How does bike-sharing enable (or not) resilient cities, communities, and individuals? Conceptualising transport resilience from the socio-ecological and multi-level perspective

Abstract

Bicycles play a crucial role in promoting resilient urban mobility, yet current approaches often focus primarily on engineering resilience, emphasising short-term resistance, adaptability, and recovery from disruptions. This perspective tends to overlook the equally important social dynamics and institutional factors. Socio-ecological resilience theory fills this gap by viewing disruptions as opportunities for renewal, innovation, and transformation, recognising that systems operate in dynamic, non-equilibrium states where change is inevitable and unpredictable. However, its application in transport studies has been limited due to the complexity of empirical implementation. This paper utilises the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) to offer a framework for understanding transport systems as complex socio-technical networks—encompassing artifacts, infrastructure, human actors, regulations, and cultural meanings. MLP's nested, layered ontology helps conceptualise the complexity and evolution of transport systems. Using Hong Kong's dockless bike-sharing system during the social movements and pandemic, this study explores how individual, community, and organisational resilience interact across scales. It shows how institutions both shape and are shaped by human agency, with interpretive flexibility allowing individuals to adapt institutional rules to personal contexts. The structuration of parking practices—shaped by voluntary digital communities managing bike parking and formalised through organisational and regulatory frameworks—illustrates how multi-level resilience arises through interactions among diverse actors, rather than from the mere accumulation of individual actions. While higher degrees of structuration, shaped by the scale of fields and number of actors reproducing them, foster stability, they can also perpetuate social exclusion, highlighting the need for equitable policies that balance individual responsibility with inclusive institutional strategies.