Shifting Perspectives on Bicycle Sustainability ft. Luis Vivanco

GundxChange

In these weekly talks, hosted by the Gund Institute for Environment, scholars and leaders exchange ("xChange") new research and solutions for people and planet.

This week, in recent decades, the bicycle has been touted as a vehicle for a small planet, gaining a reputation as a “mobility fix” for congested cities to address the environmental externalities of motorized transportation, support the rise of green economies, and advance urban sustainability and well-being. As more cities have invested in infrastructure to support bicycle transportation, however, scholars and activists have drawn attention to corresponding patterns of support for uneven and consumption-oriented development, gentrification, and racialized disinvestment. In this talk, environmental anthropologist, bicycle researcher, and Gund Fellow Luis Vivanco explores these debates over the sustainability of the bicycle, and assesses a diverse array of alternative frameworks for imagining the relationship between people, bicycles, and the environment.

About the speaker: Luis Vivanco is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the University of Vermont. Since finishing his Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology at Princeton University in the late-1990s, his scholarship and writings have focused on the culture and politics of community-level conservation in Costa Rica and Oaxaca, Mexico; multisited fieldwork on the transnational ecotourism certification movement; the cultural and technological history of wildlife films; and ethnographic research on social movements promoting the bicycle as a tool for urban transformation in Colombia, the U.S., and Denmark. Lately he’s been creating hand-drawn comics from his various research endeavors and leads the UVM Comics-Based Research Lab. His tenth book, which was just published in 2026 is Culture, Nature, and Environmental Sustainability: An Anthropological Introduction (John Wiley and Sons).