On The Hierarchy Of CloudsBefore we plant anything
A few questions to see if trust is already here
On The Hierarchy Of CloudsLife Notes 2: Losing, choosing, and moving anyway
And somewhere along the way, I stepped off the expected path (though I don’t even know if I was following it)
On The Hierarchy Of CloudsPost-Human Governance: Organising Beyond the Individual
Building from stewardship toward relational systems of power
On the Hierarchy of Clouds is a space for exploring the structures — seen and unseen — that shape our lives. It’s about systems, governance, and the slow work of change. About how we build, break, and reimagine the institutions around us.
On The Hierarchy Of CloudsBefore we plant anything
A few questions to see if trust is already here
On The Hierarchy Of CloudsLife Notes 2: Losing, choosing, and moving anyway
And somewhere along the way, I stepped off the expected path (though I don’t even know if I was following it)
On The Hierarchy Of CloudsPost-Human Governance: Organising Beyond the Individual
Building from stewardship toward relational systems of power
On the Hierarchy of Clouds is a space for exploring the structures — seen and unseen — that shape our lives. It’s about systems, governance, and the slow work of change. About how we build, break, and reimagine the institutions around us.
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Somewhere between governance and joy, a city is remembering itself. Not through revolution. Not through reform. But through repetition. Bicycles trace quiet lines through the asphalt each Sunday, and a new kind of polity is emerging; one that insists, not through slogans, but through movement. It begins with no fanfare. Just a closed road. And a question: what if infrastructure could be built from below, one ride at a time?
This is Muévete en Bici, one of the largest weekly car-free street programs in the world. It began in 2007, not as a vision for urban transformation, but as a modest experiment; an attempt to create a few hours of cleaner air and safer movement. Today, it invites over 100,000 people into motion each week.
Every Sunday in Mexico City, an alternate future unfolds. Not as spectacle, but as ritual. At 8am, the city starts to close its major streets to cars. By 9, Reforma is humming with bikes, wheelchairs, strollers, rollerblades and market carts. The traffic has disappeared. In its place: laughter, language, velocity, sweat.
But what’s unfolding here is more than mobility. It is an emergent form of urban stewardship. A participatory choreography of care, refusal and belonging.
“We didn’t know what would happen,” Camilo, one of the original volunteer marshals, told me. “We thought maybe a few people would show up. But they kept coming. And they made the city theirs.”
This is not a story about bicycles. It’s a story about memory and how a city can be governed back into coherence. Not through policy alone, but through persistence
Governments tend to imagine infrastructure as static: concrete, steel, metrics. But infrastructure can also be relational. Something built from the repetition of gestures. Something that thickens over time.
Muévete en Bici doesn’t announce itself with banners. There are no speeches. It begins the same way each week. Cones laid down, volunteers in fluorescent bibs, a slow trickle of riders filling the boulevard. And yet, this small, regular act has changed the structure of the city.
The air is cleaner on Sundays. Small businesses along the route report increases in weekend sales. Ecobici stations along the corridors see surges in usage. Families ride together who otherwise wouldn’t. And most importantly, for three to four hours each week, the city signals that it belongs to someone other than the car.
What began as event has become expectation. What began as mobility has become governance.
“It’s a small thing,” one volunteer told me at a stop sign. “But small things done weekly for 17 years aren’t small anymore. They shape the city’s rhythm.”
And in that memory lives a provocation: what if infrastructure isn’t something we build once and maintain, but something we practice? What if governance is not a set of decisions, but a form of sustained attention?
When I arrived in Mexico City, I didn’t know how to ride in a city this big. London teaches you to duck and weave, to flow through gaps, to flatten your presence. But here, on Sunday mornings, there was no rush. No danger. No need to prove.
I borrowed a bicycle and pedalled through Reforma. Children rode past me in Spiderman costumes. A man fixed tyres under the shade of a jacaranda tree. A woman handed out watermelon in slices. The silence of engines revealed the rhythm of life underneath.
And I remember thinking: this isn’t a protest. It’s an invitation for everyone.
Each week, people show up. Some on fancy road bikes. Some on rusty frames with squeaky chains. Some pushing carts of tamales, or hauling buckets of tools. They ride not to go anywhere, but to belong.
And I wondered; what else could be built like this? What else could be imagined into being by simply refusing to go away?
Mexico City did not become a cycling city through design. It became one through accumulation. What exists today was never written in a single plan. It emerged, entangled, layered.
A bike lane in Condesa. A night ride in Iztapalapa. A guerrilla stencil painted in the dark. A neighbourhood audit mapped with chalk. A bureaucrat willing to listen. Another unwilling. A family on their way to market. A protest after another cyclist killed.
Each moment small. But over time, they wove a mesh. A distributed civic network of movement, attention, and insistence.
The Layers of This Mesh:
Physical infrastructure: Over 300km of bike lanes now line the city. Some wide and protected. Others barely distinguishable from the street. Painted on by ‘Cycloactivists’. Each one telling a story of negotiation, protest or compromise.
Policy scaffolding: Muévete en Bici runs weekly. Ecobici, the public bike-share program, now has over 9,000 bikes and 687 stations. Its 2019 renewal was one of the first in Latin America to use open contracting, inviting public feedback and drastically lowering costs - making it more accessible for more people.
Economic ripple effects: Public health researchers estimate over $90M USD in annual health savings. Along car-free corridors, local vendors report sales increasing by 15 to 40 percent on Sundays alone.
Cultural infrastructure: Ride groups now exist for almost every identity and geography; Rodadas Rebeldes for feminist rides, Bicitekas for systemic advocacy, night rides for visibility, Indigenous groups for rural transit justice. Each remapping what safety and presence means.
These layers do not form a hierarchy. They form a living system. One that cannot be managed from the top-down, but create new ways of interacting with urban and civic spaces.
Officially, most cities consult. They run public forums, surveys, workshops. But in Mexico City, something else has emerged. A practice of co-production that isn’t formalised, but seems more real than the alternatives.
The people who built this system did so without budget or money. They showed up with spray paint, repair kits, Google Maps and institutional patience. And often, the state followed them.
Four Moments of Co-Production:
Guerrilla bike lanes: Activists painted ghost lanes in dangerous corridors where cyclists kept dying. For years they were erased. But eventually, planners stopped fighting. Some became formal. The city adapted to the already-existing.
Citizen mapping: Riders used Mapillary to document danger points: potholes, missing signage, blocked paths. This data, often more accurate than city records, began influencing street-level upgrades.
Night rides as safety audits: Feminist and LGBTQ+ groups rode at night, not just for joy, but to test where the city failed. When they published their findings; where lighting was absent, police response delayed, fear concentrated. Some routes changed. Infrastructure followed the movement, not the model.
Open contracting for Ecobici: The city opened up its procurement process. Bidders were scrutinised. Budgets were public. Citizens could give feedback on station locations. It wasn’t perfect. But it was a signal. Not just consultation, but invitation.
“Sometimes we painted at 3am,” one Bicitekas member told me. “We didn’t know if we’d be arrested, threatened or just ignored. But we knew no one else was going to do it. So we did.”
These aren’t romantic stories. They’re stories of exhaustion. Of learning to hold power accountable when it will not hold itself.
They are also blueprints. Not for what to build. But for how to stay.
One morning, I met a woman at a corner in Doctores, taping signs to a traffic pole. A cyclist had died there the week before. The sign said, Aquí murió alguien que iba en bici. Here died someone who was on a bike.
It wasn’t an official memorial. Just paper, marker, and tape. She said she’d made four of them already this year. One for each loss.
I asked if it made a difference.
She shrugged. “Maybe not to the city. But people see them. They slow down. They remember. That’s all I want.”
I walked past on another afternoon, a group rode through. Slowed at the sign. Touched the pole. Kept riding.
It struck me that maybe this is what governance looks like when it stops pretending to control everything. Not enforcement. Not perfection. But presence. A system of quiet warnings and remembered grief.
We are so used to thinking of infrastructure as what prevents harm. But sometimes, it’s what allows us to carry it.
The language of public life often assumes direction. Governments govern. Institutions deliver. Citizens receive.
But what if the direction is reversed?
In Mexico City, the story of the cycling movement is not one of benevolent policy handed down from above. It is the story of people who stewarded the institutions. Riders who mapped where officials had not. Volunteers who showed up before the city did. Groups who held grief until it forced a response.
This is governance not as service, but as relationship.
When a route lacked lighting, women’s groups rode it together and documented the danger. When potholes swallowed wheels, neighbours marked them with crates and cones. When procurement was closed, advocates cracked it open. When a child was killed, rides turned into vigils. And when the city listened, it was because people insisted long enough to be heard.
“They didn’t ask us what we needed,” said Clara, an organiser in Tláhuac. “So we rode. And we mapped. And we made the dangers visible to them.”
These are not moments of consultation. They are a form of civic stewardship. A mutual obligation. Not for a city that exists. But for one that must be held into being - by all those live there. We can’t just wait for the changes we want, we need to make them, we need to create them.
And beneath these gestures is another kind of labour: care. Often invisible. The volunteer steward tying cones at 7am. The mother who rides with three kids strapped to a single frame. The Sunday vendors who open early to feed the movement. Their contributions are not captured in metrics, but the system would not survive without them.
We often think of infrastructure as hard. But here, the soft keeps it alive. It is easier to show up then you imagine.
Urban transformation often speaks of the future. Smarter cities. Green infrastructure. Active transport. But too often, these futures are mapped only for the central, the visible, the counted. And I don’t pretend to be an expert here at all.
In Mexico City, early cycling investment centred on Roma, Condesa, Juárez. Affluent, walkable, already watched. The periphery remained an afterthought.
But beyond the mapped core, other mobilities have always existed.
In Milpa Alta, a southern delegación built along volcanic ridges and ejido lands, people have long travelled by bike, foot, and cart. Not for leisure, but for market, medicine, family and ceremony. The city did not plan for them. So they planned for themselves.
“We don’t call it mobility,” said Julio, an organiser in San Pedro Atocpan. “We call it life. We walk the same paths our grandparents did. The city calls it rural. But we know it’s where movement begins.”
Here, rides are not about emissions or health goals. They are about sovereignty. The right to move between villages. The right to access care. The right to remain in place.
Indigenous riders from Milpa Alta and Xochimilco began to organise. They mapped missing links, built alliances with businesses, showed up at city forums that weren’t designed for them. Their maps didn’t match the city’s, because their values didn’t. But their presence could not be ignored.
And they weren’t alone.
Caregivers asked for cycle lanes that could carry strollers. Market workers mapped safer routes for transporting food. Disabled riders built modified tricycles and formed visibility brigades. Young mechanics turned sidewalks into repair stations. A different city began to assemble. Not from scratch. From what had been excluded.
“We weren’t invited to the planning,” said Julio.
“But the land remembers us. So we ride it differently.”
These voices did not just call for inclusion. They demanded a shift in who narrates the future. They revealed that what we call mobility is often just a proxy for recognition.
And that a just city isn’t one that builds more paths. It’s one that listens to where they already are.
The temptation, as always, is replication. To study what has worked and carry it elsewhere. To turn the rides into a toolkit. The system into a slide deck. We all do it, whether designing, consulting, financing.
I have been thinking a lot about how to make a similar movement happen in Sydney or London. But the more I think, the more I realise that Mexico City’s cycling movement resists this. It does not offer a model. It offers a method.
“We didn’t change the city all at once,” said Areli.
“We just kept riding. And eventually, the city had to ride with us.”
That method is not efficiency. It is staying.
Staying with grief, with friction, with missed connections. Staying when a lane is erased. When a life is lost. When the city says no. And still showing up with a can of paint or a wheel to repair. For all movements. Keep going.
If you are elsewhere; another city, another terrain… this is your invitation:
Don’t replicate the route. Trace your own.
Don’t begin with infrastructure. Begin with presence.
Don’t ask what policy allows. Ask what practice demands.
And don’t wait to be included. Start from where you are.
What the rides in Mexico City teach is not how to build better mobility systems. They teach how to rebuild trust. How to reconstitute a public around rituals that endure. How to embed governance in action, not abstraction.
Each Sunday, a city reassembles. Not through force, but through invitation. Not through decree, but through participation. The street becomes a commons. The commons becomes memory. And memory becomes infrastructure.
The lesson is not the lane. It is the line of people who return to it. Week after week. With care.
“We didn’t just build bike lanes,” Areli told me, watching the riders pass beneath a jacaranda. “We built the muscle of a public.”
Core Mobility Programs & Policy
Muévete en Bici – Program Background
Ecobici – Public Bike Share System
Open Contracting for Urban Mobility in CDMX
Economic & Public Health Impact of Cycling
Health and Economic Impacts
Civic Participation, Advocacy, and Protest
Bicitekas + Areli Carreón – Activism and Civic Leadership
Rodadas Rebeldes + Feminist Cycling
Citizen Mapping & Grassroots Infrastructure
Cycloactivism and Guerrilla Bike Lanes
Academic Context – Power, Participation, and Exclusion
Somewhere between governance and joy, a city is remembering itself. Not through revolution. Not through reform. But through repetition. Bicycles trace quiet lines through the asphalt each Sunday, and a new kind of polity is emerging; one that insists, not through slogans, but through movement. It begins with no fanfare. Just a closed road. And a question: what if infrastructure could be built from below, one ride at a time?
This is Muévete en Bici, one of the largest weekly car-free street programs in the world. It began in 2007, not as a vision for urban transformation, but as a modest experiment; an attempt to create a few hours of cleaner air and safer movement. Today, it invites over 100,000 people into motion each week.
Every Sunday in Mexico City, an alternate future unfolds. Not as spectacle, but as ritual. At 8am, the city starts to close its major streets to cars. By 9, Reforma is humming with bikes, wheelchairs, strollers, rollerblades and market carts. The traffic has disappeared. In its place: laughter, language, velocity, sweat.
But what’s unfolding here is more than mobility. It is an emergent form of urban stewardship. A participatory choreography of care, refusal and belonging.
“We didn’t know what would happen,” Camilo, one of the original volunteer marshals, told me. “We thought maybe a few people would show up. But they kept coming. And they made the city theirs.”
This is not a story about bicycles. It’s a story about memory and how a city can be governed back into coherence. Not through policy alone, but through persistence
Governments tend to imagine infrastructure as static: concrete, steel, metrics. But infrastructure can also be relational. Something built from the repetition of gestures. Something that thickens over time.
Muévete en Bici doesn’t announce itself with banners. There are no speeches. It begins the same way each week. Cones laid down, volunteers in fluorescent bibs, a slow trickle of riders filling the boulevard. And yet, this small, regular act has changed the structure of the city.
The air is cleaner on Sundays. Small businesses along the route report increases in weekend sales. Ecobici stations along the corridors see surges in usage. Families ride together who otherwise wouldn’t. And most importantly, for three to four hours each week, the city signals that it belongs to someone other than the car.
What began as event has become expectation. What began as mobility has become governance.
“It’s a small thing,” one volunteer told me at a stop sign. “But small things done weekly for 17 years aren’t small anymore. They shape the city’s rhythm.”
And in that memory lives a provocation: what if infrastructure isn’t something we build once and maintain, but something we practice? What if governance is not a set of decisions, but a form of sustained attention?
When I arrived in Mexico City, I didn’t know how to ride in a city this big. London teaches you to duck and weave, to flow through gaps, to flatten your presence. But here, on Sunday mornings, there was no rush. No danger. No need to prove.
I borrowed a bicycle and pedalled through Reforma. Children rode past me in Spiderman costumes. A man fixed tyres under the shade of a jacaranda tree. A woman handed out watermelon in slices. The silence of engines revealed the rhythm of life underneath.
And I remember thinking: this isn’t a protest. It’s an invitation for everyone.
Each week, people show up. Some on fancy road bikes. Some on rusty frames with squeaky chains. Some pushing carts of tamales, or hauling buckets of tools. They ride not to go anywhere, but to belong.
And I wondered; what else could be built like this? What else could be imagined into being by simply refusing to go away?
Mexico City did not become a cycling city through design. It became one through accumulation. What exists today was never written in a single plan. It emerged, entangled, layered.
A bike lane in Condesa. A night ride in Iztapalapa. A guerrilla stencil painted in the dark. A neighbourhood audit mapped with chalk. A bureaucrat willing to listen. Another unwilling. A family on their way to market. A protest after another cyclist killed.
Each moment small. But over time, they wove a mesh. A distributed civic network of movement, attention, and insistence.
The Layers of This Mesh:
Physical infrastructure: Over 300km of bike lanes now line the city. Some wide and protected. Others barely distinguishable from the street. Painted on by ‘Cycloactivists’. Each one telling a story of negotiation, protest or compromise.
Policy scaffolding: Muévete en Bici runs weekly. Ecobici, the public bike-share program, now has over 9,000 bikes and 687 stations. Its 2019 renewal was one of the first in Latin America to use open contracting, inviting public feedback and drastically lowering costs - making it more accessible for more people.
Economic ripple effects: Public health researchers estimate over $90M USD in annual health savings. Along car-free corridors, local vendors report sales increasing by 15 to 40 percent on Sundays alone.
Cultural infrastructure: Ride groups now exist for almost every identity and geography; Rodadas Rebeldes for feminist rides, Bicitekas for systemic advocacy, night rides for visibility, Indigenous groups for rural transit justice. Each remapping what safety and presence means.
These layers do not form a hierarchy. They form a living system. One that cannot be managed from the top-down, but create new ways of interacting with urban and civic spaces.
Officially, most cities consult. They run public forums, surveys, workshops. But in Mexico City, something else has emerged. A practice of co-production that isn’t formalised, but seems more real than the alternatives.
The people who built this system did so without budget or money. They showed up with spray paint, repair kits, Google Maps and institutional patience. And often, the state followed them.
Four Moments of Co-Production:
Guerrilla bike lanes: Activists painted ghost lanes in dangerous corridors where cyclists kept dying. For years they were erased. But eventually, planners stopped fighting. Some became formal. The city adapted to the already-existing.
Citizen mapping: Riders used Mapillary to document danger points: potholes, missing signage, blocked paths. This data, often more accurate than city records, began influencing street-level upgrades.
Night rides as safety audits: Feminist and LGBTQ+ groups rode at night, not just for joy, but to test where the city failed. When they published their findings; where lighting was absent, police response delayed, fear concentrated. Some routes changed. Infrastructure followed the movement, not the model.
Open contracting for Ecobici: The city opened up its procurement process. Bidders were scrutinised. Budgets were public. Citizens could give feedback on station locations. It wasn’t perfect. But it was a signal. Not just consultation, but invitation.
“Sometimes we painted at 3am,” one Bicitekas member told me. “We didn’t know if we’d be arrested, threatened or just ignored. But we knew no one else was going to do it. So we did.”
These aren’t romantic stories. They’re stories of exhaustion. Of learning to hold power accountable when it will not hold itself.
They are also blueprints. Not for what to build. But for how to stay.
One morning, I met a woman at a corner in Doctores, taping signs to a traffic pole. A cyclist had died there the week before. The sign said, Aquí murió alguien que iba en bici. Here died someone who was on a bike.
It wasn’t an official memorial. Just paper, marker, and tape. She said she’d made four of them already this year. One for each loss.
I asked if it made a difference.
She shrugged. “Maybe not to the city. But people see them. They slow down. They remember. That’s all I want.”
I walked past on another afternoon, a group rode through. Slowed at the sign. Touched the pole. Kept riding.
It struck me that maybe this is what governance looks like when it stops pretending to control everything. Not enforcement. Not perfection. But presence. A system of quiet warnings and remembered grief.
We are so used to thinking of infrastructure as what prevents harm. But sometimes, it’s what allows us to carry it.
The language of public life often assumes direction. Governments govern. Institutions deliver. Citizens receive.
But what if the direction is reversed?
In Mexico City, the story of the cycling movement is not one of benevolent policy handed down from above. It is the story of people who stewarded the institutions. Riders who mapped where officials had not. Volunteers who showed up before the city did. Groups who held grief until it forced a response.
This is governance not as service, but as relationship.
When a route lacked lighting, women’s groups rode it together and documented the danger. When potholes swallowed wheels, neighbours marked them with crates and cones. When procurement was closed, advocates cracked it open. When a child was killed, rides turned into vigils. And when the city listened, it was because people insisted long enough to be heard.
“They didn’t ask us what we needed,” said Clara, an organiser in Tláhuac. “So we rode. And we mapped. And we made the dangers visible to them.”
These are not moments of consultation. They are a form of civic stewardship. A mutual obligation. Not for a city that exists. But for one that must be held into being - by all those live there. We can’t just wait for the changes we want, we need to make them, we need to create them.
And beneath these gestures is another kind of labour: care. Often invisible. The volunteer steward tying cones at 7am. The mother who rides with three kids strapped to a single frame. The Sunday vendors who open early to feed the movement. Their contributions are not captured in metrics, but the system would not survive without them.
We often think of infrastructure as hard. But here, the soft keeps it alive. It is easier to show up then you imagine.
Urban transformation often speaks of the future. Smarter cities. Green infrastructure. Active transport. But too often, these futures are mapped only for the central, the visible, the counted. And I don’t pretend to be an expert here at all.
In Mexico City, early cycling investment centred on Roma, Condesa, Juárez. Affluent, walkable, already watched. The periphery remained an afterthought.
But beyond the mapped core, other mobilities have always existed.
In Milpa Alta, a southern delegación built along volcanic ridges and ejido lands, people have long travelled by bike, foot, and cart. Not for leisure, but for market, medicine, family and ceremony. The city did not plan for them. So they planned for themselves.
“We don’t call it mobility,” said Julio, an organiser in San Pedro Atocpan. “We call it life. We walk the same paths our grandparents did. The city calls it rural. But we know it’s where movement begins.”
Here, rides are not about emissions or health goals. They are about sovereignty. The right to move between villages. The right to access care. The right to remain in place.
Indigenous riders from Milpa Alta and Xochimilco began to organise. They mapped missing links, built alliances with businesses, showed up at city forums that weren’t designed for them. Their maps didn’t match the city’s, because their values didn’t. But their presence could not be ignored.
And they weren’t alone.
Caregivers asked for cycle lanes that could carry strollers. Market workers mapped safer routes for transporting food. Disabled riders built modified tricycles and formed visibility brigades. Young mechanics turned sidewalks into repair stations. A different city began to assemble. Not from scratch. From what had been excluded.
“We weren’t invited to the planning,” said Julio.
“But the land remembers us. So we ride it differently.”
These voices did not just call for inclusion. They demanded a shift in who narrates the future. They revealed that what we call mobility is often just a proxy for recognition.
And that a just city isn’t one that builds more paths. It’s one that listens to where they already are.
The temptation, as always, is replication. To study what has worked and carry it elsewhere. To turn the rides into a toolkit. The system into a slide deck. We all do it, whether designing, consulting, financing.
I have been thinking a lot about how to make a similar movement happen in Sydney or London. But the more I think, the more I realise that Mexico City’s cycling movement resists this. It does not offer a model. It offers a method.
“We didn’t change the city all at once,” said Areli.
“We just kept riding. And eventually, the city had to ride with us.”
That method is not efficiency. It is staying.
Staying with grief, with friction, with missed connections. Staying when a lane is erased. When a life is lost. When the city says no. And still showing up with a can of paint or a wheel to repair. For all movements. Keep going.
If you are elsewhere; another city, another terrain… this is your invitation:
Don’t replicate the route. Trace your own.
Don’t begin with infrastructure. Begin with presence.
Don’t ask what policy allows. Ask what practice demands.
And don’t wait to be included. Start from where you are.
What the rides in Mexico City teach is not how to build better mobility systems. They teach how to rebuild trust. How to reconstitute a public around rituals that endure. How to embed governance in action, not abstraction.
Each Sunday, a city reassembles. Not through force, but through invitation. Not through decree, but through participation. The street becomes a commons. The commons becomes memory. And memory becomes infrastructure.
The lesson is not the lane. It is the line of people who return to it. Week after week. With care.
“We didn’t just build bike lanes,” Areli told me, watching the riders pass beneath a jacaranda. “We built the muscle of a public.”
Core Mobility Programs & Policy
Muévete en Bici – Program Background
Ecobici – Public Bike Share System
Open Contracting for Urban Mobility in CDMX
Economic & Public Health Impact of Cycling
Health and Economic Impacts
Civic Participation, Advocacy, and Protest
Bicitekas + Areli Carreón – Activism and Civic Leadership
Rodadas Rebeldes + Feminist Cycling
Citizen Mapping & Grassroots Infrastructure
Cycloactivism and Guerrilla Bike Lanes
Academic Context – Power, Participation, and Exclusion
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