Appropriating the city: space, theory, and bike messengers

TLDR: In this paper, the authors connect the cultural significance of messenger practices to the emplacement of those practices inside the urban environment, and argue that bike messengers cannot be understood outside an analysis of space.

Abstract: Over the last 30 years, social theorists have increasingly emphasized the importance of space. However, in empirical research, the dialectical relationship between social interaction and the physical environment is still a largely neglected issue. Using the theory of structuration, I provide a concrete example of why and how space matters in the cultural analysis of an urban social world. I argue that bike messengers—individuals who deliver time-sensitive materials in downtown cores of major cities—cannot be understood outside an analysis of space. Specifically, I connect the cultural significance of messenger practices to the emplacement of those practices inside the urban environment. Bike messengers work in the downtown cores of major metropolitan areas. Their services are most useful in older cities whose business districts, developed long before the primacy of automobiles, are prone to traffic congestion and are continually hampered by insufficient parking. Outside of these areas, bicycle couriers are largely unknown, and their existence is considered quaint, if anything. Yet, inside these major urban centers, the bike messengers' presence is considered an intriguing or even disturbing cultural phenomenon. As one newspaper article explained, "They live the life you may have dreamed of but never had the courage or foolish disregard to try" (Cheney 1993:A1). They are "toned, tattooed daredevils who cut through exhaust and traffic all day long delivering just about anything that will fit in their shoulder bags" (Sanders 2003:2). They are also "law-flouting, obscenity-spewing, bath-needing, wild-riding, pedestrian-smashing madmen" (Levy 1989:E4) who are "maniacal and dangerous" (Lee 2001:14), and, thus, "richly deserve our wholehearted contempt and an attache case or umbrella plunged into their spokes" (Rosenthal 1987:50). In one of the early statements of what would become the Chicago School of urban research, Park (1923) notes, "The small community often tolerates eccentricity. The city, on the contrary, rewards it. Neither the criminal, the defective, nor the genius