to debates in social and cultural geography on riding a bike.

Resumen

Este artículo va más allá de las explicaciones biomédicas de los beneficios para la salud del ciclismo para considerar la noción situada, emergente, encarnada y relacional del estar bien. Al hacerlo, nos basamos en la explicación del afecto de Deleuze y Guattari para avanzar en un marco conceptual de territorios terapéuticos móviles del ‘hogar’. Entendemos los momentos de estar bien como una capacidad afectiva emergente generada por el encuentro de relaciones socio materiales en un proceso de territorialización, desterritorialización y re-territorialización. Nuestro rizoanálisis se basa en entrevistas semiestructuradas y bocetos de investigaciones sobre la reactivación del ciclismo en el centro de la ciudad de Sydney, Australia, en 2020 durante las primeras restricciones de aislamiento en la pandemia. Demostramos que para quienes trabajan desde casa con acceso a costas y parques, andar en bicicleta se convirtió en un importante facilitador para llegar a ser y estar bien en momentos de competitividad y felicidad. Tales momentos surgieron de la fuerza afectiva intensificada de las relaciones socio materiales que comprenden el pedaleo en territorios ‘de origen’ como un ‘deporte de estilo de vida’ o como un ‘juego libre activo’. Al hacerlo, contribuimos a los debates en geografía social y cultural sobre ciclismo.

Résumé

Cet article va au-delà des témoignages biomédicaux concernant les bénéfices du vélo pour la santé et offre une réflexion sur la notion relationnelle, concrète, émergente et située de se sentir bien. Pour cela, nous nous appuyons sur le concept des affects de Deleuze et Guattanpour offrir une structure conceptuelle de territoires de « foyers » thérapeutiques mobiles. Nous considérons les moments ou l’on se sent bien en tant que capacité affective émergente engendrée par la rencontre de liens sociaux et matériels dans un processus de territorialization, de déterritorialization et de reterritorialisation. Notre rhizoanalyse repose sur des entretiens semi-structures et des esquisses de recherche sur la reprise du cyclisme dans le centre de Sydney, en Australie, en 2020, pendant le premier confinement de la pandémie.Nous démontrons que pour les personnes qui télétravaillaient et avaient accès au littoral ou à des parcs, faire du vélo est devenu un facteur important pour devenir et rester en forme dans des moments de compétition et de loisirs. Ceux-ci sont nés de la force affective intensifiée des rapports sociaux et matériels qui incluent pédaler dans les territoires « du foyer » comme « sport mode de vie » ou « jeu libre actif ». Ce faisant, nous apportons notre contribution aux discussions de la géographie sociale et culturelle concernant la pratique cycliste.

KEYWORDS:

• Assemblage
• affect
• rhythm
• natural environments
• pandemic geographies

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• Ensamblaje
• afecto
• ritmo
• ambientes naturales
• geografías pandémicas

MOTS CLEFS:

• Agencement
• affect
• rythme
• environnements naturels
• géographie de la pandémie

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted people’s daily movement through stay-at-home orders, the closure of non-essential places and by placing limitations on public and private gatherings. Research has since revealed an increase in poor mental health during ‘lockdown’ periods, especially in countries with the toughest restrictions. This was largely due to the loss of personal space, strained relationships, stress, boredom, and loneliness (Robinson et al., 2021). At the same time, emerging geographical scholarship has started to engage with how public and private ‘natural environments’ helped people to cope with pandemic uncertainties through mentally and physically rejuvenating activities, such as gardening (Gordon-Rawlings & Russo, 2023; Marsh et al., 2021), ocean swimming (Bates & Moles, 2022; Jellard & Bell, 2021; Wheaton et al., 2021) and walking (Doughty et al., 2023). Dominant across this research is a more relational way of understanding therapeutic landscapes.

Following Conradson (2005, p. 338), therapeutic landscapes are considered as ‘a relational outcome, as something that emerges through a complex set of transactions between a person and their broader socio-environmental setting’. Relational conceptualizations of therapeutic landscapes stress the notion of ‘being well’ rather than ‘wellbeing’. While the two concepts are related, the idea of being well bridges the more static wellbeing definitions that capture current personal conditions as either eudaimonic (leading a meaningful life, realizing one’s potential or capabilities) or hedonic (pleasure experienced, displeasure avoided). Thus, becoming well emphasizes the ongoing, relational, and situated process towards personal flourishing, while also acknowledging the social and material configurations that inform being well can shift, transform, and adapt over time. This paper adopts the being well frame.

This paper contributes to therapeutic landscapes of well being via an enquiry into the therapeutic benefits of cycling physical activity in the context of COVID-19 spatial restrictions in inner-city Sydney, Australia (Andrews et al., 2021). Variations in the severity of pandemic restrictions make it challenging to compare cycling engagement across cities (Buehler & Pucher, 2021; Spinney, 2021; Wild, 2020). In affluent inner-city suburbs of Sydney, cycling participation increased significantly during the pandemic (Powell, 2021). Factors that contributed to the increase include already existing pre-pandemic leisure cycling rates, the desire for socially-distanced outdoor activities, absence of traffic concerns, increased cycling infrastructure (such as cycle lanes), and access to parks and beaches. While some active cyclists increased cycling participation, others saw it as an opportunity to reactivate cycling after a long break (Cycling and Walking Australia and New Zealand CWANZ, 2021; Waitt & Stanes, 2022). This paper specifically engages with this cohort to understand how cycling reactivation enhanced pandemic life in inner-city Sydney during the first COVID-19 lockdown.

Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) assemblage thinking captures the fluidity of health, sport, and fitness geographies (Andrews & Duff, 2019; Bell et al., 2023; Latham & Layton, 2020). Assemblage thinking provides a framework that can integrate cycling kinaesthetics; that is the heightened awareness of sensations, body movement and positioning associated with pedalling, steering, and balancing on a bicycle. In the context of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) philosophy, we offer the concept of ‘mobile therapeutic home territories’ that draws on the related notions of ‘affect’, ‘refrains of rhythm’ and ‘home territory’. Bringing these concepts into dialogue speaks to the cathartic and flourishing potential of repetitive cycling kinaesthetics, predicated on a desire for relaxation, comfort, and safety. The sense and sensibilities of routine mobilities are conceived to give rise to meanings of cycling, selves, routes, and places.

This paper sits at the intersection of health, sports, and mobility geographies. In sports geographies, Andrews (2017) and Latham and Layton (2020) argue that how amateur sport and fitness practices enliven cities is often overlooked in geographical research on sport and physical activity. They point to the well-established health and wellbeing benefits across various disciplines for those who have access to social infrastructure that facilitate sport and fitness, including safe sidewalks, parks, gyms, leisure centres and swimming pools.

In health geographies, Duff (2016) and Smith (2021), offer the notion of ‘being well’ to challenge biomedical understandings of wellbeing. Rather than emphasizing physiological aspects of an individual’s physical functioning, they emphasize that being well is a situated, unfolding and rhizomatic process that transcends fixed identities, structures, and norms. They conceive of being well as emergent within and through the sense and sensibilities of different socio-material territories (assemblages) that comprise a sense of self and place. In turning to more-than-human approaches, we build on the work of Butterfield and Martin (2016) who coined the term ‘affective sanctuaries’. This work draws on assemblage thinking to critically address how the experiences of socio-material relationships of everyday routines that comprise ‘third places’ can offer emotional refuge for individuals by generating a ‘home-like’ atmosphere (belonging, security and comfort). Elsewhere, Jellard and Bell (2021) discuss the connections between routine engagement with physical exercise, moving, sensing, being well, and a sense of place as ‘home’.

In cycling mobilities research, Jones (2012) and Waitt, Buchanan, Lea, et al. (2021) illustrate the potential of Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage thinking via the interpretation of emotional and affectual moments in how, where, when, and why people journey by bike. Insights have been offered to cycling bodies’ vulnerabilities. These are examined through the unchosen and unforeseen circumstances of how bodies, materials and ideas come together when riding a bike (Butterfield & Martin, 2016; Jones, 2012; Waitt et al., 2023b; Waitt, Buchanan, Fuller, et al., 2021; Waitt, Buchanan, Lea, et al., 2021). What is under-researched, however, is how cycling sensations may also produce moments of being well (Waitt & Buchanan, 2023). In the case of reactivated cycling, our attention turns to the kinaesthetic motion of pedalling, and how individuals become well through the sense (including smells, sights, touch, speed, proximity, rhythm, and timing) and sensations of pedalling specific routes (including joy, comfort, safety, relaxation, and fear). The critical utility of mobile therapeutic home territories as a process of territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization helps rethinks physical activity to help facilitate more just sustainable urban futures.

The article evolves over four sections. In the following section, we review different approaches to how cycling can be conceived as therapeutic and introduce our heuristic framework. Section Three explains the research approach with reactivated bike riders during a time when mobility was restricted. In Section Four, we analyse how participants practiced and experienced cycling during the pandemic as either a lifestyle sport or free-play activity based on our notion of therapeutic home territories. Finally, our conclusion discusses our contributions to social and cultural geography and for health policy.

Cycling and being well: advancing mobile therapeutic ‘home’ territories

Cycling can be conceived as therapeutic in three ways. The first is in the therapeutic value of cycling to wellbeing by improving physical and psychological health. This approach has been pivotal in discourse on healthy and liveable cities (Australian Bicycle Council, 2010; Garrad et al., 2021). Cycling is a known low-cost solution and accessible to obesity prevention, improved life expectancy, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, high blood pressure and depression (Basset et al., 2008; Lusk et al., 2010). Consequently, cycling promotion has been included in various healthcare strategies (H. J. Chatterjee et al., 2018). However, within liveable city scholarship, questions about health attributes, and how they can be improved, is dominated by the biomedical body (Gordon-Larsen et al., 2009; Hamer & Chida, 2008; Huy et al., 2008). Physiological health is based on the evaluation of ‘objective’ circumstances, which might include for example, the intensity of physical activity and duration of exertion (Davis & Parkin, 2015), the potential harm from air pollution (Tainio et al., 2016) and Body Mass Index (BMI) (indicators of obesity) (Kroesen, 2014).

The second way cycling is conceived as therapeutic is via the subjective experience of movement, people, and things. The hedonic wellbeing benefits of cycling that prioritizes individual experiences and perceptions are well documented in the transport and leisure studies literature (K. Chatterjee et al., 2019). This includes research on the lowering of perceived stress and improved self-reported health from both leisure (Zuxanek et al., 1998) and commuter cycling (Gatersleben & Uzzell, 2007). Böcker et al. (2016), for instance, found commuter cycling satisfaction in Rotterdam to be positively associated with green space and negatively associated with ‘bad’ weather, such as extreme temperature and weather events. Likewise, Glackin and Beale’s (2017) analysis of recreational road cyclists’ satisfaction in England reported the greater hedonic wellbeing benefits from exercising in green space that helped cope with mental challenges with their lives, including experiences of calm and opportunities for exploration. These studies have helped to identify some of the contextual factors that facilitate wellbeing riding a bike. Yet, this literature overlooks how being well involves finding meaning in moments of emotional and affective intensity.

Our attention to emotion and affect turns us to the third way that cycling and therapeutic landscapes intersect. Here we attend to more-than-human approaches to health, fitness and mobilities (Andrews & Duff, 2019; Latham & Layton, 2020; Waitt & Buchanan, 2023). How we conceive mobile therapeutic ‘home’ territories derives from Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) discussion of affect, refrains of rhythms and home territory.

Affect can be conceptualized as pre-individual forces that augment or diminish a body’s capacity to act, engage or connect (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Anderson’s (2009) concept of affective atmospheres offers a route to consider how the intense embodiment of journeys are felt. Affective atmospheres are related to how bodily capacity to act, and sense operate as a force that circulates in-between biked-bodies, ideas, and objects. Crucially, the notion of affective atmosphere draws attention to kinaesthetics, alongside touch, smell, sight, and/or sound, help how people evaluate their mobility, sense of self and places they move in and through (Jones, 2012). Attention turns to the sensations of the coming together of social and material relations into a working arrangement (territory), or liveable order, that aligns with our embodied life histories. The capacity to affect and be affected is not similar between individuals but requires the sharpening of skills and perceptions.

Scholarly recognition of how senses are central to the doing, feeling, and valuing different transport modes has invited a closer reading of the in-the-moment kinaesthetic sensations of journeys (including speed, proximity, timings, and rhythms) across a wide range of empirical contexts. These include travelling in cars (Waitt & Harada, 2016), walking (Clement & Waitt, 2018), and cycling (Jones, 2012; Waitt, Buchanan, Fuller, et al., 2021; Waitt, Buchanan, Lea, et al., 2021). Jones (2012) and Waitt, Buchanan, Lea, et al. (2021, b) employ affective atmospheres to illustrate how cycling capabilities may be diminished for some along certain routes, or altogether, by negative affective intensities and densities understood as danger from the felt proximity, speed, and risk of passing motor vehicles. In contrast, bodily capacity to ride may be enhanced for some by generating meaning in the intensity of emotions named as comfort, safety, love, joy, or happiness. This includes routes that contained things already invested in a shared positive affective value of ‘nature’, including views, trees, rivers, and parks. Exploring the highs and lows of kinaesthetics is a necessary precursor to enhance bodily capacities to choose a transport mode.

Affective atmospheres are understood to diminish or enhance what pedalling bodies can, or cannot do on-the-move, including becoming and being well. Affective atmosphere promotes thinking of the potential therapeutic cycling benefits as an embodied, spatial, and temporal achievement within a shifting field of ongoing and emerging socio-material relations and kinaesthetic sensations. Paying attention to different embodied histories and contexts highlights how and why different cycling social-material arrangements may enhance some bodies to become well when pedalling and serve to displace others. Cycling practices that comprise a therapeutic place for one person may further entrench forms of distress and injustice for another. Indeed, there is an affective politics to cycling practices.

‘Refrains of rhythm’ shape how people perceive themselves and their surroundings (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). These rhythmic experiences provide comfort and safety, creating a spatial order or ‘home’ territory that wards off despair. Grosz (2008, p. 52) also discusses these rhythmic patterns as generating a liveable order. Thus, the concept of ‘home’ territory represents a temporary space where one feels secure (Waitt et al., 2023a). Viewing home territory as provisional reveals that being well involves an ongoing process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Deterritorialization does not necessarily mean physically leaving a space but rather losing the desire for security, comfort, familiarity, and belonging. Reterritorialization examines how living without a safety net induces a sense of risk, fear, and vulnerability. For example, the desire for safety and comfort in a cycling home territory prompts adjustments in sensory qualities, such as changing the route, clothing, timing, and social context (cycling alone or with others). Thus, therapeutic bike rides depend on continually reconfiguring (reterritorializing) ‘home’ territories to foster comfort and safety.

Our conceptualization of mobile therapeutic ‘home’ territories is experiential. Home territories are understood as facilitated, or not, by the sense and sensations of repetitive rhythmic movements alongside the ongoing coming together of ideas, things, and bodies. Moments of where and when individuals and communities may flourish on-the-move arise from the desire for safety and comfort of a ‘home’ territory or working arrangement (or assemblage). Following Deleuze and Guattari (1987) the desire for safety and comfort does not reside in individual psyches, it is an affective force produced from and producing everyday life conditions. In our case, we argue that the affective atmosphere or intensities felt and named as safety and comfort are produced by pedalling kinaesthetics. These affective flows may be read as an ordering or territorializing force over mobility practices. As Lester (2020, p. 85) argues, ‘Life goes on through a desire to form arrangements or assemblages that are conducive to being well; bodies and things co-compose situations in which life can flourish’. This ordering force enables everyday life on-the-go. Habitual ways of moving in ‘home’ territories can support and exclude individuals, raising questions about cycling practices therapeutic potential (Waitt & Buchanan, 2023). For example, Waitt, Buchanan, Fuller, et al. (2021) provide insightful discussions of how becoming well for some bike riders emerges from the rhythmic sensations of speed, but danger and discomfort for slower, less experienced bike riders. Hence, thinking with mobile therapeutic ‘home’ territory uncouples therapeutic cycling benefit studies from the biomedical body and recognizing it as an emplaced, dynamic, differentiated, and embodied process.

Methods

This research sits within a larger multi-disciplinary project titled Pedalling for Change, which aimed to better understand cycling experiences as active transport. While not in the initial research scope, an opportunity to better understand active transport in the context of cycling reactivation practices was presented by the COVID-19 disruptions and the resultant ‘cycling boom’ in inner-city Sydney.

Data collection was conducted between July and December 2020. Because fieldwork occurred between Sydney’s first and second lockdowns, the data provides rich retrospective accounts of cycling reactivation practices and experiences. A purposeful recruitment strategy occurred via an invitation circulated on the ‘Sydney Bike Commuter’ Facebook group. With over 5,600 members, the volunteer-led community group serves as a hub for cycling information. Eighty-three individuals who cycled during the first COVID-19 lockdown responded to our invitation. Thirty-six people, aged between 20 and 65 years, consented to participate. Our sample is not representative of all cycling experiences in Sydney during the pandemic. Excluded are the experiences of children, teenagers, older adults, and those living in the outer Sydney suburbs. Not featured in this paper are twenty-one participants who primarily began commuter cycling during the pandemic restrictions (Waitt & Stanes, 2022) or e-bike (Waitt et al., 2023a). In this paper, we focus on experiences shared by six participants who were primarily at home in inner-city Sydney at a time of restricted mobility and narrated accounts of becoming and being well through cycling reactivation practices.

Participation involved two-stages. Informed by previous research on creative practice, particularly in mobility studies (Barry et al., 2022; Hawkins & Straughan, 2015), stage one combined synchronous semi-structured internet interviews and sketches to co-produce cycling reactivation, knowledge with participants. Stage Two adopted an ‘enactive’ mobile method approach (Spinney, 2009). This involved an invitation to video-record cycling journeys as Sydney emerged from the first lockdown, with a follow-up conversation. Given our focus on cycling reactivation during the first COVID-19 Sydney lockdown in 2020, this paper draws on Stage One methods.

As the research itself occurred under COVID-19 restrictions, fieldwork design was grounded in literature on the theoretical and pragmatic issues of internet interviews (Longhurst, 2016). ‘Zoom’ was used to conduct ‘real time’ semi-structured interviews due to technical ease and participant familiarity. Like Aldred (2013), we understand the dialogue of semi-structured interviews as a shared process of meaning-making. Stage One invited participants to discuss their reactivation practices across five themes: cycling life narratives, sharing details about their reactivated bike(s), reasons for reactivation, experiences of riding during the first Sydney lockdown, and experiences of riding following restrictions easing. The synchronous online semi-structured interviews explored mobility practices, embodied cycling histories, and cycling affective intensities.

Drawing on the idea that creative practices can reveal the emotional aspects of social-material relationships (Veal & Hawkins, 2020), interviews employed sketching to aid participants in how they were able to share cycling reactivation personal experiences in lockdown. Semi-structured interviews and sketches helped us understand cycling reactivation practices as a way of knowing and evaluating oneself and the city through different sensory experiences such as kinaesthetics, touch, sight, and smell. Semi-structured interviews lasted between 60 and 120 min, were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. Pseudonyms are used in the text.

Our interpretation utilizes rhizoanalysis. This abductive approach aligns with Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage thinking because it has no prescribed linear process (Waitt & Stanes, 2022). Rhizoanalysis therefore demands an openness to empirical data and give attention to how meanings may arise and are negotiated, in the moment through, ‘movement, singularity, difference, and entanglements of language and matter’ (MacLure, 2013, p. 171). Rather than employing a conventional coding practice, attention was instead given to how the empirical data is produced within research arrangements. A rhizomatic approach enabled us to interpret affective intensive moments; that make, remake or undo cycling therapeutic home territories. What emerged were rich discussions of how cycling therapeutic home territories connect to differentiated embodied histories, infrastructure and social norms in moments of competitiveness and playfulness. In the following section, we use six reactivated bike riders’ vignettes to map cycling therapeutic home territories during the lockdown. We understand vignettes as presenting ‘an illustrative scene, a literary sketch’ the ingenuity of which lies in their ability to map and reveal ‘the hidden depths of an interior view’ (Galef, 2016, p. 1). We describe the two mobile therapeutic cycling ‘home’ territories that were evident amongst our participants in producing moments of being well: the competitiveness of cycling as lifestyle sport and the playfulness of active free-play.

Moments of competitiveness: lifestyle sport and therapeutic home territories

The cycling reactivation of three participants highlight how road cycling as a lifestyle sport produced moments of competitiveness and of being well through the territorialization process of affects, habits, relationships, ideas, materialities, movement, rhythms, and routines. James, aged in his early 40s, lived with his wife and two teenage children in an inner-west Sydney apartment. Originally from Singapore, he has lived in Sydney for the past 10 years. James’ cycling histories spanned both cities, namely as a road and leisure cyclists. Central to James’ experiences was exercising in ‘nature’. James’ cycling histories thus reflect Wheaton’s (2004) discussion of lifestyle sport as a social yet competitive activity that centres pleasure spending time exercising in settings understood as natural.

Cycling reactivation meant spending more time exercising on the bike, which helped James manage the anxieties surrounding COVID-19 related unemployment. James described how reactivation pleasure was met by access to the coast and the absence of traffic. Accompanying his sketch (Figure 1), James offered an emotive evaluation of the car’s absence on his cycling body in terms of peace, freedom, and exhilaration. He exposed how the pandemic deterritorialized the dominant working arrangement of roads as the taken-for-granted domain of motorized traffic, and the footpath as that of pedestrians (Mehta, 2020). Road cycling felt safer without the territorializing rhythms and speed of either traffic or pedestrians. Opportunities arose to generate positive emotions when reterritorialized onto the road bike, as in racing moments. Central to feeling that ‘life is good’, if only momentarily, was a heightened sensitivity to the pleasures and comfort of the routines, movement, and rhythms of road cycling pedalling arrangements in ways that both deterritorialize and retteritorialize the road as a home territory.

Figure 1. James’s sketch and reflection of his road cycling reactivation performance and experience.

James’s sketch conveys the physical exertion of cycling, alongside his sensory engagement with coastal encounters. His experience echoes previous research on the therapeutic qualities of green/blue space from a range of physical outdoor activities before (Foley et al., 2019) and during the pandemic (Bates & Moles, 2022; Conradson, 2021; Doughty et al., 2023; Jellard & Bell, 2021). Bodily response to a road cycling home territory included flows of neurochemicals, increased heart rate and heightened alertness. This underscored how the affective intensity of the multisensory experiences of the coastal sounds, textures and colours and scents connects him with memories of his home country. Building on previous research on the therapeutic qualities of touch and sound (Ratcliffe et al., 2013), James underscores the tactile caress of sea breeze as restorative and rhythmic sound of waves on the seashore as ‘peaceful’ and ‘calming’ (Figure 1). James points to how the therapeutic experiences of competitive road cycling as always, a more-than-human achievement based around human-nature relationships. Therapeutic experiences from coastal bike encounters during the lockdown points to the importance of understanding mobile therapeutic home territories as always contingent on the sense and sensibilities of materials socially constituted as nature, embodied histories, territorializing mobility rhythms, alongside cycling skills.

Like James, Ginny and Leon (a professional couple in their thirties who live together in a high-density apartment in inner-west Sydney), had cycled for many years. Each self-identified as road-cyclists. Both rode bikes valued at over three thousand dollars and regularly wore cycling-specific Lycra clothes. Like James, their road cycling life history is embedded in the pleasures of a competitive lifestyle sport (Wheaton, 2004).

Ginny and Leon shared their desire to affect and be affected by the momentary sense of being well produced by cycling together in Centennial Park. More than just a space to cycle, the affective atmosphere of Centennial Park felt like a refuge from traffic through the joint participation of road cyclists and socio-material relations that comprise this public space (Figure 2). As work-from-home orders increased screen time, their usual exercise routine of driving to, then cycling around Centennial Park in the evening took on heightened significance for being well both physically and mentally. Ginny discusses cycling around Centennial Park as a mentally rejuvenating activity (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Ginny’s sketch and reflection of her lockdown road cycling reactivation performance and experience.

In her sketch, Ginny underscores how the pandemic amplified the therapeutic benefits of cycling through Centennial Park by generating and managing emotions (see Cook & Larsen, 2022 for a similar discussion on running). With Centennial Park mostly closed to cars during lockdown the positive relationship between bodies and greenspace created a therapeutic territory to deal with the stresses of remote online work. Routine pedalling facilitated deeper connections with their local surroundings. For Ginny, we interpret this sense of connection as a process of territorialization that produced a therapeutic home territory and moments of being well. This therapeutic home territory was underpinned by sensations of repetitive synchronized rhythms of speed alongside encounters with the parklands and its non-human inhabitants, and the smooth surfaces of the designated cycleway. Ginny illustrates how the ephemeral yet intense ‘feel good’ qualities of the routine and repetitive synchronized training lap rhythms territorialized Centennial Parklands as a home territory. Such kinaesthetic sensations strengthened place attachments and encouraged regular visits during pandemic times (Figure 2).

During the COVID-19 lockdown, Centennial Park also became a popular site of cycling reactivation for less experienced riders, particularly at weekends. Leon explained that as Centennial Park became more crowded, his sense of pleasure in the moment dissipated. What registered was how the skills, random movement and slower pace of less experienced riders disrupted his affective cycling pleasure (Figure 3). Leon illustrates how the unpredictable movements of less skilled bike riders generated chaotic affective forces. For Leon, the uncertainty offered through the assemblage of unpredictable pedalling movements, embodied tensions, and anticipation of speed, worked against the potential for Centennial Park to become a therapeutic home territory. Leon illustrates how the affective intensities of the chaotic movement of unskilled bike riders work to deterritorialize Centennial Park as a mobile therapeutic home territory for skilled road cyclists who pedal fast. The chaotic sensations of random movement create frustration that is tempered by ideas that aligns Centennial Park as a refuge for road cyclists.

Figure 3. Leon’s sketch and reflection of his lockdown road cycling reactivation performance and experience.

Ginny and Leon also illustrate how cycling therapeutic home territories involved organizing collective spaces to enable experiences of relaxation and restoration. In the context of government-imposed restrictions on when and how people socialized with others, road cycling practices were deeply entangled with organizing therapeutic home territories with partners, family members, housemates, and friends. For example, Ginny reflected on how road cycling reactivation practices generated a home territory that fulfilled her desire for social engagement during the lockdown with friends:

We have a small group of people we know who cycle and when we all go on a cycle together, it’s always a pretty fun day. You do the cycle together, you have a pack, you’re like part of a team and you do the route and then you have beers together and it’s pretty fun.

Ginny illustrates the joyous energy that emerges through the joint participation of people. More than road cycling in space, cycling together promotes a sense of joy, attachment to place, social group, and being well.

Finally, Leon illustrates how the home territories that emerged from the reactivation of road cycling as a nature-based activity created new opportunities to care for others. Leon explained that:

Because of COVID I was doing a bit more cycling with my brother as well … My brother lost his job like quite early during COVID. And cycling was a really good way to catch up with him. And it gave him an opportunity to like process a lot of what was going on. And we just go for long rides and just chat and talk about how crazy and like fucked up the whole thing was. And the world was imploding, but at least we were just spinning around Centennial Park still. And so that was really nice.

The notion of mobile therapeutic home territories allows us to better understand how the cycleway qualities in Centennial Park created micro-geographies of respite. Moments of being well emerged for Leon’s brother that comprised Centennial Park as a therapeutic home territory generated by the socio-material relations and the pedalling rhythms affective pleasure. Pleasure increased Leon’s brother’s capacity to become well. At the same time, Leon tells of how the shared physical exertion and rhythms – the pedalling, the breathing – enhanced his capacity to care for his brother made him feel good by facilitating deep one-on-one conversations.

Moments of playfulness: active free-play and therapeutic home territories

Three participants illustrate how cycling reactivation generated moments of playfulness and being well that we understand as active-free play therapeutic home cycling territories. Twenty-two-year-old Theo (full-time international student from Hong Kong, lived in student accommodation in inner-city Sydney) did not regularly ride a bike before the pandemic. His bike had languished in domestic storage due to how embodied sensations of fear from speeding cars and busyness of Sydney traffic territorialized and reterritorialized the road as motorized vehicles’ domain. The absence of traffic from the first COVID-19 lockdown generated cycling possibilities. His riding skills, knowledge and bodily competencies were drawn from the cycling histories of his childhood and teenage years. How Theo described cycling reactivation aligned with cycling as active free-play – where mobility was underpinned by playfulness, curiosity and encouraged new engagements with his urban surrounds. For Theo, reactivation changed his perspective of Sydney living (Figure 4). Echoing Doughty et al. (2023), Theo prioritized the pursuit of discovering the local by bike, specifically parks.

Figure 4. Theo’s sketch and reflection of his lockdown active free-play cycling reactivation performance and experience.

Through sketching and storytelling, Theo emphasized moments of being well through the connection between cycling as active free-play and the pleasure generated by seeking out ‘greenery’ in parks (Figure 4). The confinement of everyday life during the pandemic pushed Theo to familiarize himself with his neighbourhood by going on cycling ‘detours’. Cycling enabled this to occur in intimate ways. A crucial aspect of this active-free play cycling home territory included the increased alertness to the sensory stimuli of sounds, specifically hearing the wind and the environment (for example, birdsong) (Figure 4).

We conceive of this emotional management as an ongoing territorialization process through the affective force of social-material relations that enhanced bodily capacities to make and remake therapeutic home territories, including pre-existing ideas about cycling, greenery, trees, birdsong, and sunshine. Unlike James, Ginny, and Leon, generating a therapeutic free-play cycling home territory did not require expensive road bikes, Lycra-clad bodies, or fitness routines to territorialize routes. Pedalling as active free-play helped less skilled biked riders to manage emotions generated by the spatial and temporal confinements of lockdown.

Like Theo, Emma’s (24-year-old, full-time professional, who lived in an inner-West Sydney share household) ideas of nature as therapeutic overlapped with and reinforced cycling reactivation pleasures as active free-play. Emma learnt to ride a bike as a child, with cycling histories that included cycling in parks for weekend family leisure activities. After learning to drive as a teenager, her bike languished. At the pandemic onset, Emma reactivated a touring bike from her parent’s garage as ‘fun’. For Emma, attending to cycling pleasures through the notion of therapeutic home territory, being well coalesced around moments of pedalling with friends and at sunrise alongside the ocean constituted as a sanctuary (Figure 5). In these moments, the pedalling affectual kinaesethetics as active free play territorialized the coast as a place of, peace, removed from stressful lockdown.

Figure 5. Emma’s sketch and reflection of her lockdown active free-play cycling reactivation performance and experience.

For thirty-five-year-old Christine (born in the United States of America, couple household, employed full-time in health sciences), cycling pleasures as active free-play facilitated interaction with the outdoors. An important benefit for Christine was how the emotions generated by cycling helped manage personal troubles and anxiety generated by disruption of work and distance from family. Since migrating from Sweden in 2017, and despite a ‘love’ of cycling, concerns about cycling road safety in Sydney had left her commuter bike to languish in storage. Like other participants, Christine explained how sedentary working-from-home practices compromised her wellbeing. In her words she felt ‘trapped’. In response, Christine explained that reactivating cycling practice became important to address boredom and ‘cabin fever’. Feeling safe on the roads made this possible for the first time:

with COVID I was, you know, I was home all the time. I wasn’t commuting anywhere or going anywhere. I felt like I just needed to get out of the house and actually the roads were empty. Not so many cars. I was thinking it was a really good opportunity to do that.

Christine recalled regular solo cycling trips to Centennial Park during lockdown as offering an important space to deal with difficult experiences and moments of mindful presence (Figure 6). Attending to the notion of mobile therapeutic home territory, Christine illustrates how the desire for comfort is generated through the sense and sensibilities of repetitive slow rhythmic pedalling, materialities (birds, trees, water) and dominant ideas about nature as restorative. For Christine, this ordering, or territorializing force, enables moments of mindfulness and of being well.

Figure 6. Christine’s sketch and reflection of her lockdown active free-play performance and experience.

Discussion and conclusion

Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) assemblage thinking, this article has investigated the therapeutic qualities of cycling kinaesthetics. We have offered a conceptual lens of mobile therapeutic home territories to think differently about how mobility enables people to flourish. Interpreting the process of being well via the lens of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) assemblage thinking our research enriches existing conceptualizations of therapeutic landscapes as sanctuaries. We argue that the concept of mobile therapeutic ‘home’ territories advances geographical research, particularly across mobilities and health. Conceptualizing reactivation as territorialization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization highlights the affective forces and differentiated senses of being well. These include different socio-material arrangements, routines and rhythms in the making, remaking, and unmaking of routes to flourish which are differentiated by cycling practices, skills, perceptions, and embodied histories. The notion of a mobile therapeutic home territory is thus in line with Andrews and Duff’s (2019, p. 128) call for a health geography characterized by engagement with ‘the affective and material expression or emergence of place’.

Conducting a form of rhizoanalysis, the cycling vignettes exposed subjective experiences of being well generated in moments of playfulness, or competitiveness. Two key findings are offered by this study that are relevant to geographical scholarship on the therapeutic qualities of public physical activities. First, it confirmed established findings in geographical research, cycling is an emotive practice that sustains a sense of self and place (Waitt, Buchanan, Lea, et al., 2021). Indeed, what made cycling important during lockdowns for participants were the possibilities to manage anxieties enmeshed with the pandemic. Therapeutic emotions were generated by sensations from cycling routines, rhythms, and socio-material territories (assemblages) in which individuals flourished and felt at home.

Second, our framework does not eclipse the nuance of embodied biographies in how cycling mobility politics is experienced and interpreted. Our analysis highlights how alongside legacies of the pristine nature ideal, cycling cultures and socio-material relationships, alongside embodied histories shape individual and collective possibilities for becoming well. Some participants underscored how the comforts and pleasures of cycling reactivation was pedalling competitively. To create a liveable order and work to territorialize and reterritorialize a therapeutic lifestyle sport cycling home territory required fitness, speed, embodied skills, and synchronized rhythms. In moments of competitiveness there is a politics to being well. To develop the pleasures of competitive lifestyle sport cycling home territories required the exclusion of slower, less skilled bike riders. For others, a more comfortable, joyous state was created by playfulness. Rather than roads being locations for pedalling fast along a linear route to nature destinations, playful non-linear journeys were critical for an affirmative sense of their being well. Play involved curiosity and facilitated connections to place, plants, birds, ocean, and people. Confirming Bell et al. (2023) argument, it is important not to romanticize the therapeutic potential of routine cycling and remain alive to the differential mobilities of cathartic release.

These two points complement the recent work that points to how experiences of physical activity are significant for urban public health policy which aims to encourage the equitable uptake of exercise (Barnfield, 2020; Hitchings & Latham, 2016). First, equitable cycling uptake requires policy goals that acknowledges pedalling as a sensual activity for managing and generating emotions. Practical attention to this might include repositioning roads as shared public space rather than the domain of cars and promoting different cycling practices for a diverse range of bodies. Second, what our Australian example highlights is cycling for all involves a politics of infrastructure provision and a way to imagine a more accessible city Latham and Layton (2020). Cycling infrastructure provision must not be designed solely for commuting or exercising practices underpinned by principles of linearity, efficiency, directness, and speed. Instead, to encourage equitable cycling uptake requires paying attention to the sense and sensibilities of the social and material relations that comprise shared public spaces that enable different bodies, cycling differently, to experience comfort, safety, play, community, and home. The potential of what a successful cycling infrastructure provision for lifestyle sport and play is glimpsed in our illustrative examples.

Acknowledgments

The research received ethical approval from the Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC no 2017/318). University of Wollongong. We thank all participants who shared their experiences of cycling reactivation through the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown. We are indebted to the constructive comments from our reviewers who helped clarify and strengthen our argument.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The funding of the project was through an Australian Research Council Discovery Project entitled “Pedalling for change” [DP190100185].