I’m Owain Llewellyn and I am undertaking a PhD in urban cycling. In my PhD I am reading the city I live in – Bangor, Gwynedd – as a text from the perspective of riding a bicycle. To do this I am using ecolinguistics analysis (Stibbe, 2020). I will be applying ecolinguistic analysis to the “text” that is the human-built environment of Bangor. I am using an autoethnographic methodology in which I use the self as a tool for data collection.
Ecolinguistics extends the mission of Critical Discourse Analysis, which exposes and challenges how language is used to exercise power of one group over another. Ecolinguistics broadens this lens to examine how language can carry meanings that are destructive to the more than human world — the animals, plants, ecosystems and natural processes we share the planet with. At the same time, it searches for new stories and ways of speaking that might nurture a more positive relationship with that wider world.
In relation to cycling, (Caimotto, 2020) extended ecolinguistics to examine texts about cycling, showing how the language used in them can discourage cycling and potentially reduce how much people cycle. This points towards an ecolinguistic approach that can expose the hostility and misconceptions surrounding cycling and contribute to replacing them with more encouraging narratives.
This research will read the human-built environment of Bangor as a text, appraising it against the ecosophy I have developed for this study. An ecosophy is described by Stibbe (2020, 10) as both the “ethical vision” of the analyst and as the philosophical principles which ecolinguists evaluate the texts under scrutiny (ibid,11).
I will use an auto-ethnographic approach to read the human-designed living environment of Bangor using my experiences of cycling in Bangor. An important element will be insider research, a form of autoethnography in which the researcher investigates a “group or social circumstance they are part of” (Butz and Besio, 2009). The success of this approach will be judged by the extent to which it is not simply a memoir but instead how it informs readers’ understanding of this topic.
Car-dominated urban transport is a critical problem with negative impacts on health, wellbeing, communities and the more than human world (Walker, Tapp and Davis, 2023; Walker and Brömmelstroet, 2025). Cycling, alongside other forms of active travel, has low uptake in many cities and in Bangor this is acutely true. There is a lack of cycling infrastructure even by the relatively low standards of the British Isles.
Being hit by a car and hospitalised while riding my bicycle as a teenager did not stop me from cycling. In fact, it has made me the stubborn advocate of cycling in car dominated cities that I am. Since then, I have lived in Aberystwyth in Wales, Sofia in Bulgaria, Porto in Portugal, Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, and now Bangor. In each of these cities I have been a utility cyclist, using two wheels to get to work, transport children around, get the shopping and even to go on holiday. I am always amazed at what a minor role cycling plays in the mobility of cities, and at the lack of infrastructure to encourage it, and the negative stories that exist about cycling and which I believe discourage its uptake.
There is a great opportunity now in Wales. In 2013, the Welsh government passed the Active Travel Act. This aims to increase active travel use across Wales. Sadly, the Welsh Government’s own view is that they have not met the outcomes ten years later. There is a belief that there needs to be a focus on behavioural change as well as building infrastructure. This research can offer an original new perspective on how such behaviour change might come about.
Bangor is a bilingual city, however I have not reached the level in the Welsh language to be competent in applying ecolinguistic analysis of Welsh language texts. There is however, an excellent opportunity to read Bangor through a linguistic landscape lens. Linguistic landscape is described by (Landry and Bourhis, 1997)25 as a combination of the
language of public road signs, advertising billboards, place names, street names, commercial shop signs and public signs on government buildings of a given territory.
How the presence of texts in both Welsh and English in Bangor contribute to the experience of cycling in Bangor is a question to address.
There are several outcomes to this research. Firstly, while this blog is part of the research process, it will also be part of a dialogue about cycling in Bangor. Secondly, I intend to write my PhD as a research monograph, which I hope to publish. I hope this will be useful for both for policy makers in Wales and beyond, and for people with an interest in utility cycling as a form of urban transport. The hope is that this will support the Welsh government with original research. A benefit will be if this can help understand the slow uptake of cycling in Wales and by extension elsewhere. Furthermore, this could help better meet the intended outcomes of the Welsh Active Travel Act by increasing cycling levels.
Butz, B. and Besio, K. (2009) Autoethnography. Geography Compass. 3(5), pp 1660-1674. DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2009.00279.x Caimotto, M.C. (2020) “Discourses of Cycling, Road Users and Sustainability,” Discourses of Cycling, Road Users and Sustainability [Preprint]. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44026-8.
Landry, R. and Bourhis, R.Y. (1997) “Linguistic landscape and ethnolinguistic vitality: An empirical study,” Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 16(1), pp. 23–49. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X970161002;WEBSITE:WEBSITE:SAGE;REQUESTEDJOURNAL:JOURNAL:JLSA;ISSUE:ISSUE:DOI.
Stibbe, A. (2020) “Ecolinguistics : Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By,” Ecolinguistics [Preprint]. Available at: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367855512.
Walker, I. and Brömmelstroet, M. te (2025) “Why do cars get a free ride? The social-ecological roots of motonormativity,” Global Environmental Change, 91, p. 102980. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/J.GLOENVCHA.2025.102980.
Walker, I., Tapp, A. and Davis, A. (2023) “Motonormativity: how social norms hide a major public health hazard,” International Journal of Environment and Health, 11(1), pp. 21–33. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1504/IJENVH.2023.135446.