Refuge cities In a city where more than 60% of journeys are made by bike, a local community group is using cycling as a tool to integrate people from immigrant backgrounds into their new nation. Peter Walker pays a visit

Naima gingerly pedals her bike round a corner of the car park and comes to a slightly wobbly halt. Feet safely back on tarmac she explains why, 27 years after coming to the Netherlands from Morocco, she has finally begun to learn that most Dutch of skills.



“Being able to ride a bike means I can go cycling with my children – they cycle everywhere,” the 47-year-old says. “I can do the shopping on it, and go and see friends. But also, being able to ride a bike makes me feel more Dutch, more part of the community.”

This is undoubtedly the case. While in the UK and US no more than 2% or so of all trips are made on a bike, in the Netherlands it is 27%. Utrecht, the country’s fourth-biggest city with a population a bit over 300,000, sees even greater numbers, with 60% of journeys in the city centre made by cyclists.

Thus, the weekly bike circuits around a quiet car park behind a block of flats in Overvecht, a relatively deprived suburb to the north of Utrecht, are more than just a personal landmark for Naima (not her real name) and her dozen or so fellow trainees, all women of Moroccan or Turkish descent.



In a liveable city, you meet each other, connect to your surroundings … and feel the wind in your hair Saskia Kluit

The organisers, a local non-profit community group called Harten voor Sport (Hearts for Sport), hope such schemes could provide a model for the many, varied ways in which people from immigrant communities can better integrate into their new nations, however long they have lived there.



Starting last year as part of a cycle push coinciding with the 2015 Tour de France beginning in Utrecht, Harten voor Sport now runs 17 such weekly lessons around the city, with potential demand for many more.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Harten voor Sport (Hearts for Sport) cycling instructor Marleen van de Vliet and students in her class. Photograph: Peter Walker

Dennis Schoonhoven, who coordinates the adult classes, contends the programme is about more than helping the women feel more part of the city. “It’s not just about integration, it’s about emancipation,” he said. “In these communities, sometimes the role of the women can be very much based around the home, and they’re afraid to travel too far. But when they know they can ride a bike they are suddenly free.”

Organisers say resistance to cycling among some immigrant groups can be in part based on viewing cars as more of a status symbol. Saskia Kluit, head of the Netherlands’ main cycle campaign group, the Fietserbond, notes that other factors can play a role.

“Often people from these communities don’t cycle because they feel it’s unsafe,” she said. “They come from a different kind of traffic structure. They bring the feeling about traffic from their home country to the Netherlands, and they feel it’s unsafe to cycle when it’s not. And then they will tell their children also that it’s unsafe, so it goes from one generation to the next.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A man rides past the Grand Depart logo for the 2015 Tour de France in Utrecht. Photograph: Benoit Tessier/Reuters

Such attitudes can be hard to break down. Naima – who like all the participants refused to give even a first name or be photographed except from behind – does now own her own folding bike, but was nonetheless driven to the class by her husband, the bike in the boot.

There is also the issue of teaching people in their 40s or older who have never previously cycled. The Overvecht class are taught on bikes built for older children, with smaller wheels and dropped saddles. Initial classes often see the pedals removed, the trainees scooting along with their feet to learn how to balance.

“Sometimes they don’t have much confidence, but others can pick it up very quickly,” said Marleen van de Vliet, the volunteer trainer leading the class, drawing a chalk line on the paving to mimic the width of the cycle paths on which the students will soon ride. “We start with balance and safety, and once they can ride properly we start teaching them about road rules.

“I think it’s very important. It gives freedom to these women. They can do more things. It saves them time on the school trips, or shopping. They can see more people.”



Van de Vliet says she was inspired to volunteer after organising some impromptu training while in a former job as a civil servant for her then-secretary, who was of Turkish origin and had never ridden a bike.



“She’d complain her trip to work took a long time, on two trams, and she was a bit overweight,” Van de Vliet said. “I offered to teach her to ride a bike at lunch times, on one of the bikes the ministry had for people to ride between buildings. She loved it, started to cycle everywhere, and lost weight. She said, ‘I’m so grateful you taught me. It saves me so much time, I see more of my children.’”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Utrecht hopes to integrate people from immigrant communities into the city. Photograph: Tasfoto/Alamy

Another Harten voor Sport initiative involves bike maintenance classes at Utrecht’s first state-funded Islamic primary school. Groups of children aged 10 and 11 are handed a punctured inner tube, a tub of water and a repair kit, and taught how to patch a hole.



But the main focus is on the women. The bulk of these are of Turkish or Moroccan origin, part of the communities which first came to the Netherlands from the 1960s to address labour shortages.

Tutors at another class the same day, in which a group of women pedal carefully along paths circling a community centre, say they have also seen considerably newer arrivals, including women from Syrian and Somali backgrounds.

“The bike is very important in the Netherlands, everyone seems to cycle,” says one of the trainees, also of Moroccan descent. “And it’s cheaper than public transport.”

Cycling in Utrecht feels enormously soothing for anyone more used to a British or American city. Separated bike lanes are almost universal on main roads. Some smaller thoroughfares are specifically designated as cycling streets, with signs warning drivers that they are there as “guests”.

There is, nonetheless, much to learn. Jos Smulders, in overall charge of cycling initiatives for Harten voor Sport, says more advanced classes are taken out on to the city’s streets to learn “bike etiquette”.

Another class that morning involved a more advanced group of students pedalling around a “traffic village”, a fenced off network of scaled-down streets, originally designed to teach children, complete with tiny roundabout and a mocked-up level crossing and wooden train.

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“All the classes finish with tea and biscuits. It’s as much a social thing as a health thing,” Smulders said. “Cycling gets these women out of their houses and into the street. Some of the women start off by wearing sports shoes, and tracksuit trousers under their skirts. They see it as a sporting activity. But it’s not.”

According to Kluit, such schemes can often have a knock-on effect.

“I have a neighbour, she’s from Moroccan background and she’s a grandmother,” she said. “It’s very uplifting – she took cycling lessons when she was in her 40s. Suddenly the area where she moved around was not only our neighbourhood, she could go to the next one, and the one after that. She could go to family she had not seen for some time.



“And once she’d made this connection she said, ‘OK, I’ll teach my children.’ And now she’s teaching her grandson. It’s really good.”

In somewhere as bike-friendly as Utrecht, once people begin cycling they tend to remain on two wheels, Kluit says: “In a liveable city, you meet each other and connect to your surroundings, you smell the grass and you feel the wind in your hair. And that is one of the big qualities of cycling, and why people like it so much.”

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