reclaim our space

I was once walking down a sidewalk. I saw this on the wall. I really liked it. I took a picture of it. I really liked it so I put it on this blog. I hope others really like it. I hope you really like it.

This painting, beyond simply being a great way of showing love to the bicycle and the bicycle's rider, is especially thought-provoking. A bicycle seems to be a fitting image to be tagged onto a wall as street art since both this style of art and the bike itself are all about forcing us to rethink our spaces. Street art makes us rethink walls, sidewalks, bridges, bricks, and advertisements as things with the potential of doing something other than selling us stuff or encouraging us to buy stuff. It makes us reconsider what belongs to individuals and what belongs to the community.

Similarly, bicycles challenge us to rethink our spaces. If we stop and think about things, it's crazy how much of our resources are continually devoted to maintaining and supporting cars. An automatically assumed aspect of any building or any part of a city is the car -- roads sprawl everywhere to provide direct automobile access to everything, every building and every portion of the city must roll out huge slabs of concrete for parking lots and paint out infinite rows of parking spaces, and we automatically plan on making intense, costly, repetitive, and seemingly eternal rounds of construction and repairs for these pieces of car-based infrastructure. Now, let's compare all this to the bike. Take a look at any multi-use path in Boulder and there it is -- that's the vision of the infrastructure required by bicycles. Small, clean, easily maintained, and much more sustainable pathways.

Bicycling makes us all reconsider the ways we structure our living spaces, our neighborhoods, our communities, and our cities. It challenges the assumptions forced on us by cars through providing a legitimate alternative, and it makes us rethink how much of our spaces are thoughtlessly devoted to providing for and catering to the monstrous automobile machine.