In Praise of the Bicycle

In this playful (and playfully illustrated) little book, a French anthropologist expounds on his love of cycling. On a bicycle, he asserts, “you become someone else, and yet you are yourself as never before.” . . . Augé grounds his velophilia in nostalgia for the immediate post-World War II years, when the bike was a means of escape from devastated cities and the great champions Bartali and Coppi were performing mythic feats in the Tour de France. Since then, Augé’s argument goes, a crisis in cycling has developed, stemming from the sullying of professional cycling (through doping and corporate sponsorship) and from the way globalization “decenters” cities, prioritizing transit into and out of the megalopolis rather than within it. Yet his description of this crisis is just a prelude to Augé’s imaginings of a utopian future in which cars have been banished from the streets of Paris and bicycles have taken their place. The bicycle, he wants to assert, is a tool for the realization of humanism . . . Seeking portents of such a future, Augé cites Paris’s Vélib’ bike-share program. One might expect the man who coined the idea of “nonplaces” to be wary of bike-shares — alert to the partial inclusivity of such projects or suspicious of the corporate advertising that often finances them — but skepticism isn’t Augé’s project. His argument is fast and incautious; he’s freewheeling and having great fun. * New York Times *