Autoethnography of disability and active travel in Greater Manchester: Encountering (non)citizenship through access controls on traffic-free walking, wheeling and cycling paths

Abstract

Enlivening is an increasingly common response to urban challenges and seeks to make urban space ‘liveable’ and ‘healthy’. A central tenet in achieving the enlivened city, is an active citizen who travels by sustainable modes, namely active travel. Whilst there is an increasing impetus upon producing an inclusive template of the active citizen within policy, it is our encounters with the materiality of active travel infrastructures within our everyday lives as disabled people that impact upon our ability to exercise citizenship rights and upon our sense of belonging within enlivening. Using an autoethnographic approach to my own experiences as a disabled tricyclist in Greater Manchester, UK, this paper demonstrates how through both encounters and non-encounters with access control barriers on traffic-free routes, the city is rendered less liveable, rather than enlivened, for many disabled people. I also attend to practices of care and repair related to infrastructures of active travel, and how these further consolidate embodied experiences of (non)citizenship. Recognising that such every day, small-scale interactions are the foundations of larger social forms, I demonstrate how autoethnography can contribute to informing inclusive policy and practice, in this case by demonstrating how practice needs to match rhetoric of inclusive, enlivened futures within Greater Manchester, as well as more broadly, if disabled people are to enact our citizenship through active mobility and be part of enlivened urban futures.