Understanding the Lived Body in the Urban Cycling Experience: An Autoethnographic Study in Amsterdam

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 PhD Researcher, Department of Urban Planning, Faculty of Art, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran.

2 Assistant Professor, Department of Urban Planning, Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran

3 Full Professor in Urban Mobility, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Abstract

Movement in the city is not merely a functional activity aimed at traveling from point A to point B, as conceived within transportation engineering. Rather, it is a fluid, multidimensional, and entangled practice that acquires meaning through its embeddedness in environmental, cultural, social, economic, and political contexts within the fabric of everyday life and through individuals’ lived mobile experiences.
In urban studies and urban design, research exploring individuals’ lived experiences of mobility in the city is an emerging field situated at the intersection of urbanism, anthropology, phenomenology, and mobility studies. From this perspective, inquiries into the lived experience of urban cycling address a fundamental question: how do individuals experience cycling in different urban contexts and spaces?
Within this framework, the present study seeks to understand and describe the role of the body in the lived experience of urban cycling in a specific urban context, continuing a line of inquiry in the phenomenology of movement and the phenomenology of the body. Using mobile autoethnography, the study examines the first author’s embodied experience of cycling in Amsterdam, a bicycle-friendly city, across different temporal and spatial conditions.
The findings reveal seven interrelated themes that, through autoethnographic description and analysis, illuminate the entanglement of the body, the bicycle, and the urban environment in lived experience. These themes demonstrate that the body, as the medium of experience, plays an active and constitutive role in shaping one’s interaction with space, self, and others. Such relations are mediated by environmental and climatic characteristics, mobility systems and planning policies, cultural dimensions, and both formal and informal norms, producing diverse lived experiences of urban cycling across different urban contexts. In the final section, this research provides recommendations for future Iranian urban design studies.

Highlights

  • Investigates the lived bodily experience of urban cycling through the lens of phenomenology of movement and the lived body.
  • Employs mobile autoethnography to explore embodied interactions between body, bicycle, and urban environment in Amsterdam.
  • Reveals how bodily habituation, environmental affordances, and socio-cultural norms co-constitute cycling experience.
  • Provides insights for future Iranian human-centered urban design studies.

Keywords

References

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History

  • Receive Date: 16 March 2025
  • Revise Date: 09 April 2025
  • Accept Date: 03 May 2025
  • First Publish Date: 19 June 2025
  • Publish Date: 19 June 2025

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