Fear and Loathing in New York: Citi Bike and Urban Sustainability?

• In Event: 563 - Section on Community and Urban Sociology Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 09. Sustainability and the City

Abstract

In the spring of 2013, the city of New York unveiled its first ever bike-sharing program: Citi Bike. The unveiling of the Citibank sponsored bike-sharing program, under the twelve-year tenure of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, further spearheaded New York’s urban biking culture. Many New Yorkers warmly embraced the advent of Citi Bike, but at the same time some concerned New Yorkers feared that the bike-sharing program would culminate in urban chaos in the form of more street congestion and fatalities. In addition, the installation of more than three hundred docking stations in downtown Manhattan and parts of western Brooklyn raised some serious sociopolitical questions of community, the corporatization of public space, and urban sustainability. These critical questions were most powerfully illustrated through the case of Petrosino Square, where a small group of local residents and artists of the SoHo neighborhood bonded under the aegis of Friends of Petrosino Square to challenge the Department of Transportation’s installation of one particular Citi Bike docking station in a public park. This paper aims to explicate how and why the arrival of Citi Bike initially engendered fear and loathing by some New Yorkers, as most acutely evidenced by the case of Petrosino Square, and concurrently presented important queries regarding the matrix of urban life and sustainability.

Author

• Omar Montana, City University of New York-Graduate Center