Grassroots Infrastructure for Disability Cycling in London and São Paulo: Exemplary Precedents Affording Motility and Wellbeing

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.It is now widely acknowledged that an urban mobility transition is a needed ingredient to realise a more just and sustainable society. Although standardised infrastructural ‘hardware’ that responds to this need—such as bike lanes or bike share systems—provides necessary foundations and leverages economies of scale, it may fail to recognise the diversity of mobility needs, as well as non-mobility needs that are related to transport, such as those associated with the varied minds and bodies that make up populations. There also exists an assumption among transport decision makers, researchers, and the public at large, that responsibility for transport infrastructure rests in the hands of local and national government, and increasingly the private sector, whereas the role of civil society is seen as limited to voting and campaigning. However, the bottom-up ‘grassroots innovations’ of citizen-led physical and social infrastructural initiatives may be more important than often recognized. Drawing on interviews with citizen-led organisations working on grassroots innovations in cycling infrastructures for people with disabilities in London and São Paulo, I argue that these innovations can provide exemplary precedents of responsive infrastructural assemblages that increase disability affordances and through that support more equitable motility (i.e. the capacity to move) and wellbeing. Besides the immediate benefits of these infrastructural innovations, their experimental and demonstrative nature may guide larger scale efforts to achieve just and sustainable mobility transitions, and thus should be better supported by funding agencies.