“…She was told never to touch a bicycle. Her parents feared she would lose her virginity.”
“To men, the bicycle in the beginning was merely a new toy, another machine added to the long list of devices they knew in their work and play. To women, it was a steed upon which they rode into a new world.”
Cycling around Dar es Salaam it doesn’t take long to notice a stark gender gap when it comes to who rides a bicycle. I’ve occasionally seen women sitting side-saddle on the back end of bikes pedaled by men, but so far very few ladies powering bikes themselves (an exception: disabled women cranking three-wheeled handcycles). Being an expatriate I’m an alien in Tanzania anyway, and while I’m no boor when it comes to cultural appropriateness while outside of my own country, I just can’t bend to gender norms that make it unacceptable for me to ride a bike.
The first quote up above is from Amanda Ngabirano, a Ugandan woman that I mentioned in a previous post about Kampala’s first car-free day in December. In a recent interview in The Observer, Ngabirano extolled cycling as her non-polluting, cost-effective, and freeing mode of transport – despite early cultural imprints that reserved cycling for men and, apparently, discouraged it as a fast track for a young lady to lose her innocence. SheCyclesNairobi, a blog by a fellow female cyclist in a big East African city, speaks to a similar point in a post last week. She lists comments made by “road-side obstetricians,” men that like to diagnose the many ways cycling is affecting her girl parts as she passes by, and puts this in a broader context of sexualization of women in Africa.
The lack of women on bikes is by no means unique to cities like Dar, Nairobi, or Kampala (dreamy egalitarian cycling utopias of Amsterdam and Portland aside). New York’s gender gap lit up the newsosphere last year, with somewhat conflicting evidence that women are lagging as cyclists as the city amps up bike-friendly infrastructure, yet at the same time the number of women biking seems to be growing faster than men. The reason for the persistent gender gap in New York is less related to the stigma of a broken hymen and more about safety concerns. Many women like to bike, but feel more inclined to if they are in a lane physically separated from cars.
Before buying a bike in Dar I was taking taxis to work, which to put it mildly was a soul-sucking experience. After a month of bitter cursing and fist-shaking at arrogant traffic police in their Love Boat captain uniforms that will boldly freeze the flood of white SUVs, taxis and daladalas from moving for twenty minutes at a time, my first bike ride to work was fabulous in that funny zone between being terrified and exhilarated. That wonderful quote by American suffragette Susan B. Anthony popped into my head somewhere along the Indian Ocean, sea breeze in my hair, hoping not to get nailed by a white SUV:
“Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.”
Despite being a woman I can vote and all (thanks to my fellow bike-loving sisters from back in the day). But let me tell you, the freedom of being emancipated from the bonds of traffic that day and every day going forward might have felt almost as sweet as casting that first ballot must have.
Susan B. wasn’t a lonely lady on a bike either: in both the U.K. and U.S., cycling played a substantial but lesser-known role in early women’s movements. The bicycle was not only a practical mode of transportation that freed women from dependence on men for transportation (allowing them to get out in public on their own), it helped make sporty exercise (and pants!) socially acceptable for women too. As author Sue Macy outlines in a recent National Geographic book on the history of women and cycling, it was an unabashed symbol of equality and empowerment. A woman riding a bike was a political statement – women, once relegated to the home, were free to move about as they pleased, self-reliant, in control. The suffragettes were also early pioneers of one of my most favorite “militant tactics” on two wheels – facing off with a driver and giving them a vigorous, defiant fist-shaking:
As satisfying now as it was over a century ago.
The road to freedom via bicycle wasn’t without it’s detractors at the time – the ability to travel independently also meant that of course women would carry themselves to dark places outside the home to satisfy those pesky sexual desires. The simple act of wearing “bifurcated garments” was vilified as well. Trousers were a natural fit for women on bikes, serving a practical purpose of not getting tangled up in your gears like flowy skirts. But as pointed out in a Jolique article, adopting pants was seen by some as a gateway to other lewd and masculine behaviors (like digging on other women). If we look at the style evidence alone though, the moral arguments become moot. No one can deny that those sassy suffragettes looked much cuter in poofy pants and jaunty hats than the man-dandies:
As a woman and former New York cyclist, I will readily admit that it’s easier to bike where it’s socially acceptable to care less about modesty – you have few qualms about the most unladylike mounting of a boy-frame bike while wearing a skirt for example. Even in a city where you can get away with pretty much anything, there are those moments that hearken back to the 19th century-style sexualization of women on bikes – witness the great “Hipster vs. Hasid” bikelane battle royale of 2009, where members of Brooklyn’s notoriously modest Hasidic Jewish population lobbied to have a popular lane through their neighborhood removed after complaining about the “religious hazard” of scantily clad female cyclists. (Full disclosure: I was one of them. Sorry to imperil your morals, sirs, I realize my bare shoulders and ankles are bitter temptresses.)
Interesting indeed is this tension between the sense of freedom enjoyed by female cyclists themselves and the challenges to female sexuality it poses to some onlookers. It’s a relationship that has been there since first female pedal-pushers and persists especially where women on bikes are breaking through some deeply embedded gender norms. So here’s to all those women out there that deal with the taunts, traffic, and traumatized nether-regions, and just make biking a perfectly ok thing to do from Nairobi to New York and everywhere in between.
Section 2 of New York City’s High Line opened this week to much celebration. The first section of the park is loved by New Yorkers and praised by planners as a successful example of converting and preserving unused urban infrastructure. Here is a description from Good:
Apple’s New Campus Eliminates Surface Parking, Adds Cars to Traffic So Apple’s new campus is not in located in one of the cities we typically cover at Encountering Urbanization, but it will certainly have an impact on the urban planning in and around Cupertino, California. The City Fix writes about how it will effect parking:
This week the book “Living in the Endless City” was released. The Wall Street Journal offers a peak at some of the graphics from the book that compares Mumbai, New York, Shanghai, Istanbul, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Johannesburg, London and Berlin.
Fujisawa Smart Town Planned for Japan to Be Most Advanced Eco City in the World The developers of a new Japanese city hope that this will serve as a model city for future projects around the world. If they are able to replicate this model the energy savings of entire towns on centrally control systems could be huge.
A group of architects have started an initiative, Vision 2050, to create three different models for the planning of Delhi.
Maharashtra renews efforts on low-costs housing reservation
As Japanese authorities are still trying to avoid nuclear disaster in Fukushima Prefecture while also dealing with at least 350,000 homeless citizens, it is difficult to think about plans to rebuild Japan. However groups like Architecture for Humanity already are thinking about rebuilding efforts. On Saturday 
