Foster + Partners’ SkyCycle and the technological sublime

This paper investigates the proposal for the SkyCycle bicycle network in London and its relationship to how we think about cities and transportation today. We draw upon the concept of the technological sublime as a way of analyzing city form and the role of contemporary urban cycling. The continued fascination with the technological sublime, and the intertwined social and economic systems that valorize it, influence how we see cycling today, and how we expect cyclists to behave. We attempt to uncover the unspoken values that underlie the SkyCycle proposal in order to understand the range of reactions to the proposal.