How built environment shapes cycling experience: A multi-scale review in historical urban contexts

Abstract

Understanding how built environments shape human experience is central to designing sustainable cities. Cycling provides a critical case: it delivers health and environmental benefits, yet its uptake depends strongly on the experience of cycling rather than infrastructure alone. Research on this relationship has grown rapidly but remains fragmented across disciplines and scales, and has concentrated on network-level analyses of routes and connectivity. This bias is especially problematic in historical cities, where embedding new infrastructure is difficult, and where cycling experience is shaped not only by spatial form but also by how cyclists perceive, interpret, and physically respond to their environment - through psychological factors such as safety and comfort, physiological demands such as stress and fatigue, and perceptual cues in the streetscape. We systematically reviewed 68 studies across urban planning, transportation, behavioural science, neuroscience, and public health. Two scales of analysis were identified: a macro scale addressing the ability to cycle and a micro scale addressing the propensity to cycle. Methods were classified into objective and subjective approaches, with hybrid approaches beginning to emerge. We find a persistent reliance on objective proxies, limited integration of subjective accounts, and insufficient attention to the streetscape as a lived environment. Addressing these gaps is essential to explain why environments enable or deter cycling, and to inform the design of cities that support cycling as both mobility and lived experience.