The road to age-friendly mobility : how cycling changes the way we age

Abstract

In recent years, the Western world has seen continuous urbanisation and population ageing. This challenges the sustainability and suitability of urban mobility for people of all ages. The present project combines work on Age-Friendly Cities, geographies of ageing, and urban transport to study complex interrelations between ageing and mobility. Both are relational to the urban setting, as well as the social environment, health, and wellbeing. This holistic approach is rarely evident in separated, utilitarian studies on urban (car) transport, health, and ageing. This thesis advances the Age-Friendly City concept by highlighting urban cycling as means to accommodate the mobility and wellbeing opportunities of older people. Adhering to a critical mobilities approach, the study engages with long-term experiences that precede mobility in older age. To elucidate the deeply contextual practice of cycling, it develops a methodology of complementary cases studies in 'ordinary' urban areas of high- and low-cycling contexts - Rotterdam (the Netherlands) and Newcastle-upon-Tyne (United Kingdom). This 'relational mobilities design' triangulates multiple qualitative methods to examine the past, present, and future mobilities of cyclists and non-cyclists.

The findings provide compelling evidence that everyday urban cycling is normalised and learned over time; affected by life events, incremental and disruptive mobility negotiations, and bodily change. Personal and environmental effects shape cycling as normalised or marginalised transport, resulting in meanings and types of cycling that complement typical expectations of high- and low­ cycling contexts. This thesis furthers the potential of cycling as form of everyday transport for a diversity of ages and abilities. With cycling as analytical lens, it identifies mobility practices as biographically embedded and shaped by physical transport environments. Physical, mental, and social wellbeing in later life benefit greatly, and are actively sustained, through (cycling) mobility. By advancing an all-age understanding of urban cycling, it concludes how normalisation of cycling in daily mobilities and urban landscapes is imperative. This insight provides important resources for sustainable mobility futures, quality of (later) life, and positive ageing.