 So I've been told that I can talk about whatever I want to talk about and Sorry that title is wrong. I'm actually going to talk about for the next three hours Uksura local residents patterns and latest developments in kinship theory Which is anthropological humor for you would be bored to death Which I hope I'm hoping I'm not going to be doing today, but I'm going to talk about something that's been on my mind for for a while now It's had moments of ups and downs and One of the latest provocations for it was I Dave gentlemen, and I went to a humanities conference last year and we got to meet a guy His name is Jordan Ellenberg, and he's a mathematician And he wrote this really interesting book called how not to be wrong The power of mathematical thinking and what he was talking about and then I went and picked up this book and read it really inspired me It's not the math that inspired me But it was the way he was trying to use mathematical thinking to address some pretty interesting everyday curiosities and mundane Things that we take for granted in everyday life like the fact that airplanes are Scheduled to be on time or to you know make up for the the lateness They are and he sort of goes through all these, you know Really interesting big conundrums that we're sort of wondering about like how do you win the lottery and he says well There's a logic to all this and so it really struck me that well If there's anybody who has anything interesting to say about everyday curiosities and the structures of everyday life It's got to be a cultural anthropologist And so I remember when I was reading this book I'd be walking my dog thinking to myself like oh, what's going to go into the book? I'm gonna write and so the book became at least what I was thinking of common sense is neither common nor sensical the power of anthropological thinking and so I've just appropriated his cover for my own purposes and but so I I Got ahead of myself. I really started thinking more deeply. I you know this can happen We get enthusiastic. We're like, oh, it's gonna be this and then you start thinking about it like no It actually it can't be that it's got to be something else. And so What I'm gonna talk about is there's something else that might be evolving tentatively And so this is all a sort of process that's playing out and live live form for me and the everyday curiosity I want to talk about is the bicycle obviously and And and Noting that it's an interesting moment in world historical terms where you know the bicycle has enjoyed ups and downs as a style You know a fad, but it's not been a fad. It's been there all along for the past 120 years But we're at another moment where it's getting a lot of interesting attention By people who are quite serious about the the prospects that bicycles might have to address certain kinds of problems around the world and so So what I want to talk about is bicycles anthropology and common sense and how they might all fit together and so Let me say this that I when I was a graduate student at Princeton I was training to become and training in the branch of anthropology called the anthropology of knowledge and the anthropology of knowledge is is focused on cross-cultural aspects of Conception and meaning and the coherence and rationality of modes of thought especially in non-western cultures and their classificatory systems and how cognition works and then also how Scientific knowledge in Western settings is constructed in social and institutional contexts But I became an anthropologist of activism and social movements and mainly environmental movements and You know That's a potentially a big jump but for me there was a common thread which was that what I was really interested in is Applied and contested Epistemologies in other words trying to ethnographically track or study through fieldwork the ways in which cultural social and institutional conditions under which authoritative knowledge and ideas about nature are being constructed and deployed And how they thought those ideas about nature might be getting picked up or not within environmental movements and so one of the early questions of my work was you know, how is it that scientists and conservation experts who claim to know certain things about nature Ensure that their perspectives their wisdom their knowledge their insights are taken into account when people sit down and design and manage a conservation area or an environmental program and So over the course of a decade of ethnographic fieldwork on the environmental movement in Costa Rica what I found was an ongoing struggle for relevance that scientists often expressed that they their ideas their knowledge wasn't being taken into consideration and reliance less on technical knowledge and technical claims and often on some combination of social and institutional authority and privileges and a set of common-sense claims About the world. So for example, biodiversity is good Rain forests are important for the future of humanity these kinds of things which were quite distant from technical claims So that really struck me. So, you know, it's been said that anthropologists I know Rob would appreciate this that anthropologists are dealers and gossip rumor Urban legends and maybe even conspiracy theories But I also realized back then that we're first and foremost merchants in common-sense In other words what we often elicit What we often overhear what we often listen to when people are conversing is not a wholly systematized Knowledge system about the world But loosely organized and commonly shared accepted and accepted beliefs habitual judgments and Untought emotions that are typically rooted in practical concerns So what this actually means when you try and Mobilize that ethnographically that is to say actually study this thing in the messy world that is social life Is that the boundaries between what is knowledge if you imagine? That is some kind of epistemologically bounded arena of special and structured principles of and findings and Common sense or these ideas that and insights that are rooted in everyday life and social relations can get kind of blurry So this is the intellectual backdrop Against which about six years ago. I set out to study bicycles Which is not by any stretch a common-sensical thing for an anthropologist to do much less prestigious the first question I often got was why and Put simply I became very curious about the role of things not just knowledge in Social movements and the kinds of claims that can get made with things so the bicycle occupies a very interesting position right now in environmental thinking and And it's it's currently being a reimagined and appropriated by different actors as a vehicle for a small planet and With half the world now living in increasingly crowded cities the environmental social and political dimensions of a Simple issue of what you would think is a simple issue of how are people going to get around have become really acute problems and Bicycles are being taken quite seriously as a mode of green urban transportation and bike advocacy groups are popping up kind of all over the world Full of all kinds of green arguments, and so I thought well, I'm an anthropologist of green movements Let me figure out what's going on here But with my anthropologist of knowledge background Something struck me right away when I started looking at bicycles and especially in this country, but elsewhere Which is that when you start talking about bicycles? It's saturated by references to its relationship with common sense Or it's involved in a political push and pull where there are divergent notions of what is common sense Their intention with see with each other It says if there are certain things that are obvious self-evident and basically true about bicycles and getting around on them So for example, why do people ride? Well, you often get a version of this. It's simple common sense right How do people ride? Well, they ride safely because they're using their common sense Or they're being vigilant and using their common sense when they ride in traffic Or when they're riding on the road, they're using their common sense rules Or how about how we regulate bicycles not just how we use them? So this supervisor breed in Ohio and Idaho talks about the common sense law that exists there And that bikes should be folded into that because it's common sensical to not yield at stop signs Or that when we're debating over bike fines, we need to be using our common sense It also has something to do with the what or sorry the where riding a bike on the sidewalk makes sense Why the hate right? or a Biker against bike lanes a tale of bikes common sense It also has to do with the what of the bike We have all kinds of presuppositions about what a bike is supposed to be and anything that stands outside of it is Revolutionary so here's a bike that doesn't use any wheels or common sense and Finally all the the arguments that suggest that bicycling is not common sensical, right? So PGO or PGO Rourke used his platform of being a writer on the Wall Street Journal To analyze a cool and logical analysis of the bicycle menace And an examination of the actions necessary to license regulate or embollish entirely this dreadful peril on our roads So what gives I'm asking myself, you know What is it about the bicycle here? That it somehow seems to be associated with common sensical thought and action in certain circumstances and others It's not what is it about bicycles that they become the means to be to show your common sense or to Be written off as someone who has no common sense and what role does common sense as a special category of knowing and sensing? Play and using bicycles and in my interest promoting them politically So for the most part my research has been on this subject has been happening in cities here in Burlington Affair amount, but also in Bogota, Colombia and not coincidentally riding a bike in a city seems to run against the grain of common sense Especially here as I've been told on numerous occasions Riding a bike in the city is risky abnormal deviant and people who do it are crazy stupid and asking for trouble Common sense dictates that you should get yourself a car. You'll get there faster. You'll get there more safely and without undesirable exertion So how do we make sense of these kinds of arguments and what's the place of the bicycle within them? I think it I and I immediately turn Towards well, what is this common sense thing? What is this category that we're talking about and This is also not prestigious work among social scientists Who have tended to dedicate themselves to poking holes in common sense as if it's an obligatory act That common sense is neither common nor sensical is the position of the social sciences and no doubt in my mind I am an anthropologist of academic disciplines Is that there is a defensive act of self-definition going on here where we are demarcating our own domain of knowledge as special as privileged as rigorous and cons and common sense is our sort of unsystematic and flimsy other and I think the social sciences have been so concerned about not being viewed as merely exercises in common sense That they've done relatively a little analysis of it as a category That itself Exercises a powerful influence over and helps frame a number of social and political dynamics Which is kind of what I want to talk about today So what is this common sense? Well, the idea has shifted over time this according to the secret history of Oxford University in 1726 It's the ordinary ability to keep ourselves from being imposed upon by gross contradictions palpable inconsistencies and unmasked imposters these days, I think the idea of what It falls under this label has shifted and so we tend to think of it now as a faculty that helps people make elemental judgments and to develop discerning principles About everyday matters that are based on real-world experience and that there is no formal training necessary It can also refer to an idealized or sorry a relatively organized body of self-evident Conclusions that are drawn from that faculty and it's the truisms about which all sensible people agree It's it can be pretty banal stuff That's why it's not prestigious, right? You know fire burns leopards don't change their spots If Wolfgang meter we're here today He'd tell us that proverbs have a special place in common sense but what's interesting to me is that these things have real epistemic authority and They sometimes trump the authority of other powerful social factors Like history law custom faith logic and reason so as Sophia Rosenfeld the historians who's written a really interesting book on Common sense is a category of political thought in Western Europe argued what quickly becomes clear is that nothing about common sense is or has been exactly what it seems at first glance And she says it's because its tenets change over time and across cultures and Sort of her book explores how this has happened in European political thought But to explain why it's so dynamic shifting variable and relative We can turn to Clifford Gertz in whose lineage I'm trained as a cultural anthropologist who argued that common sense is not what the mind cleared of can't spontaneously apprehends It is what the man filled with presuppositions concludes In other words common spends common sense is constructed out of well-worn grooves of thought and action characteristic of particular times and places This is not at all news to anthropology One of the great anthropological brain teasers is this is some of the the issues that have come out of this book He Evan Pritchard Evans Pritchard's 1937 book witchcraft oracles and magic among the Azandei Where he refers to a boy who has stubbed his toe on a route or a man who had the misfortune To be sitting under a granary when it collapses The Zonday common wisdom says that it's witchcraft that caused these things to happen Nonsense according to Evans Pritchard It's that you weren't paying attention young boy, and it's old man those poles holding up that granary were eaten out by termites That's why these things happened Well, of course say the Zonday, but it's why it happened to me right if I hadn't been bewitched I would have seen that route or The granary would have fallen on somebody else So while early anthropologists of knowledge would have probably called this a primitive metaphysics That's not what we would how we would see it today Rather what's being expressed here is a view that's integrated into a set of explanation and truth claims that are on their face Commonly sensible and of course the Zonday are not intellectually deficient They do know stupid and incompetent things when they see them that are not stricken by witchcraft Albeit in culturally specific ways But it's when their normal explanations fail that they hold up witchcraft as the explanation So witchcraft is this all-purpose idea that's dependable and adequate It's empirically sufficient and it's tied to a moral system that seems quite natural and thus it's something to be dogmatic about Which is why Clifford Gertz observed that common sense is a cultural system It's an in-generate order. That's self-evident if it wasn't in generates to you It's a it's an in-generate order capable of being empirically uncovered and conceptually formulated So that's music to my ears as an anthropologist because it means we can do fieldwork on it, but he cautions don't look for consistency or a logical structure and Expected to vary wildly across cultures as well as within them since even within a single society There is not full consensus on what common sense might be So in thinking what this might have to do with bicycles I will perform the classic anthropological maneuver of displacement and take you to Bogota, Colombia An Andean city of eight and a half million people at 8,500 feet in the in the mountains That has become very closely identified with the bicycle during the past decade and a half In 2011 the BBC ran a well-known article call it designating Bogota a bicycle paradise Noting that Bogota has the hot the largest bicycle network in the Americas and one of the largest in the world It sponsors weekly Ciclovias or they shut down the streets 75 Miles of streets to invite people to come out on their bikes without automobile traffic And over 200 cities around the world have have been doing Ciclovias and Claim their inspiration comes from Bogota So Bogota has become a global reference point for cities that are interested in bringing bicycles into the the flow of city life and into the transportation system So I was there to empirically uncover as Gertz might say and Conceptually formulate the in-generate order in which bicycles in urban mobility Intersect and I have to say that my own common commonsensical notions of urban bike riding were immediately Relativized with this work there But let me first say that bicycles have an interesting cultural renaissance resonance in Colombia It's the second sort of sport soccer is the first Although the glories in international sport that Colombians have had have always been in cycling not in soccer To the disappointment of many millions of Colombians But there's still a sense that bicycling is a critical dimension of national identity And it's the fact is that even presidents will run campaigns on it This is Enrique Peñalosa who in 2014 ran what he called a bicycle campaign He said the bicycle is the only thing that will unite this fractious country and divided country So he used the bicycle symbolically to say it. It's what we all share in common Could you imagine George W. Bush running on that platform and it's also a particular kind of cultural critique in Colombia where One prominent public intellectual wrote this really interesting editorial called the revenge of the bicycles in the top newspaper in the country and it was his analysis of Colombian success in international bike racing and he says The reason for this success is that it is the only truly accessible and inclusive sport Because the roadways are free so anyone can do it no matter what social class they come from Most sports are very expensive because they require Access to a club to play them tennis soccer even And if you want to play on that nice field Right and that the victories of these cyclists are is a slap in the face of the elites of this country because most of them Pretty much all of them are people like Naito Quintana who is the comes from a peasant farming family the the sort of outcasts of Colombian society are the ones who become the great cyclists and he said There is a revenge against this that country's business community and elites who want to exclude the poor and would just as soon Ride over these people with their SUVs and tinted windows The other thing happening in Bogota is a really interesting transformation that play has played out in the past Decade two decades and so up until fairly recently Bogota was considered not least by its residents to be the worst city in the world with sky-high murder rates kidnappings uncontrolled violence Undirected urban development And a lot of it is rooted in what happened in 1948 which was called the Bogota so which was a series of riots when Presidential candidate on the left was assassinated and it sparked the Civil War that is still happening and it led to Days of rioting in the center of Bogota and the the rich decided that we've had enough We're decamping they loot they moved their part of the city They just left and they moved north of the city the city eventually has encompassed them But what it's resulted in is a divided city so that the rich and the poor live spatially segregated from each other You have millions of people pouring in as refugees from the violence of drug cartels of The Civil War in the countryside and no one's there to sort of organize or receive them Legendary traffic jams playing out for hours upon hours because only while only 20% of the people own cars They're wealthy and entitled and they'll just go wherever they want. They'll park on sidewalks. They'll sit in Intersections they'll run red lights so how you move around the city gets wrapped up in this sort of dystopic City that's being developed here and a rupture comes about in 1994 when a couple of new mayors come on the scene Dedicated these two guys in green dedicated to reinventing the city and building what they thought of as a new culture of urban citizenship and interestingly enough key to their vision was reinventing the transportation system in which bicycles would play a Protagonistic role in remaking this city not the only thing but a very important role and This brings on the scene one of my favorite all-time politicians in Latin American History Antonis mocus who has served as mayor of Bogota on multiple occasions and he sort of is the disrupter in all this and he's sort of a He likes to think about common sense and uncommon sense a lot and use it towards political Purposes and to generate social change So let me tell you just briefly who this guy is and I'm glad that President Sullivan is here because I want to see him Do this too so he was the president of the National University of Columbia and He was addressing several thousand students one day and they were yelling at him They were pissed off. They were like, you know the drug cartels the violence the corruption He could have given a word in Edgewhite so he turns around he drops his pants and he moons them Thousands of students he moons them So he gets fired But an interesting counter-discourse emerges, so I don't really want you to do that But an interesting counter-discourse emerges, which is that this is the last honest public figure left in Colombia, right? And so he should run for mayor So he decides, okay, I'm out of a job. I'll run for mayor and he's a philosophy professor That's important to know here. And so he runs on a studied considered Platform that's what is lacking in Bogota or certain common sensical Rules and norms about how to live in a city. This is why people are stacking up in traffic jams for hours This is why there's all kinds of violence and trash in the streets and so on people just don't they're refugees Most of these people from the countryside. They're traumatized. They don't have they don't have a sense of what it means to live in a city so He does some interesting and unusual things the first thing he does is he issues these sort of cards to different people in pedestrian drivers They're sort of like red cards and yellow and green cards for like soccer, right? You're being a jerk Here's a red card, right? So people would pull you know pull in front of you and you're when you're walking the street You'd give them the red card people still remember this this happened about 10 years ago And then you know if things are going well give them the green card. Thank you appreciate it, right? It didn't change much, but I got people recognizing that there's a there's a certain set of rules and norms about living in the city and then he fired the traffic police and he's hired a bunch of mimes about 350 mimes to go out into intersections and And and and this was fascinating because this got traffic flowing again It was one of the most effective things to cut through People's notions and common sense of what is city how they should act in the city and reshape it because this was based on embarrassment and public shaming, right? So So based but here's mocus, right? He has these crazy ideas and he says bicycles Bicycles are based on dignified Transportation, it's the person doing things under their own power. That's a good thing It brings hope and and good health and it brings all these great things to cities Let's promote bicycles and so he Puts into motion the development of some pretty interesting bicycle programs and Expands that cyclo via Sundays open streets thing and he starts His planning department to plan This what's called the cyclo ruta or this sort of system of separated bike lanes and In the last and then this guy and Pena Losa was mayor after him He sort of continues this and then mocus becomes mayor again and he continues this so for up until the mid 2000s you have this tremendous transformation playing out where bikes are playing this really interesting role So we're you know ten years later. I'm down there doing fieldwork. I'm trying to try to figure out Well, what's happening? What's going on? What's how has this changed and there's definitely an urban bicycle culture that has developed And it even has developed its own common sense or a set of truisms rooted in practical experience And so one of my first ethnographic introductions to this Don't tell risk management because I was on UVM time is that I rode with two of the city's Prominent young bicycle activists. I'm just kidding. You're supposed to do participant observation, right? So I'm participating. I'm riding with people I'm riding with a couple of activists to a meetup of other activists. We're riding about 60 city blocks Which is you know ten eight miles or something? and You know for much of the ride we're like this where I in fact I shot this image right here We're riding in the street Even though there's a secret route right next to us. That's quite inviting I'm thinking to myself like oh, that's a nice like I don't get those things at home I want to write on that instead. We're riding in traffic, which is what I kind of do here and we're riding along and I Asked this woman who's a very prominent bike activist. I said well, so what what's going on here? Why aren't we on there? She says look when you've mastered the road the Ciclo Ruta shows itself to be slow and inconvenient There's too many people walking on it. There's too many interruptions with cross streets Now not five minutes after she says this We're riding fast and she swerves right onto the Ciclo Ruta I'm like oh my god. We should go over the Ciclo Ruta. She just told me not to go on the Ciclo Ruta So she swerves onto the Ciclo Ruta and there's some pedestrians there And so she turns to me before we get to them and she says this is our space They have there, you know, they have their own space It's to the side and if we don't protect this space, we won't get it We these people have to learn we got to teach them so most serious urban cyclists have Whistles hanging from their helmets really sharp whistles and she gets the whistle and she starts blowing at these pedestrians And they're like oh geez and so they get out of the way And we speed along and then immediately the next block. We're back onto the road. So This was interesting to me not least that unfamiliar communication style of using a whistle to communicate what your plans are I could imagine that could lead to some troubles here You know the ephemeral tensions between pedestrians and bike users There's a kind of creative and informal choreography of getting around the city going on here You know, there's a situational involvement with the Ciclo Ruta's and so on And it got me thinking about what this Argentine anthropologist named Pablo Wright calls Conducta there's a culture of conducta vial or sort of traffic traffic behavior that's rooted in these sort of informal norms and codes and practices that exist outside of and in fact are often Opposed to formal law formal traffic law that are highly specific to particular countries and cities and neighborhoods and that's Another term for that might be what's the common sense of getting around in that city? so I kind of set myself up to look into this and so I did a lot of interviews with different bike riders and bike activists and And those those I wrote a blog It was very widely followed and I think about I think all five of the people who followed it were here today and and I wrote about this sort of one of the things I'm learning about what it means to ride a bike in the city and There's all kinds of interesting sort of you know This is common sense a loosely organized set of principles and knowledge and so, you know have no fear Although the city itself is chaotic dangerous and fear fearsome bicycles or hairs cars or tortoises riding is liberating and creative They see it. You know, that's what that was all about moving here and there, right? If you ride in a straight line, you're gonna get yourself into trouble if you swear of a lot You're gonna get yourself into trouble Trust your bike even if you don't trust it I heard this a lot like your bike is a piece of junk it could fall apart at any moment But you got to trust it because you're riding through some sketchy areas Most people are indifferent towards you riding a bike with auto traffic is faster than in bike lanes Bike parking is scarce and substandard, but if you know your serial number you can bring it into buildings and They'll write it down They'll write down your serial number on one sheet of paper and then you'll write it on the other sheet And then when you want your bike out you show them the serial number on a sheet of paper Then they'll give you your bike At a traffic signal you should filter to the front get yourself a whistle All right buses produce claustrophobia. These are all these sort of principles that I came across and they all have the hallmarks of common sense There's a naturalness to them. There's a practicalness. There's a literalness. There's a non methodical Shamelessly ad hoc dimension of this one time, you know, I ran across this quotation from Emerson recently I thought man this cat captures The dynamic in Bogota really nicely a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds or Weak writers, right, but one quickly realizes that this loose set of truisms is not universalizable even within Bogota This is an elite version. This is a version. I got from middle-class upper middle-class people with style themselves to be urban cyclists There's a whole non-elite sort of intelligentsia vial or traffic intelligence is what they call it there That differs in substantial respects, but it also is presented as a body of common wisdom about how to get around Bicycles are symbols of poverty humility and struggle Liberation lies with motorcycles And it doesn't lie with you using creative space using space creatively Riding is a highly individual act But you could you should ride in loosely organized groups because it will reduce street threats It's a dangerous city, right? So, you know, you've got to watch out. You should downplay your Visibility don't bring attention to yourself. God forbid you should have a whistle with you The police will see you the police will hear you the criminals will hear you You ride only during limited times when others are commuting, right? There's between 5 and 7 p.m. And between, you know, 6 a.m. And 8 a.m. Don't ride outside of those times That's when the criminals are out trust your premonitions. I heard a lot of that, you know You've got a spidey sense. They don't use that expression, but they talk about this you have premonitions You have fears you need to take those things seriously bike lanes and other struck other infrastructure can aid you But they can also inhibit and threaten you So to me this is implicitly fascinating stuff I've ride a bike obviously and I love this kind of thing But you know on some level it I there's a part of me that says this is kind of butterfly collecting You know when you study something like common sense You kind of it can lead to this you compile lists of what that common sense is you kind of Put it in different categories and so on and there's something in my training that I think a lot of anthropologists trained since the 1970s Sort of you know, you're worried about which is that you're that you know, if you're told that you're butterfly collecting it's sort of like a somewhat grave accusation accusing your analytical metal and Your your variability to think anthropologically So the bigger issue is well, so what yeah, okay other tribes other scribes Yeah, we know that already common sense differs show me what it actually means so This is where I want to think about that so on one level the analytical significance of something like this is That common sense is not simply intellectual territory It's embodied and it's mediated by certain kinds of grounded dynamics and Material conditions so when it what when writers that I would be interviewing Invoke fear premonition chaos stress feelings of being threatened or Contentment pleasure and other real positive feelings. They often tied it to very specific geographies and spaces neighborhoods and alleys and certain types of infrastructure Bridges tunnels bike lanes that can produce Some very palpable sensations for them So the emphasis here is on sense literally the sensual in how we might approach common sense This has been radically underappreciated it when social scientists approach something like common sense Because they imagine right off the bat a body of notions instead of embodied notions On another level the question for me is what kind of social and political authority Does that kind of common sense carry and what ways? Does common sense contribute to the shape of bike advocacy and bike politics as I was finding in Environmental activism in Costa Rica and this for me is where the story can get quite interesting and I'm still putting the pieces together What's happening around bicycles in Bogota is not happening in isolation It's being shaped by and has contributed to Some globally circulating ideas about how you make a good city by reinventing transportation structures and developing new policies to move people around And there's a transnational flow of policy knowledge and exchange that's been increasing in scale and speed and What's happened in Bogota is in part inspired by things going on elsewhere places like Curitiba in Brazil or Barcelona in Spain and Bogota itself has now been picked up in this flowing set of ideas and common-sensical ideas about how to Make cities better What this means for Bogota According to someone I spent a lot of time listening to who works in the mayor's office is that it receives in any given week One or two official delegations from another city around the world Who are there to inquire into how did Bogota do it? How did they integrate bicycles into its transportation system and what's interesting is that you have in Planning conferences international planning discourse people like Antony Smokas show up and give talks and other city officials from Bogota Participate they publish things they talk at these conferences. They share what happened What's interesting is there's a new kind of common sense being constructed and circulated in those circuits about the story of bicycling in Bogota and that body of common sense that's emerging says that Bogota is a model of International best practice of how to integrate bicycles into the transportation mix Because it's prioritized a number of common-sense initiatives that get people biking One is that it supports its sequel via this open streets on Sundays And the second is that it's pursuing an infrastructure-centric approach to bike Transportation it's building an extensive bike network putting in bike lanes cycle tracks the sequel Ruta and Creating or encouraging the creation of bike parking infrastructure So but what I find fascinating here is that when stripped of context this particular set of common-sense beliefs and principles Allides a few dynamics One of these is that there's a set of specific contingent some might even say accidental and Unintended dynamics of power governance and legitimacy That in Bogota that shaped the very conditions of possibility for imagining bikes on the streets They had a lot to do with constitutional reforms including one that Guaranteed people the right to a healthy life. They had to do with highly centralized mayoral bureaucracies acting in top-down almost Totalitarian fashion to put these things into place a Couple of charismatic mayors showed up on the scene who were able to shift the narrative about the city And bring international attention and foreign investment to it The other is that all of this swirls in this sort of International story that says if a dystopic third-world city can do these things if it can pull it off What about a gleaming first-world city? We could do it too. We're even better. We have more money We have more smarts. We have all the technical wisdom and so on and it's rooted in a very interesting Bit of common sense that I'm sure you're all familiar with Build it and they will come Right, this is the somewhat crazed Iowa farmer who builds a baseball field in order to attract the ghosts of former, you know dead baseball players if you build bike lanes if you put in Infrastructure if you build sequel root does if you make transformations to the built environment it will bring cyclists out it will encourage them to get on their bikes and change the transportation mix and It's true. There's no doubt that if you put in certain kinds of transportation infrastructure You for example build roads they get filled with cars, right in Bogota they built a bus rapid transit system that's stressed to the max too many people want to use it But when it comes to bikes, there's an interesting exception here Bogota's results are quite ambiguous The rates of cycling in Bogota really remain quite low about 600 trips 600,000 trips a day, which is about 2% of overall trips and when you look at this infrastructure that Tens of millions of dollars were spent for Only about a third of those 600,000 200,000 or so actually use it on any given day So the story of Bogota is that they built it, but the people didn't really come And so there's a hole in there that triumphalist narrative somewhere. So why this is one of the questions I've been asking myself and I at one level the answer is always complicated by particularities of local history Legacies of urban planning dynamics of social marginality that have played out in Bogota And as a lot of Bogotano seem to believe as I've heard on multiple occasions You can't build your way out of social dysfunction in a city But on another it's useful to recognize that build it and they will come is kind of like our version of Zande witchcraft It's a theory of causation that seems commonsensical It's a version of Technological determinism and ability to make clear predictions Through the instability and situational character of human thought and action It's an all-purpose idea that is dependable adequate empirically sufficient Something we can even be dogmatic about even if on closer examination. It doesn't really hold up to scrutiny So my own conclusion about all this remains decidedly uncommon sensical That cycling in a city certainly is sensitive to things like spatial form in the built environment But it's also sensitive to the political economic and social hierarchies that are built into transportation systems and transportation funding It's Related to the cultural preseptions and ideologies that people have about urban space And the embodied and performative demands and experiences and informal rules involved in the movement itself And so returning to the purpose of this talk I think instead of sort of taking the high ground And saying all of this common sense as it relates to bicycles is neither common nor sensical Which is in an odd way an expression of common sense among academics Especially social scientists. Let us instead recognize that this category of knowing As wily and as unstable as it may be Still carries tremendous epistemic authority that shapes and drives matters of real importance in our world That common sense is may not be reasonable or methodical or systematic is not really the point The point if there is one Is that it is one of the privileged means by which groups of people can come to a more or less consensual Albeit temporary practical agreement about the world they share To me the question is not How and why when we think we know better does it stick around so doggedly? But where do those presuppositions that relies on and feed into it actually come from? Thank you very much