Community bicycle workshops: what are they? How do they work? What do they contribute?

This site is to collect together emerging research and information on community bicycle workshops. In a workshop, you get to fix your own bike, there is a stack of secondhand and donated parts to help you, and some volunteers to assist. Workshops have diverse origins including community development networks supporting social justice, anarchists and anti-car movements, bike enthusiasts, and others. They exist in many countries, and have grown since the 1990s in many towns and cities in the US, Canada, Mexico, Southern Africa, right across Europe, Australasia, and beyond. We (the authors of this site, see About tab) became interested when we realised almost nobody had catalogued the rise of these workshops and their contribution to ‘community economies’ .

Currently (early 2015) Simon Batterbury, a geographer at the University of Melbourne, Australia, is on a  Fellowship at the Brussels Centre for Urban Studies to explore workshops in Germany, Belgium and France.

In the words of  the French l’heureux cyclage network: “Un atelier vélo participatif et solidaire concentre dans un lieu des vélos, des pièces détachées, des outils et des animateurs qui donnent des conseils aux cyclistes”. Simple.

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