Navigating cycling infrastructure in Sofia, Bulgaria

This chapter builds on our previous research on cycling in Sofia, which examined the practices and affordances of travelling by bicycle in a post-socialist South-East European city (Barnfield and Plyushteva, 2016). By drawing attention to the situated, embodied, mundane and ambiguous elements of cycling, we sought to show how the bicycle acts as a small but important force shaping mobility in contemporary Sofia. In the present chapter, we revisit and develop our discussion of cycling infrastructure in Sofia, by drawing together ethnographic observation, interviews with urban mobility activists, and document and media analysis from several research visits between 2013 and 2018. In keeping with our earlier approach of zooming in on a specific urban location and the situated interactions of people and infrastructures within it, in this chapter we focus on a cycle lane added to a central Sofia boulevard in 2017. We discuss the decision-making processes which brought together politicians, municipal employees, mobility and cycling activists, local residents and various other actors. We explore how these processes resulted in a particular set of hard and soft infrastructures for cycling.