Zen and the Art of Cycling: An Inquiry Into Values
The Fab City Zero Carbon Roadshow from Hamburg to Barcelona.
Written by @Wolf Kühr for the Fab City Network.
The title is an apparent play on the famous book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. As its author Robert Pirsig explains that, despite its title, “it should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice. It’s not very factual on motorcycles, either“, we add here even not on biking. But what is it about? Let’s start at the beginning…
The core ideas for the Fab City Hamburg Zero Carbon Roadshow were simple: use only our muscles as the sole energy source to move from Hamburg to Barcelona; meet and interview actors of the network in places on the way, and promote the “Fab City Operating System”, the digital infrastructure for Fab Cities and their regional networks. We are building FabCityOS within the framework of the Interfacer project. Funded by the European Union, the project aims to facilitate and enable collaborative design and local production.
We set off from Hamburg in early July rain, heading first to Amsterdam via northern Germany and the Netherlands with its dykes and sheep to visit the Fab City Amsterdam along with the fantastic Waag Society and Fiction Factory.
On the way to our next destination, the vibrant Fab City Paris, we crossed the impressive artificial landscape of the Dutch Zealand region with its hundreds of wind turbines, and along the way, we visited the Wapi Fab Lab in Belgium and the very innovative rural hub L’Hermitage in the north of France. Going further south, with temperatures reaching 40°C, we often cooled off by plunging into the Loire, Rhône and Saône rivers. Together with swimming in the cool waters, sampling the excellent local wine refreshed us from the summer heat to reach Lyon to meet with representatives of the Fab Region Rhône Alpes.
After 2000 km, sitting on the saddle became as routine as sitting in front of a computer — but with drinking (much) more water! Just before reaching the mediterranean sea, we stopped at the Fab City Montpellier. Crossing the Pyrenees was a new challenge for us — northern Europe is so flat! But the fairytale-style cork forest enchanted us to almost forget the hours of steep climbing. At the end of August, we finally arrived in Barcelona, the birthplace of the Fab City movement, with its incomparable innovative ecosystem.
Once we arrived, reality struck! We had travelled almost 3000 km over 50 days. During our travels, the sensation of time and space was strangely altered. On the one hand, we physically experienced the distance with every metre imprinted in our bodies, but on the other hand, our perception of time was like a slow accumulation of several singular days.
Considering our journey, if the aim of our trip was purely to meet like-minded people in other cities, we reflected on why we travelled such a distance by bike when the same distances could have been done in a couple of days with ‘usual transportation’.
Yes. The answer is yes, we could have done that. We could have planned the journey much faster, much more efficiently, compressing the space between each destination. But looking closer at the underlying mechanisms of such a question: the efficiency or productivity of the chosen transportation modality, we could also ask another question: What exactly does productivity mean today? Is the Fab City Initiative as a network of (future) “productive cities’’ not at the very heart of this debate? Is it not worth stopping for a moment and reflecting on such a concept, asking what are the positive and negative externalities of what we are producing and consuming? What are we optimising for and for what purpose? What do we lose as individuals, as communities and societies in the name of productivity?
In his article “Time of Transition’’, reflecting on the Post-Covid Crisis, Tomas Diez invites us to design a desirable future by imagining, inventing and making new codes, rules, laws, and agreements. With this article, we respond to his invitation and give a first simple answer to the question of whether biking for business travel is more efficient than fuel-based transportation: Yes, because we need radically new ways of thinking, evaluating and acting outside of the resource-result equation — who would disagree?
Other recent articles have inspired us, including Kate Armstrong’s “2020: Fab City, four cities stronger amidst a uniquely challenging year” as well as “What are the Role and Capabilities of Fab Labs as a Contribution to a Resilient City?” authored by a research team of our project partner, Helmut Schmidt University. These articles have analysed the resilient character of Fab Labs in times of crises — from the Covid pandemic to the Suez Canal blockage, the fragility of the global economy’s traditional supply chains has become clear to all.
The local production of personal protection equipment during the Covid crisis has been widely discussed as a kind of proof of concept for local labs to respond effectively and quickly to urgent local needs. Picturing the huge container ships with their immense cargo capacity waiting a couple of weeks to continue the transportation compared to the production capacity of labs (even in a distributed manner) visualises the present reality.
Is it true that the production capacity of today’s Fab Cities and Labs could make a significant change in today’s supply chains? Probably not. Is not the very strength of Fab Cities and Labs more the combination of places and communities of practice? Like-minded people across cities and regions engaged to find solutions to the disaster we are facing? Are better solutions found beyond traditional blind productivity, towards more a holistic perspective with the capacity of questioning the (hyper) consumption? Perhaps we should be further questioning the meaning and sense of labour in the digital society, inventing circular products and processes, and demystifying the technical environment by appropriating the technologies to empower geeks and citizens to make their own stuff based on local needs. In short, understanding the Fab City not as a productive city in the sense of producing goods but rather as “fabricating the City”, as an approach to imagine and transform the city as a place where we wish to live and that we wish to transmit to our children. Is this not a way to invest in a more meaningful human perception of space and time within a local community?
During our tour and the visit (documented with the Walk-throughs videos) of 12 different labs, we have seen so many inspiring and creative projects that are following such a path. What if we would be able to join forces and collaborate on such projects, extending the DIDO (data in data out) framework to IIIO (idea in idea out)? More an exchange of locally proven experiences than abstract data. For doing so, we believe that we need a digital infrastructure and human relations based on trust and mutual engagement. That is what we wish to achieve with the Fab City Operating System and the Roadshow, the one will not be reached without the other.
Another aspect of productivity & travelling is the way we relate to space-time. Our modern-day understanding and perception of time and space is the heritage of the immense techno-scientific transformation from the Enlightenment through to the Industrial Revolution. What had been the cyclic experience rhythmed by the natural seasons progressively became four normalised dimensions of spacetime, one dimensional for time and three for space — all represented as vectors of evenly discrete units. This abstraction and mathematical translation of the modern subject was in stark contrast to the previous subjective experience interdependent with the surrounding environment. This four dimensionality became the fundament of the rising capitalist industrial economy and the need for precise measurement of all kinds of human activities, from labour work to leisure.
There are several realms of knowledge where the pre-scientific perception of time and space has survived. For example, the traditional Japanese arts, from flower arrangement (ikebana) and tea ceremony (sadō) to martial arts (budō), are just some examples of these domains. These different understandings of time and space, strongly related to Buddhism, Shintoism and the experience of the “here and now” of meditational practices are concentrated and widely discussed in the interpretation and understanding of the Japanese ideogramme MA (間). It is used in the sense of both time and space. The expression of time and space is not only inseparably connected, but is also dependently bound to the person acting and perceiving in what the french geographer, orientalist and philosopher Augustin Berque called co — attentifs. “In other words, in one sense, the MA is beyond modernity, while in another sense, it retains the concreteness and therefore the singularity that was the case for all measures of time and space in all human environments (including Europe) before modernity.”
The pre-scientific representation of time and space as a concrete experience. Here is an extract of a 5.2 m long picture scroll made in 17th-century China. A mix of a map and historical narration. Image by the Historiographical Institute of the University of Tokyo
Without diving into this quite complex topic, what could better illustrate the different experiences of the spacetime dimensions of travelling than the ambience of standardised airports where travelling becomes a mere efficient displacement from A to B, where the enduring experience recalled is the missing legroom in the cabin seat? Compare this sterility to the voyage by bike where the environment with its hills and rivers, the daytime with its different atmosphere, colours and temperature are the concrete yet sensual elements of the physical experience of the trajectory. But before investigating this comparison of displacement and voyage, let’s have a look at another aspect of how our understanding of time and space is impacting our contemporary life.
The shift of the concrete experience of space and time to an abstractable and measurable quantity became the basis for the way of ascribing value to things and actions — modern accounting. Here, productivity is represented by investment in work and the profit of resulting products and services. In today’s accounting, however, it is not possible to represent positive and negative externalities. As a result, air and ocean pollution, for example, continue to be supported by the collective whole, not by the polluters themselves.
Where do we find the positive externalities of Open software and hardware represented? They have a benefit or value far beyond the purpose for which they were primarily developed, without appearing in any traditional siloed accounting system. In order to represent the full spectrum of distributed economic network transactions, the Valueflows project has established a vocabulary for cooperative and commons-based peer production. The inclusion of this ontology is a major contribution of our project partner, the Dyne Foundation, and is included in the heart of the Fab City Operating System in order to transparently integrate non-monetary workflows into the representation of transactions. We need both new open ways of representing values as well as new narratives of the values themselves — this is a core aspiration of the Interfacer project.
But what do cycling, the resilience of Fab Labs, productivity, our understanding of time and space and the Japanese MA or indeed modern accounting have to do with each other? To make it clear, it’s not about abolishing the car, the train or the plane. It is not primarily about the avoidance of negative externalities like the saving of CO2 when travelling by bike. It rather wishes to show that such avoidance of negative externalities is producing positive externalities like the joy of experiencing the environment. Also the simplicity of the encounters during the tour, where often a text message announcing that we were coming from Hamburg by bike was enough to be warmly welcomed by a dozen initiatives without even explaining what we actually wanted, the bike ride was enough to evoke curiosity.
Here, cycling as a very relatable way of experiencing time and space stands as a metaphor for a shift from productivist thinking in abstract space-time coordinates towards meaningful shared actions coupled with sensual experiences in the real here-and-now. This metaphor could be interpreted as being less productive but also interpreted as imparting an increased sense of doing based on the needs and values of a local community that sees itself as part of a global entity — our environment; the frugality as a response to scarcity instead of a more energy-efficient economy. The demonstrable joy of manufacturing or of repairing things by oneself are alternate ways of relating to objects, not just as a consumer god but rather as a part of both our environment and our entwined cultural values.
In conclusion, what could be more unproductive than continuing to push the planet to the brink of collapse? Certainly not biking for 50 days!
