Explore cycling histories across time, space, and cultures
Cycling Cities: The Digital Experience is an experimental digital platform currently under development. Conceived as a prototype, it explores how more than a century of cycling history can be presented in a spatial, visual, and comparative format. Built from the global Cycling Cities research program, the platform translates historical research into an accessible map-based environment.
Cycling Cities Five-Factor Framework™
Users can explore how cycling practices have changed over time, how they differed between cities, and why cycling flourished in some places while declining in others. The framework examines the interaction between urban form, mobility alternatives, traffic policies and governance, social movements, and cultural representations to provide a common language for comparing mobility transitions across cities and continents.
The Cycling Cities Five-Factor Framework™ examines mobility transitions through five interacting factors:
1. Urban Form
2. Mobility Alternatives
3. Traffic Policies and Governance
4. Social Movements
5. Cultural Representations
These factors provide a common framework for comparing cycling histories across cities, regions, and time periods. The prototype brings together visual materials, historical narratives, and modal split and statistical data. By combining these sources in a single interface, users discover connections that are difficult to capture through books or articles alone.
The current prototype uses Minneapolis as a primary test case and Rotterdam as a comparative case to explore how a digital environment can support historical interpretation and comparison. Through maps, timelines, photographs, narratives, and data visualizations, users can investigate cycling histories within individual cities while beginning to identify broader patterns across places and time periods.
Future versions will strengthen direct city-to-city comparison through the Cycling Cities Five-Factor Framework™, enabling users to explore mobility transitions through a shared comparative lens.
Designed for researchers, students, planners, policymakers, educators, and the wider public, the platform serves as a laboratory for experimentation, comparison, and collaborative knowledge creation. Future versions will expand the number of cities, strengthen comparative functions, integrate exhibits and bicycle tours, and create new opportunities for teaching, research, policymaking, and public history.
Project Credits
Cycling Cities: The Digital Experience is developed under the design direction of Ruth Oldenziel and managed by Michael Keith in collaboration with student teams at Eindhoven University of Technology.
The platform serves as an experimental environment for translating comparative historical research into digital form. Development and testing have drawn upon Peter Bird’s research on Minneapolis together with comparative research conducted by Njogu Morgan and colleagues on Johannesburg and by Eric Berkers and collaborators on Rotterdam. Together these projects help test how the Cycling Cities Five-Factor Framework™ can function within a digital comparative environment.
TU/e Computer Science Student Teams
Instructors: Michael Keith and Thomas van Dijk
Prototype 1.0 (2024)
Project Managers: Kristian Michaylov; Luke van Dongen
Supervisor: Alexander Nolte
Student Team: Alexandru Ion; Flavio Ionica; Muhammed Rafi Pramanta Hidayat; Sever Nastase; Maria Neicutescu; David Nistor; Eleftheria Papachristoforou; Marios Papalouka; Pranav Srivastava; Marom Sverdlov; Timo van Veen
Prototype 2.0 (2025)
Project Managers: I. Luta; L. Nica
Supervisors: A. Nolte; W. Zhou
Student Team: Floris Bruin; Lars van Dartel; Ciska de Greef; Lucas van Honk; Victor Klomp; Hiske Kolner; Arend Roijakkers; Inge Schermer; Stijn Schroijen; Isabella Wanningen; Sandor van Wieringen
TU/e Innovation Studies Student Team
Instructors: Frauke Behrendt; Peter Bird; Dorcas Nthoki Nyamai; Michael Keith
Prototype 1.1 (2024)
Student Team: Elena Appendino; Susan van Asseldonk; Merijn Beerlage; Filomena Ercegović; Luuk van Helden; Gijs Tuijtel; Mila Ayazyan; Nicolas Brodbelt Lopez; Alica Martín Núñez; Stefan McCandlish; Rosa Ouwerkerk; Piotr Trzebiński; Sanne Croon; Stijn Geuze; Francesca Mogna; Daan Pekelder; Simeon Rangelov; Fernando Zubillaga Suárez