A ride through Lisbon to discover the bicycle, through stories and old photos

We are in Rua do Crucifixo, downtown. Behind us, where today there is a hairdresser's, there used to be one of the most important bicycle shops in Lisbon. The Casa Victoria, founded by Armando Crespo, occupied the numbers 112-114 of that street between the early twentieth century until at least the 1960s. All that remains of it today are photographic records like the one we have in our hands.

The photo was passed to us by Maria Luísa Sousa, researcher and coordinator of Hi-BicLaba History Laboratory about urban mobility and, in particular, the bicycle in the city of Lisbon. The goal of Luísa's work is to reconstruct the History and histories of the bicycle in Lisbon, crossing different disciplines of the academy and presenting, in the end, a book about the past, which can, at the same time, serve as a manifesto for the future. Luísa doesn't work alone; while we admired that photo of that old store that once occupied downtown, we were accompanied by some of her colleagues from the History Lab and another two dozen people. We were all taking part in a walk organized in the scope of the Hi-BicLab, with the intention of starting to aggregate some community around this research project.

If the arrival point was at Rua do Crucifixo, where in other times the Victoria bicycle store used to be, the departure point was at Campo Grande, where in 2001 the city's first bicycle path was born - Is it possible that the bicycle started to construct daily scenes in Lisbon only after the construction of bicycle lanes in the city? We passed by Entrecampos, a crossing point of several mobility modes and where, with the leveling of the train line and the construction of road tunnels, it became clear which mode was given priority. And by Alameda, near Almirante Reis, where the question of what is an avenue was raised. At each of the stops, we reviewed old photographs, heard stories of the city, and were challenged with a few questions.

With funding from the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), the Hi-BicLab project brings together five historians (Maria Luísa Sousa, Jaume Valentines-Álvarez, João Machado, Hugo Silveira Pereira and Diego Cavalcanti Araújo), a biologist (Cristina Luís), a geographer (David Vale), an urban planner (Bernardo Campos Pereira) and an economist (Patrícia Melo). A large and multidisciplinary team that embodies this History Lab, whose work began this year. The project will last until 2023; throughout next year, there will be new activities open to the public, such as a conference (as soon as January 11) and hands-on labs.

"The History Lab has been a methodology used in several contexts. We are using it to understand how certain histories of dominant modes of mobility, in this case self-mobility, have been sold, and how you can also use history to understand that all of this is a social and technical construction and negotiation."Luísa explains. "We want to know the alternative pasts that we don't know about yet, whether those pasts that actually happened - that is, the active mobilities that existed and that we don't know about, like bicycles in Lisbon in the 20th century - or the pasts that were planned futures but were not realized, and that help us understand the way things were designed at the time."

How have we been sold self-mobility and altered perceptions of public space? Are the streets and avenues "arteries" for automobile traffic? What "alternative" pasts do we not know about the presence of the bicycle in the city? What dystopias and utopias were thought of in the past? What patterns do we find in permanence between the past and the present? What does the bicycle represent? These are some of the questions that the Hi-BicLab proposes to answer, involving different audiences in this identification of key social, cultural, and technical factors that have shaped the mobility (and immobility) of people, and broadening our imagination about the city's past. "We're going to look at what expertise has been called upon to define what is and who is entitled to certain parts of public space, and also look at the image and status of the bicycle in the city, at role of social movements, and how this has been building the reality we have today, and how this can build future realities again."

Hi-BicLab is an academic, research project, but the intention is to be open to the people of the city, to include technicians and politicians from the Lisbon City Council, activist groups, social movements and also bicycle users and people simply interested in the subject. The book to be edited at the end of the project will be part of the international collection Cycling Citieswhich has been documenting the history of different world cities with the bicycle. "There is an implicit goal here of attempting political change. Let's be honest."points out David Vale. "From the moment we involve the City Council, activists and other groups, we want the project to also be a vehicle for changing the city's mobility policy. That it leads people to realize each other, to understand each other and to be able to change somehow, giving more prominence to what we call active modes - walking, cycling and even public transport itself." "Everyone here is involved in some way with the modal use of the bicycle. So it is not possible to ignore in the scientific construction the personal motivations that everyone has. Of course, that motivation is not to be confused with our methodology. The whole process is done in a scientific way."adds Diego.

The tour, which brought together two dozen people and was organized in record time, allowed us to present some of the historical research work that has already been done and to show its breadth. Luísa and her colleagues are going through the archives trying to find and confirm information. Patrícia Melo, on the other hand, is looking at the economic side of urban planning in an attempt to find out how much public transportation existed, how much the tickets cost, and how the different services were related to each other. "So factors that in a very direct way influenced people's decision"he explains. "From the standpoint of public policy fare and investment in improving the service of different modes and their intermodality, it was building and making it more affordable for whom? This will be my contribution."

The information Patrícia is looking for is not systematized anywhere and will involve, for example, visiting CP's archives, consulting timetables and building service indicators based on them - only by seeing the timetables will it be possible to know, for example, how many trains pass through Entrecampos each day. But making this data available is one of the project's objectives, allowing not only other researchers but anyone in general not to have to go through the same research effort. "We don't have a practice of the different operators and transport authorities concentrating this data for public policy." laments Patricia "This data that we are systematizing we will leave in some way consultable for the future, because the problem many is not even knowing if there is the data because it is not systematized"says David. "We are trying to move policies also on access to documentation. Many of these documents that we are accessing are public, but the form of access is not yet fully publicized and systematized. For many of them, we have to do face-to-face consultation"Diego adds.

Diego Cavalcanti Araújo is a historian and usually looks at social issues of representation; his contribution to the project is essentially about these issues. "The invisilbilizations in relation to cycling are constructions of perception. Policies don't just shape the space of the city, but also the dispute of the imaginary-that space that people have common sense, like that Lisbon is not a cyclable city and that it became one only in the 21st century."Diego points out. "The bicycle has different meanings for different social groups. In the 19th century, it was eminently associated with the Aristocracy, and in the 20th century, what we can see is not a vulgarization, but a more popular use of the bicycle by liberal work sectors, by professionals linked to public work, such as firemen or bulletin distributors"he explains.

"The bicycle comes to have new meanings throughout this historical process and one of the questions we are trying to investigate is how these re-signification processes made the bicycle at some point something positivized and at other points something negativized, and for which groups these meanings were signifying."he explains. The researcher exemplifies that the invibilization was not made around all cyclists and that the sportive use of the bicycle "it's not evidenced, it's advertised"but "the uses by more popular layers [like a chestnut seller] are more marginalized, they are invisible".. In short, Diego summarizes: "The bicycle is not a single thing. It has different layers. We're trying to problematize that concept of what the bicycle is and what kinds of uses they make of it, and why certain groups have been invisibilized while others have been promoted."

As part of Hi-BicLab, new meetings with the public will be promoted throughout the year 2023. The first one will be on January 11th - the first one will be on January 11th. details will be published soon on the project's website. Until then, some "journal clubs" have been promoted, meetings for discussion of scientific articles on urban mobility, selected by researchers. You can follow Hi-BicLab on the social networks Instagram, Facebook e Twitter. And most importantly: if you want to receive the project's newsletter, send an e-mail requesting it to hi.biclab@campus.fct.unl.pt.

Field Notes

If you didn't have the opportunity to go on this historical and scientific tour, we share some notes of what was presented to us and the respective photographs. So that you can take a walk with us without leaving home and, perhaps, become interested in this project. The following texts are from the Hi-BicLab project.

Campo Grande

In Campo Grande, David showed us that the bicycle didn't start to construct everyday scenes in Lisbon only when bike paths started being built in 2001. There is evidence of bicycle use since the beginning of the 20th century, namely the reference to a party called "battle of flowers"organized by Portuguese Propaganda Society in 1907to a military "velocipedia" contestthe following year, in 1908; in 1924the registration of a contract for a place called Champighon that was in the Campo Grande garden for the activity of bicycle rentalThe garden was remodeled in the 1940s in an intervention by Francisco Keil do Amaral (and others). The garden was remodeled in the 1940s, in an intervention by Francisco Keil do Amaral (and others), which will have favored the use of the bicycle through the construction of spaces that provided for this purpose.

From 1960s and 1970s references continue to be found to bike lanes in the Campo Grande garden and the rental activity of bicycles and also motorcycles, precisely where the tour started. The records collected by the researchers seem associated with a leisure side of the bicycle, although it is not known if those who rented them had only that use. The History of the bicycle in Portugal that we know shows much of its sportive and leisure side and only recently do records of the bicycle as a means of transportation begin to appear. But as the uses and their purposes coexist in the present, they may have coexisted in the past. In fact, there are records of the use of the bicycle as a means of transportation in Lisbon throughout the 20th century, for example, among certain professional groups.

If, at the beginning of the 20th century, in 1907, riding a bicycle could still be associated with the aristocracy and people in liberal professions (like the members of the Sociedade Propaganda de Portugal, a kind of "Touring Club" of Portugal, created in 1906); in 1961, it could perhaps more easily be associated with the image of "poor man's horse"It is ironic, as a 1961 photo shows, that some of the people who worked on the construction of the Segunda Circular in Campo Grande used to commute to work by bicycle. It is ironic that, as a 1961 photograph shows, some of the people who worked on the construction of the Segunda Circular in Campo Grande commuted to work that way, helping to build a road from which bicycles would effectively be excluded. So these photos remind us of the status and representations around bicycling, but also of how self-mobility (the mobility of the private car) came to dominate public space. And what different statuses do we have today in the uses of the bicycle? Does a person delivering food have the same status as a middle-class person who has chosen the bicycle as a means of transportation?

Entrecampos

In this second stop, Patrícia evoked the intersection of various modes of mobility, which are represented in this railway viaduct in Entrecampos and in the surrounding stations and infrastructures. With the planning of the so-called "new avenues" at the end of the 19th century, this intersection between the then Avenida Ressano Garcia (now Avenida da República) and the internal belt railway line appeared, solved with level crossings, embankments and small tunnels. The first viaduct we see was inaugurated in 1950. It would be replaced by a new viaductdesigned by Edgar Cardoso in 1968 and inaugurated in the early 1970s. The construction of this new viaduct was concurrent with the construction of the Entrecampos road tunnel and responds to a common rationale: the increase in automobile traffic and the public space used for its operation.

In this period (1950-1973) also occurred the construction and opening of the first phase of the Lisbon Metrowhich went to Entrecampos (in one of the arms of the "Y"), as well as other fare integration initiatives between Metro and Carris, for example, which occurred around the same time as the opening of the road tunnel and railway viaduct in 1973. These seem to be initiatives with opposite signs.

In Entrecampos, issues related to the urban and mobility planning: the so-called De Groër planof 1948 already foresaw the construction of radial and ring roads to Lisbongiving an important role to what was imagined to be automobile circulation. If in part, the argument was to avoid through traffic, these radials, on the contrary, brought automobile traffic directly to the city center. O plan approved in the late 1960s for Lisbon accentuated this issue, and there were several studies that followed it, which foresaw an increase in traffic and the creation of infrastructure (such as road tunnels in the historic center) to accommodate it (an irresolvable paradox). Some of these proposals were not followed up (black utopias).

Today, in Entrecampos, besides cars, trains and subway, there are also bicycles, thanks to the GIRA stations installed there and to the busy bike lane on Avenida da República.

Alameda/Almirante Reis

At Almirante Reis, Luísa cited the first two definitions in Porto Editora's dictionary for the word "avenue": 

"1. A roadway that is wider than a street and whose carriageway usually has several lanes for automobile traffic;

2. wide and usually tree-lined street; boulevard."

In trying to understand how the uses and representations of public space (for example, an avenue) are tradedand have been in historical processes, can help us in this reflection the definitions that we attribute to things today. Avenida Almirante Reis, the name adopted with the implantation of the Republic in 1910 (just like Avenida da República), was initially projected from Rua da Palma to Praça do Chile and designated Avenida dos Anjos (when it was inaugurated in 1903, it would still be called Avenida D. Amélia). Conceived in the late 1870s to solve circulation problems, it took several years to be realized.

In one of the observed photographs, we see the outbuildings of the Hospital do Desterro that took a long time to be expropriated and that blocked the opening of AvenidaThe existing streetcar lines made the detour to largo do Intendente.

Who was the Avenue for? This avenue continued to be reinvented throughout the twentieth century, particularly with its extension from Praça do Chile to Areeiro, with the opening of adjacent streets and the regularization of existing streets and also with changes in its cross-sectional profiles, which materialized the way public space was distributed. Traffic engineering concepts were sometimes applied (also due to the influence of the Junta Autónoma de Estradas and its road engineers, as seen in the preparatory work between 1954 and 1959 for a new Lisbon urbanization plan), which emphasized the hierarchy of faster modes of mobility to the detriment of other modes of mobility (even by the criteria and planning instruments they used). However, as we see in these photographs from 1960, modes of mobility that were often made invisible by those expertiseSuch as pedestrian and cycling mobility persisted.

The discourse of a certain type of expertise in favor of the hierarchization of the fastest mobilities continues to be mobilized in some arguments presented today about the division of public space. There are several actors in these negotiations. We know that social movements have played an important role in some European cities to propose alternatives to this hierarchization of mobilities. We also observe similar movements happening in Lisbon.

Crucifix Street

"Is the bicycle a machine for dreaming?"Diego asks us. This is the last stop on this tour. We bring this photo a photograph of a Mocidade Portuguesa parade, from before 1947, to help us reflect on that normativity that we attribute to the bicycle. A Portuguese Youth was created in 1936 by the Portuguese Estado Novo dictatorship, intending to socialize young people (and also young women, in the Mocidade Portuguesa Feminina, created soon after) in the regime's values (being initially inspired by the Hitler and Italian Fascist Youth). In this photo, they parade with bicycles. What do bicycles represent? How not to essentialize them? As historian Melvin Kranzberg would say, technology is not good, it is not bad, and it is not neutral either - that is, it depends on how it is used and the context of that use. 

Returning to the question about whether the bicycle is a machine for dreaming, and being aware of the risks of normativity (and essentialization), we can say that the bicycle has already made it possible to dream, and has already been an object of desire (as a consumer good and more). But the bicycle is also one of the modes that disputes the urban space and also has its exclusions.

Diego also shows us a photograph of the Casa Victoria, owned by Armando Crespo e C.a, which operated in this street, to say that the study of bicycle stores, rental stores, and workshops since the beginning of the 20th century are one more evidence of the use of bicycles in everyday life in Lisbon. In the image, we see exposed bicycles that were offered by this store for the "Dream Contest". Can the bicycle still make people dream today? The investigation is open, as well as the answer on how the knowledge of the past can give tools to think about the present and the future.