Living Cities: Tackling ‘bikelash’

A conversation on what makes a livable city.
By AITOR HERNÁNDEZ-MORALES
With GIOVANNA COI
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Happy Thursday, city lovers!
After a two-week break, we’re back with a look at the social backlash that sometimes occurs when streets are redesigned to be more people-friendly — and how experts think it can be tamed.
Further down, we look back on a summer defined by pushback against mass tourism in Spain.
LISTEN UP: In this edition we debut our new Culture Corner, offering critical takes, music and more.
‘BIKELASH’ BANTER: Redesigning streets to give more space to cyclists and pedestrians is easy; getting the wider community to accept those changes is harder. In cities like Brussels, London and Madrid, attempts to reduce cars on streets have generated enormous social backlash with dire political consequences for the parties seeking to implement such climate-conscious measures. Earlier this summer local leaders gathered at the Velo-City cycling summit in Ghent to reflect on how to avoid “bikelash.” The big takeaway: Mobility is personal, and getting city-dwellers to accept big changes requires real engagement.
Common ownership: Emil Renslava, former chief adviser of the Norwegian Cyclists’ Association, said popular backlash against decarbonized mobility was rooted in the perception that locals are being left out of the conversation. Countering that, he argued, depended on establishing a feeling of common ownership over the transformation of the cityscape. “You have to present a clear vision of what those changes will look like, and how they will benefit the people living in the community,” he stressed.
Silent majority: Echoing the results of a recent study that showed small-but-loud collectives of naysayers often dominate debates on low-emission zones, Renslava said it was necessary to engage with the “silent majority” of citizens who want more liveable surroundings. “The angry man who writes to the newspaper might have support from the wider population … But he may also just be the representative of a loud minority, and not of the people who would actually like their kids to be able to play on safe streets.”
Keep talking: To ensure the silent minority remains committed to the changes, Renslava said it was important to view communication like “a marathon” in which “you start interacting with residents early and never stop.” He added, however, that “when disinformation and fake news about the changes begin to spread, it’s time to sprint to shut those down with actual facts.”
Lessons from failure: In 2022 the attempted introduction of a new mobility plan in Brussels’ Schaerbeek municipality led to riots; local authorities ultimately backtracked from its implementation. Adelheid Byttebier, the municipality’s deputy mayor for mobility, acknowledged that local authorities had failed to sufficiently engage with residents, many of whom are of migrant backgrounds and were caught off guard by the changes. The Green party representative admitted that it had been a mistake to reach out to community leaders like the imams of the area’s mosques only after the backlash occurred — when minds were already made up.
Lack of representation: It’s to be expected that communities will react negatively to perceived “outsiders” arriving to impose changes on their surroundings. That’s particularly a problem in cities with neighborhoods with large concentrations of residents belonging to migrant or ethnic minority groups. Europe’s local leaders are overwhelmingly white, as are the policy experts they deploy to implement the changes.
Go local: Ghent mobility adviser Cédéric De Clerq recognized that the lack of diversity among municipal representatives was a challenge. He said his city had attempted to overcome that obstacle by featuring residents in advertising campaigns announcing big changes in their neighborhoods. While the effort is promising, unless major efforts are made to tackle representation at all levels of municipal administrations, many initiatives will likely be resented as top-down impositions on neighborhoods of color — no matter how beneficial they may be for the community at large.
DEAL WITH IT? Up to now, Portuguese flat-owners could shut down noisy short-term rentals within their buildings by filing an official complaint. But conservative Prime Minister Luís Montenegro’s government has passed a new decree that requires two-thirds of the building’s residents to sign onto the complaint, and for the city’s mayor to have the final say on whether the problematic flat should be shuttered; moreover, rather than be permanent, the closure can be mandated for a maximum of only five years. The change, ostensibly done not to stifle entrepreneurism, seems remarkably out of touch when Europeans are protesting against unrestricted tourism …
WHY, WHY LCY? Britain’s new Labour government raised eyebrows this week by greenlighting the expansion of the London City Airport (LCY). The move was made against the advice of the country’s Climate Change Committee, an advisory body created by the U.K. Labour government in 2008, which says none of the country’s airports should be expanded if it hopes to meet its 2050 net zero emissions goals.
FINED: Spain’s Civil Guard fined a member of the city of Alcorcón’s fire department this week after determining the aged firetruck he was driving was prohibited within the local low emissions zone. The episode is a reminder that tackling pollution also requires public investment in things like the vehicles used by municipal health and security services.
WELCOME BACK: 58 years after Liége shut down its tram network, the light-rail system is back! The city on Tuesday tested out the new carriages that will traverse an 11.7 kilometer route between Coronmeuse and Sclessin beginning this fall. The network aims to create a public transport alternative that will help get buses out of the historic center.
IT’S A SEINE: French officials set a goal of cleaning up the Seine for the 2024 Olympics. Whether they managed it is debatable; whether they can get the river clean enough for regular Parisians to use next year is even more in doubt. Our colleagues Nicolas and Marianne dig into it here.
[NON-NATIVE] REPRESENTATION MATTERS: For the first time in history, more than 50,000 non-Belgian residents of Brussels have registered to vote in the city’s local elections, which are set to be held in October. Expats now make up 7.7 percent of the registered electorate, and more than 10 percent of those registered in municipalities like Saint-Gilles, Etterbeek and Ixelles. Re-read our July interview with Restless Brussels’ Tom Moylan, who spearheaded the campaign to register foreign residents to vote, here.
SOUNDS OF THE CITY: This week we’re debuting a semi-regular section anchored by POLITICO’s own Leyla Aksu and Paul Dallison, both former music writers, who will be lending us their expertise and compiling cities-themed playlists to delight your ears. They start out strong this week, pedaling forward with a selection of ditties about the joys of cycling:
“For this first installment, we went on a multi-genre search for songs that truly spoke to the highs and lows of bike ownership,” Leyla explained. “We wanted to capture the unadulterated freedom that comes with a first bike, the feeling of the wind in your hair, the thrill of side-stepping city traffic, the stress that comes with parking and cleaning your cycle, and the absolute heartbreak associated with losing a beloved two-wheeler.”
“We also couldn’t stop ourselves from including a few hidden gems we dug up dedicated to legendary cyclists and the glory of a serious bike race,” she added. “Lest we forget: ‘I don’t need no gasoline / With my bicycle machine’.”
TIRED OF TOURISTS: This summer will likely be remembered for Spanish cities bucking against mass tourism. As the season kicked off, long-term residents of places like Valencia, Gran Canaria and Granada took to the streets to protest against politicians bending over backward to accommodate ever more foreign visitors. In Barcelona, angry locals used water guns to spray out-of-towners eating at tourist traps on La Rambla; in Málaga, stickers reading “A family used to live here” have been placed on the doors of short-term flats in a bid to shame those who rent them out.
Hate the industry, not the traveler: Protest organizers in Spain are careful to stress that they have no problem with foreign visitors, but rather the volume of them. In insular locations like Palma de Mallorca, demand has driven real estate prices to levels out of reach for workers like teachers and police officers. In smaller locations, residents point out that seasonal mass tourism ends up putting enormous stress on basic infrastructure like sewage systems and public health centers.
Taking note: Spanish politicians have routinely celebrated hitting ever-higher tourism records year after year. But 2024 may be different, due to the obvious anger on the streets. In Spanish cities, local leaders are announcing new measures to tackle the issue. Barcelona Mayor Jaume Collboni announced that by 2028 the city will no longer have any additional short-term rental flats. Valencia has expanded the number of police officers chasing down unlicensed tourism apartments. Seville, meanwhile, is going even further — cutting off the supply of water to the estimated 5,000 illegal rental properties within the city limits.
Fed up: While targeted measures may ease local pressure caused by excessive tourism, it’s clear that more comprehensive policies are needed to address a challenge affecting most of Europe’s major cities. The tourism industry is lucrative for a select few, but wider communities suffer from its impact. If greater attention isn’t paid to the needs of the locals who live in these locations year-round, the protests seen in Spain this summer will inevitably spread beyond its borders. Indeed, similar local anger is already being seen in places like Sintra, where residents are fed up with the masses of foreign influencers who storm the city to snap selfies at the multicolored Palácio da Pena, and Athens, where the backlash against visitors arriving via cruise ships is increasingly palpable.
We’re back with our weekly cities-related trivia challenge! Gonzalo Heredia-Borreguero of Barcelona was the quickest reader to identify Barcelona as the site of the People’s Olympiad, an alternate sporting competition set up by athletes seeking to boycott the Nazi-organized 1936 Berlin Olympics.
More than 6,000 athletes from 49 nations registered for the games; the opening ceremony was meant to have included a parade of exiled Jews from across Europe, as well as delegations from colonized states in North Africa. Alas, the Spanish Civil War, which began four days before the Olympiad’s inauguration, ultimately derailed the event.
This week’s challenge: Which two cities were the first to be linked by a passenger rail line in continental Europe? The first reader to identify them, and the year the inaugural trip took place — preferably without using a search engine — gets a shout-out in next week’s newsletter.
— The inner workings of the European Commission’s New European Bauhaus scheme are the subject of a deep-dive by POLITICO alumnus Simon Van Dorpe in Follow the Money.
— A headless corpse found in a canal in Brandenburg an der Havel has stumped authorities who can’t tell whether they were the victim of a crime or a bizarre accident, the Berliner Morgenpost reports.
— From beyond the Continent: Indonesia’s unfinished new capital city hosted the country’s official Independence Day celebrations this week; the AP has more.
THANKS TO: Nicholas Camut, Marianne Gros, Leyla Aksu, Paul Dallison, and my editors Kelsey Hayes and Stephan Faris, and producer Giulia Poloni.
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POLITICO’s Global Policy Lab is a collaborative journalism project seeking solutions to challenges faced by modern societies in an age of rapid change. Over the coming months we will host a conversation on how to make cities more livable and sustainable.