The 5th International Conference of the International Forum on Urbanism (IFoU)

2011 National University of Singapore, Department of Architecture Global Visions: Risks and Opportunities for the Urban Planet

CUSTOM BIKE URBANISM

Hiroyuki Shinohara (Architect/Lecturer)

Nagoya Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture and Design, Nagoya, Japan Email:gsd98hs1@hotmail.com

ABSTRACT: This paper describes how bicycles altered to various needs and functions on the streets of China become a key factor in animating the various spaces of the city. While current urban development in China expands infrastructure and as a result inaccessible landscape in favor of motorization, the customized bicycles, sit within the existing urban contexts, contribute to constitute city more dynamic and help functioning of existing city. Primarily used by inhabitants from the lower end of the polarized Chinese society, they will suggest both ecological and social sustainability in the city. KEYWORDS: everyday urbanism, bicycle, mobility, informal, bricolage

1 INTRODUCTION

The physical space of the city is a reflection of intertwined social realities and represents the multiple desires of different actors in the city. Urban aspiration requires city planning that insures a variety of spaces and places where a spectrum of different activities can be fully performed. Current Chinese cities however, are produced through planning strategies based on generic masterplans; static, centric in nature, and dominated by infrastructure and inaccessible landscaping. Custom Bike Urbanism, on the other hand, suggests a possibility of constructing urban spaces that are individualist and dispersed, yet able to accommodate a multitude of dynamic forms. With the inherent characteristics of mobility and ephemerality, it brings vibrancy to redundant urban space and enhances the function of the existing city.

Figure 1 A temporary food market by custom bikes on the street.

Figure 2 CARGO maximizes the transport capacity with plastic sheets.

Those who practice Custom Bike Urbanism are citizens from the bottom end of China’s polarized society; the people who are typically omitted from the plans created by generic master planning methodology. The spaces they inhabit are relentlessly being marginalized and are often subject to gentrification through urban renewal. Authorities claim that such spaces are dilapidated, unhygienic, and have no value. As a result, street widening in favor of motorized vehicles replaces the living space of custom bikes. Custom Bike Urbanism is a physical reality of the city that enriches people’s lives and can be seen as an informal reaction to the current city construction process. The objective of Custom Bike Urbanism is not isolating, but rather engaging. It closely looks into the everyday tactics of people whose livelihood inevitably relies on customized bicycles or tricycles (custom bikes), their process of occupying streets as a field, and making their living through their constant negotiations within existing urban conditions. Custom Bike Urbanism presents a perspective on creating dynamic, multidimensional, and lateral urban spaces that emerge from within. Ultimately, this bottom-up urbanism complements the fixed, selective, and totalizing thinking of the top-down urban planning.

2 CUSTOMIZATION AS BRICOLAGE

Fig.3 is an excerpt of customized bicycles and tricycles sampled during the last five years from Shanghai and to a lesser extent Beijing. It demonstrates different methods of customizing bikes and their adapted use by lower socioeconomic class locals, migrant, and minority groups as a means of transportation, and income generation. Mobile Home exemplifies this most directly; a non-registered migrant worker in Shanghai has added a box to the carrier of his tricycle, this is constructed of recycled veneer timber boards with a tiny window cut-out to provide ventilation and view to the street. He rides his bike to construction sites where he works as a day laborer, carries materials and scraps to and from building sites, and sleeps in the box.

Custom bikes are simply made out of bicycles and tricycles purchased at local bicycle markets. Their custom components are usually gathered from local shops or scraps from construction sites, bicycles, tricycles or automobiles. The fabrication technique is rustic and can be self-made or built by local subcontractors at very cheap prices. The pragmatism affiliated with custom bikes is better understood with a concept that Lévi-Strauss refers as bricolage. The term explains the creation of a work by resourceful use of diverse materials that happen to be available. Likewise, regardless of their original purpose, custom bikes make use of whatever materials are at hand. The custom bike defines bikes that go beyond their original function of moving and carrying. The pragmatic approach is further carried out beyond the customization of bikes themselves and is applied to the ways which they assimilate themselves into existing urban conditions.

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Figure 3 Custom bike catalogs

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3 FROM INDIVIDUALS SURVIVAL TO EMERGENCE OF HOT SPOTS IN THE CITY

Among the different custom bikes, the ones that are frequently seen on streets with heavy pedestrian traffic are employed in retail activities. Through their bikes these rider-owners can make a daily income. Mobility is the crucial factor for their business. The bike allows them to move across the city, to engage customers and to quickly ride away from the local police when they crack down on illegal street venders. Their instability allows them occupy ‘in-between’ spaces of the city, optimizing their business opportunities. They can stop at the entrance of a gated residential community, a boundary between private and public territory, a bus stop, a transit point with a News stand (Fig. 4) waiting for customers, a back street in a business district, a concealed space between buildings in which food vender sells breakfast (Fig. 5), or a large blank space around buildings resulted from the district plan set back regulation in which street venders open a market (Fig. 6). All of those of ‘in-between’ spaces are otherwise empty, or merely for passing through. Fig. 7 explains a unique situation that a fruits vender occupies a temporally blank wall of a building demolition site. He takes advantage of the location next to an existing fruits market. Occupancy by custom bikes temporally converts space into places of attraction in the city.

When custom bikes collectively assemble, they turn urban spaces into more contested spaces. Custom bikes can turn local food markets into open-air farmers’ markets, spontaneously the entrance of supermarkets become flea markets, create night markets in the downtown back alleys, or turn streets in bar and Karaoke Television districts into late night public dining area. All of the newly created places are appreciated by local residents and outsiders, regardless of gender, class and ethnicity. From Chinese Muslims cooking beef and lamb kebabs on the street to sweets vendors from Xinjiang region that present their ware like food pyramids, aggregation of custom bikes amplifies existing urban conditions and generates vital and dynamic temporally hot spots in the city.

Figure 4 News stand Figure 5 Teppanyaki Figure 6 Glove vender Figure 7 Fruits shop

4 MOBILITY/ECOLOGY/INFRASTRUCTURE

The convenience of custom bikes’ mobility complements the insufficiency of infrastructure driven development and promotes environmentally friendly urban behavior. The Bike Taxi (Fig. 8), for example, enables short distance movement for those who have to travel a few city blocks in Beijing, from subway station to their office buildings. The Bike Taxi contributes to a more ecological way of transportation in the city. Distribution and collection of reusable water-cooler bottles using custom bikes is now an ecological water supply system that has become a part of citizen’s everyday life in Shanghai (Fig. 9). This system of recycling is not strictly enforced by regulations in Chinese cities. Custom bikes collecting recyclable refuse are active participants in domestic waste recycling (Fig. 10). The Disjunction brought about in the transitional periods of city development is bridged by custom bikes. A ‘Gas Distributor (Fig. 11)’ bike rides into narrow and meandering lanes in the old part of the city in order to distribute cylinders to household that are not connected to gas line infrastructure.

5 INFORMAL TO FORMAL

The informality of custom bikes is formalized in cases where they infiltrate into public sectors. Cheap labor resources are utilized by government appointed divisions to maintain and beautify the public spaces and facilities of the city. For instance, Dust Collectors (Fig. 12) are allocated all over the city, and the streets are zoned into distinct areas for each of them to clean. They manually sweep roads with a broom and collect garbage on the street. Although it may seem illogical in the eyes of western rationalism, the system can

respond with flexibility to different road conditions. City Cleaners (Fig.13) wash roads and public facilities such as benches, street ramps and trash cans using water supplied from fire hydrants on the streets. City Cleaners gain rights to use the public resources. The same source of water is used by Moving Sprinklers (Fig. 14) to water plants and trees along public streets. The formalisation of custom bikes thus provides employment opportunities to those who previously were precluded from the masterplans, and bring them public rights.

Figure 8 Bike taxi Figure 9 Water distributor Figure 10 Recycle bike Figure 11 Gas distributor

Figure 12 Dust collector Figure 13 City cleaner Figure 14 Moving sprinkler

6 TOWARDS DYNAMIC EQUILIBRIUM

Custom-Bike Urbanism is another urbanism. It exerts itself into urban spaces where a multiple differences can then coexist. Nested within the existing city, it challenges generic masterplan’s closure and control, and contributes to more dynamic cities that reflect a multitude of individuals. It formulates the city as a space of differences through mutual dependency of mobility and fixity, which together produce dynamic relationships in multiple places and spaces. The mobility of custom bikes destabilizes urban spaces and transforms them into places of activity that include a broad range of the actors of the city. The instability that characterizes these custom bikes is positive, as long as it produces and sustains openness. Custom Bike Urbanism does not replace or overwrite the city with imposed plans. It rather oscillates and thickens layers of the city from within and vitalizes urban spaces essentially left for interpretation by the generic masterplans. It mobilizes the city in dynamic equilibrium and eventually leads to more sustainable city development.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Special thanks to Shaokai who helped me to visualize bicycle diagrams in CAD.

REFERENCES

[1] Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Blackwell, 1991. [2] Lévi-Strauss, Claude, The Savage Mind, University of Chicago Press, 1968. [3] de Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven Rendall, University of

California Press, 1984. [4] Brillembourg, Alfredo, Kristin Feireiss, and Hubert Klumpner, Informal City: Caracas Case, Prestel

Verlag, 2005. [5] Liauw, Laurence, "Post Generic City, Learning from Shenzhen," in 4th IFoU Proceedings, Amsterdam/Delft, 2009,

pp.1369-1378.