Towards the cycling metropolis? Shifting geographies of cycling infrastructure provision and urban mobility reconfiguration in Mexico City

Keywords: Cycling infrastructure, geography, mobility, Mexico City
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

In the twenty-first century Mexico City, long considered an exemplary case of urban dysfunction and unsustainability, has improved its environmental governance. In particular, the city has gained global acclaim for its ambitious sustainable mobility policies and roadway reconfigurations, including the creation of a bicycle network (Whitney et al., 2020). However, infrastructural provisions for cycling have been concentrated in the wealthier core of the city, while poorer peripheral neighbourhoods with higher rates of cycling have been neglected (Sosa López, 2021). Seeking to address this gap, the municipal government of Claudia Sheinbaum (2018-2024) has adopted a new spatial strategy for cycling infrastructure provision which seeks to develop ‘peripheral’ networks and ‘regional’ connections, including metropolitan links. In confronting the obduracy of established road ordering and urban development practices, the bicycle strategy has been forced to negotiate institutional fragmentation, the Covid-19 pandemic, a series of disasters affecting public transport operations, and political pressure following the 2022 district elections.

Tracing the shifting geographies of roadway reconfiguration and cycling infrastructure provision in Mexico City, this paper examines three processes: (1) the formulation and conflictual implementation of the bicycle infrastructure strategy; (2) the deployment and differential trajectory of emergency Covid-19 cycling lanes; (3) the operation of peripheral cycling networks and their reliance on adequate public transport provision. In doing so, this paper contributes to conceptualising the scale, content, and impacts of strategies of infrastructural reconfiguration to support urban cycling in contexts of urban difference, crisis, and fragmentation.