This site was formerly Living Room, but before that, it was The Bike People. We have simply returned to our emphasis on bicycling in the city in the context of cultural, social, and environmental sustainability. All our former content is still available through the article indexes on the left.
Snippets, Musings, & News: the Bicycle Fixation Weblog
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01/01/2008: "Adams on Mobility"
Superb piece on hypermobility, democracy, daily life, and our future together by geographer John Adams of London's University College. A snippet here:A constraint on behaviour which technology cannot remove is the number of hours in a day. As we spread ourselves ever wider, we must spread ourselves thinner. If we spend more time interacting with people at a distance, we must spend less time with those closer to home. If we have contact with more people, we must devote less attention to each one. In small-scale pedestrian societies – hypomobile societies – everyone knows everyone. In hypermobile societies, old-fashioned geographical communities are replaced by aspatial communities of interest – we spend more time, physically, among strangers. The advantages of mobility are heavily advertised; the disadvantages of hypermobility receive much less attention. Many of the unwelcome characteristics of the hypermobile society can readily be imagined by extrapolating existing trends.To read the entire article, go to Hypermobility at Carfreeworld.net.