A dedicated volunteer with Our Streets MPLS, Melody Hoffmann is a scholar who has recently published a book that examines how the bicycle is symbolized in different communities, and how bicycle advocacy and planning reflects those different values often resulting in inequitable development. 

Our Streets MPLS is hosting a book release party at Boneshaker Books, an all-volunteer bookstore in the Seward neighborhood. Admission to the party is free, and will include refreshments and a Q&A with the author! This is a great opportunity to dig into this topic deeply, and have your book signed by Melody! We will have a blog post coming soon with more details about what to expect from the conversation, so stay tuned!

If you are unable to attend this event, you will be able to tune in to a live stream.

ORDER your books through Boneshaker Books!

Praise for Bike Lanes Are White Lanes

“For anyone interested in the urban role of cycling, this is an important book. Informed by an overdue concern with race, class, and gender, it critically redresses imbalances in our current understandings of cycling. [Hoffmann] usefully punctures a general liberal, middle-class complacency over the implicitly assumed superiority of the bicycle. . . . Indispensable reading if our goal is to broaden cycling’s appeal and to make inclusive and just cities, as well as genuinely ecologically sustainable ones.”
—Dave Horton, author of Promoting Walking and Cycling: New Perspectives on Sustainable Travel

RSVP details

Admission is free, but please fill out this link (https://goo.gl/forms/TpzIsLAHgehri7Gp1) to reserve your seat! Boneshaker has limited seating, and we want this conversation to be an intimate size. People of color (POC) will be given priority for 50% of the seats. If you identify as a person of color, please check that on the form and we'll save you a seat! After the 50% are reserved, we'll reserve seats on a first come first served basis.

More info about the book

The number of bicyclists is increasing in the United States, especially among the working class and people of color. In contrast to the demographics of bicyclists in the United States, advocacy for bicycling has focused mainly on the interests of white upwardly mobile bicyclists, leading to neighborhood conflicts and accusations of racist planning.

In Bike Lanes Are White Lanes, scholar Melody argues that the bicycle has varied cultural meaning as a “rolling signifier.” That is, the bicycle’s meaning changes in different spaces, with different people, and in different cultures. The rolling signification of the bicycle contributes to building community, influences gentrifying urban planning, and upholds systemic race and class barriers.

In this study of three prominent U.S. cities—Milwaukee, Portland, and Minneapolis—Melody examines how the burgeoning popularity of urban bicycling is trailed by systemic issues of racism, classism, and displacement. From a pro-cycling perspective, Bike Lanes Are White Lanes highlights many problematic aspects of urban bicycling culture and its advocacy as well as positive examples of people trying earnestly to bring their community together through bicycling.

To read more about Bike Lanes Are White Lanes, visit the publisher page, here: http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Bike-Lanes-Are-White-Lanes,677153.aspx