Cycling and Recycling: Histories of Sustainable Practices

✍ Scribed by Ruth Oldenziel (editor); Helmuth Trischler (editor)

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2015
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 256
• Series: Environment in History: International Perspectives; 7
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Technology has long been an essential consideration in public discussions of the environment, with the focus overwhelmingly on creating new tools and techniques. In more recent years, however, activists, researchers, and policymakers have increasingly turned to mobilizing older technologies in their pursuit of sustainability. In fascinating case studies ranging from the Early Modern secondhand trade to utopian visions of human-powered vehicles, the contributions gathered here explore the historical fortunes of two such technologies—bicycling and waste recycling—tracing their development over time and providing valuable context for the policy successes and failures of today.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
List of Figures
How Old Technologies Became Sustainable: An Introduction
PART I Cycling Histories
CHAPTER 1 Use and Cycling in West Africa
CHAPTER 2 The Politics of Bicycle Innovation: Comparing the American and Dutch Human-Powered Vehicle Movements, 1970s–Present
CHAPTER 3 Scarcity, Poverty, Exclusion: Negative Associations of the Bicycle’s Uses and Cultural History in France
CHAPTER 4 Who Pays, Who Benefi ts? Bicycle Taxes as Policy Tool, 1890–2012
CHAPTER 5 Monuments of Unsustainability: Planning, Path Dependence, and Cycling in Stockholm
PART II Intersections
CHAPTER 6 Bicycling and Recycling in Japan: Divergent Trajectories
PART III Recycling Histories
CHAPTER 7 Premodern Sustainability? Th e Secondhand and Repair Trade in Urban Europe
CHAPTER 8 Waste to Assets: How Household Waste Recycling Evolved in West Germany
CHAPTER 9 Ecological Modernization of Waste-Dependent Development? Hungary’s 2010 Red Mud Disaster
CHAPTER 10 The Scramble for Digital Waste in Berlin
PART IV Reflections
CHAPTER 11 Can History Offer Pathways to Sustainability?
CHAPTER 12 History, Sustainability, and Choice
Selected Bibliography
Index