What is shared in shared bicycles? Mobility, space, and capital

Abstract

As sustainability has become a keyword for urban mobility, cycling and bicycles are often perceived as an inherently progressive force for a more environmentally friendly and equitable society. This article joins the growing scholarship that critically examines bicycle mobility as a socio-technical system with complex effects on urban lives. Drawing on long-term fieldwork on mobilities in the urban areas of the Pearl River Delta area in South China, this ethnography of the platform-based, bicycle-sharing programs unpacks the complex politico-economic, spatial-infrastructural, and social entanglement that has shaped this reincarnated form of pedalled mobility when China has moved away from a kingdom of bicycles to a country of cars in the past two decades. I argue that dockless bicycle-sharing programs emerged a capitalist technological fix for a socio-spatial condition produced by the process of urban transformation. Shaped by marketing strategies common in the sharing economy, bicycle-sharing companies capitalize on an ambiguous perception of public space. Yet this individualized form of mobility reproduces rather than disrupts the existing social hierarchy. This study sheds light on the importance of a socio-technical critique of the assemblage of infrastructure, capital, and technology to produce more sustainable forms of urban mobilities.

Keywords:

• Bicycle-sharing
• mobility
• urbanization
• public space
• technological fix
• the sharing economy
• China

Acknowledgement

The author is grateful to the comments from all the participants in the Ride-hailing workshop in Vancouver and the lunchtime seminar in the Department of Anthropology in Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2019 for the feedbacks on the earlier drafts. Special thanks to Sheri Lynn Gibbings, Joshua Barker, and Bronwyn Frey for their careful reading and comments on various drafts. The author also thanks the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful critiques and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 In this article ‘bicycle’ and ‘bicycle’ refer to pedal bicycles.

2 Gongxiang danche refers specifically to the dockless shared bicycles. Some municipal governments have the traditional bicycle-sharing programs with the docking stations (more details later; see also Christensen 2017), but their scales are much smaller and they are much less popular. In this article, unless otherwise stated, terms such as ‘shared bicycles’ and ‘bicycle-sharing’ in the China context refer to the dockless ones as they are commonly understood in Chinese.

3 Guangzhou has long been an administrative-spiritual centre throughout Chinese history, while Shenzhen was developed as a city in the post-1978 era. A historical market town, Foshan is less populated than the other two, and its public transportation system less developed. These cities all have a sizable middle class and have drawn migrant workers in large numbers from other parts of the country. With Guangzhou as the analytical focus, I juxtapose Guangzhou with the other two in my data analysis, which allows me to see how important the existing or changing spatial-infrastructural order is in shaping the actual usage and experiences of bicycle-sharing. This research has obtained ethical approval from the Research Committee at City University of Hong Kong.

4 This economy of scale and spectacle allows officials, technocrats, planners, and other professionals to strategically brand cities as metropolises that are somehow distinct from their rival urban centres. It provides symbolic capital to municipal governments and opportunities to those with money and political connections (Zhang 2016).

5 The formation of urban villages (chengzhongcun) is due to the dual landownership system. Depending on location, timing, and the dynamic in the process of negotiation during the conversion, the built environments and socioeconomic statuses of urban villages may vary significantly, as discussed in a large body of literature.

6 See Guangzhou Statistics Bureau (1993, 1995, 1997, 1999, 2001, and 2002).

7 https://Mobike.com/cn/timeline/ (accessed 28 August 2019). It is noted that Mobike’s first CEO used to work in the top management of Uber in Shanghai. Yet by 2018 Ofo had run into serious financial trouble, and Mobike was bought by another Chinese platform company.

8 A large body of literature have been devoted to the topic of public space. To begin with, see Low (2000), Low and Smith (2006), and Warner (2002).

9 I cannot provide here an in-depth discussion of the historical origin and philosophical development of this topic. For the earlier spatial-political tradition in China, see Abramson (2006) and Lewis (2006).

10 For debates on public-private separation in relation to a different spatial understanding of the relations between state and society, see Huang (1993).

11 For discussions of such campaign-style governance, see Liu et al. (2015) and Wang (2020).

12 Mobility practices have complicated the politics of public space. Similar de facto encroachment of public space can also be observed with privately own cars that need parking spaces in Chinese cities (see Zhang 2019).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China under the General Research Grant [Project No. CityU 21603019].