Deadline for Submissions: January 15, 2012
Please send your article proposals, drafts, flyers, photos, etc., to
From Chris Carlsson, Hugh D’Andrade, LisaRuth Elliott, and friends
The 20th anniversary of Critical Mass is coming in September 2012. The first-ever ride was in San Francisco in September 1992, so we’re inviting everyone from around the wide world of Critical Mass rides to come to San Francisco next September for a week-long festival to celebrate twenty years. During the week-long festival we hope to have daily group rides, film festival, art shows, discussions, music, and more. (Send us a message if you’re planning to come, and let us know how many people are planning to come from your city/country. And if you’re in the Bay Area and want to help plan the week, organize an event, coordinate food and entertainment, provide housing, etc., please contact us!)
In conjunction with this anniversary we also want to produce a new book of essays, cartoons, photographs, and documents, capturing the dynamic and powerful social movements that have emerged from, or embraced the Critical Mass phenomenon. To that end, this is an open solicitation for material for the book. Predictably we have no budget to pay anyone, but we hope to create a historically important volume documenting the emergent bicycle movement over the past two decades, and its relationship to Critical Mass. Any proceeds of sales of the book will go to funding events for the anniversary and after that, for ongoing Critical Mass-related printing and communications.
We’d love essays anywhere from 2000 to 8000 words, and we’re open to other kinds of materials too. We are especially interested in essays that go deeper into the larger political questions surrounding Critical Mass specifically, and the bicycle as a signifier and tool of a broader social transformation.
Please contact us to let us know if you’re going to write something, or if you have photos, flyers, or other material to contribute to this. Authors or groups published in the book will get a free copy, and if we’re lucky, we’ll find publishers in other languages to produce the book in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc. If you have contacts with publishers in other languages, please do let us know.
Here are some questions to get you started, but feel free to query us with your own ideas of what you’d like to write:
1. Please describe the history of the Critical Mass experience in your city with the following questions as a guide:
When did it start? How many people participated in starting it? Did it come out of a pre-existing network or political association? Or did new friends come together to start it?
Give us the details of your ride:
where does it start from, when does it roll, how long has it been going? How often does it happen? Monthly? How do you think your ride is unique vis a vis other rides you have heard of, or maybe personally experienced?
2. How does Critical Mass manage itself in your city? Do you have monitors and communications that are sustained by the same people month after month, or do new people emerge regularly to help produce a good experience? What kind of debates characterize your Critical Mass experience? Do people discuss and argue about the nature of the ride during the ride? Do you have xerocracy (printed documents circulating among the riders)? Do you have pre-planned routes or do you move around the city spontaneously? Do your rides split up into multiple rides sometimes? Tell us about the lived experience and the tensions within your ride, and related to other organized bike rides in your city (if any).
3. Can you describe stories of personal transformation that people have experienced as a result of riding in Critical Mass? Who rides in Critical Mass in your city? Has the population of your ride changed over time or is it the same as it has been since the beginning? What kind of future does the ride have in your city, in your estimation?
4. How would you characterize your city’s bicycling scene? Was it pretty big before Critical Mass? Did Critical Mass play a key role in expanding it? How does your city feel differently today than it did before Critical Mass started? Or does it feel different at all?
5. Are there formal bicycle advocacy groups in your city (or region)? How do they relate to Critical Mass? Do they support it and participate in it? Or are they hostile? What kinds of dynamics have taken place where you are?
6. Are there free food, gardening/farming, housing/squatting, free radio, hacker spaces, or other kinds of similar efforts cross-linked to Critical Mass in your city? What is the relationship of Critical Mass to other political and social initiatives in your city, if any? Can you write in depth about those relationships and how they have fed each other? What is the relationship in your city between formal and informal political groups?
7. Outsider journalists and writers often pose the question, “What has Critical Mass accomplished?” Our answer in SF as co-founders has generally been to emphasize that Critical Mass is an ongoing event, an ongoing seizure of public space by hundreds and thousands of cyclists, and is not an organization—nor even a coherent movement—with a specific agenda. So to speak of “accomplishments” is to frame it incorrectly. How do you respond to this question? Describe how you experience the meaning and coherence of the Critical Mass phenomenon in your city.
8. What kinds of journalism, blogs, writing, and/or art has emerged from the Critical Mass movement in your city? Please submit some examples and tell us about them (can be weblinks, photos, artwork, books, zines, stickers, posters, etc. If you are sending a url, please be specific about which page/blog/art you mean, and describe how it relates to Critical Mass, the ride).
