Urban Planning Tools for Cycling Experience
How to integrate the human experience in mobility practice and advocacy to plan for cycling cities
Description
The experiential aspect of cycling is an essential part of planning for a bicycle-friendly city. The act of cycling is one of human movement and perception. Despite this, professional urban planning practice often overlooks it. This course equips urban mobility professionals and activists to illuminate cycling experience in their work. Learners will explore what cycling experience is, and be presented frameworks for identifying, communicating and evaluating it. They are guided through cases in both a mature cycling context and in a car-oriented context, and finish by conceptualizing or evaluating cycling experience in their own city or town.
Course workflow
In Section 1, you will develop a foundational understanding of what cycling experience is. In Section 2, you will build this understanding further through a grounding in two lenses: the Heuristic Evaluation and the Social, Sensory, and Spatial framework. The Heuristic Evaluation is a framework to quickly and broadly evaluate the cycling experience on a street. The Social, Sensory, and Spatial framework breaks down the elements of cycling experience with a descriptive approach. You will gain familiarity with these tools through seven examples of infrastructure, and then at the end of the course you will apply one of them to shine a light on the human experience of cycling in your own context.
Instructor's note
Welcome, and a dose of good news before you get started. Whether you know it or not, you already tacitly understand what cycling experience is, through your own embodied experience of riding a bicycle. This course just gets you on a track to articulate and communicate it. And, it gets you to consider what it might be like for others- cycling experience is both a shared and uniquely personal phenomenon.
This is a rich topic with depth as endless as the human experience :) See you in the course!
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Mahtab BaghaiePoor, Ana Castan, and Gautam Merwan for contributing to this course.
What You Will Learn!
- Identify the core elements of cycling experience that are relevant for urban planning and design
- Develop familiarity with cases of cycling experience in both car-oriented and cycling-oriented contexts
- Describe and evaluate the embodied experience of cycling in your own context
- Learn to illuminate the experiential aspect of cycling in communication with planning stakeholders and the public
Who Should Attend!
- Urban mobility professionals in a context where cycling experience is left out of project development
- Cycling activists
- Students