Istanbul is widely seen as a city where cycling is impossible—but this assumption has a history. Cycling Cities: The Istanbul Experience explores how people, institutions, and planning authorities once made cycling an ordinary part of urban life—and later rendered it dangerous and invisible. Drawing on archives, images, and oral histories, the book shows that today’s conditions are not inevitable—and that cycling in Istanbul was possible before.
From the 1890s through the mid-twentieth century, the bicycle was a visible and legitimate component of Istanbul’s urban mobility landscape. By the early twentieth century, cycling had moved beyond novelty and entered everyday life. Newspapers, advertisements, municipal actors, while popular culture depicted cycling as part of daily urban life. Workers, civil servants, delivery riders, students, and leisure cyclists used circulated alongside pedestrians, carts, trams, ferries, and later automobiles. Cycling functioned as an ordinary—if unevenly distributed—mode of transport rather than an exceptional or marginal practice.
“Sultanahmet Square has become the city’s bicycle training ground. All the men who rent out their bicycles gather here. After seeing the scene in the picture, it becomes necessary to call the old and historic Horse Square the ‘Bicycle Square.’” Playing the square’s historical name, At Meydanı (Horse Square), referencing its Byzantine origins to the Hippodrome used for chariot races. Source: “Bisiklet Meydanı.” (1930, April 14), 3.
Over time, however, the conditions that had allowed cycling to function within the city began to erode. From the mid-twentieth century onward, municipal governments, planners, and traffic authorities prioritized motorized traffic, redesigning streets to favor vehicle speed and throughput. These decisions, combined with shifting regulatory and cultural frameworks, fundamentally transformed urban streets. Cycling increasingly came to signify exposure, vulnerability, and danger, and official discourse and everyday practice recast it as incompatible with modern urban life. The bicycle was pushed out of daily circulation and reframed as a risky, improper, or childlike activity—rendering its earlier practicality largely invisible.
Yet cycling never disappeared entirely. Even as bicycles became rare, a small but persistent group of cyclists continued to rely on multimodal practices, combining bicycles with ferries and rail-based systems to navigate distance, topography, and traffic danger. Though marginal in number, their persistence shows how people sustained cycling through adaptation and selective engagement with urban infrastructure.
Cycling Cities: The Istanbul Experience reconstructs this trajectory by examining how institutions, policies, and planning decisions made cycling possible—and later rendered it “impossible”—through historically contingent urban choices rather than immutable geography. Drawing on newspapers, visual archives, municipal records, planning documents, advertisements, and oral histories, the book uncovers how cyclists negotiated traffic, adapted to infrastructural change, and experienced the growing production of danger long before cycling disappeared from planning agendas.
The study employs the Five-Factor Analysis developed by the Cycling Cities: The Global Experience to trace the shifting fortunes of cycling in Istanbul. It analyzes interactions between urban form and distance; relationships between cycling and other mobility modes, including rail-based systems and ferries; governance practices that alternately legitimized or restricted cycling; user groups shaped by class, gender, and age; and cultural meanings attached to the bicycle as a symbol of modernity, respectability, danger, impracticality, or impossibility. Particular attention is paid to how institutions and public discourse produced perceptions of risk and infeasibility and distributed them unevenly across users and urban spaces.
By foregrounding path dependency, the book shows how previous decisions about traffic flow, street hierarchy, and acceptable risk continue to shape contemporary assumptions about cycling in Istanbul. Rather than asking whether Istanbul is inherently unsuitable for cycling, the study reframes the question: under what historical conditions did cycling function as a practical urban mode, and how did danger and “impossibility” become taken for granted?
Positioned within a global comparative framework, Cycling Cities: The Istanbul Experience brings a major imperial and post-imperial metropolis into the international history of cycling. It demonstrates that today’s dominant perceptions of impracticality and danger are not timeless truths but historically produced outcomes—opening space to rethink what cycling in Istanbul has been, and what it might become again.
Researcher Müge Özbek, Kadir Has University/Istanbul
