Justin Blinder, an artist in Brooklyn, has built a small 3D-printed device that clamps onto the front fork of any Citi Bike in New York. It carries a GPS unit and census data on rent burden, the share of a household’s income that goes on rent and utilities. Ride into a block where that share is high and the device adds resistance to the front wheel. Ride into a more affordable one and it eases off, and the bike rolls.
Blinder delivered food by bike across the city after losing his job in 2020, and built the project on a 10,000-dollar grant from the Brooklyn arts organisation Idle Hands. His question was what would happen if affordability stopped being something you map onto a city and became part of the terrain you have to move through. The same census figure that usually arrives as a colour on a chart arrives here as resistance in your legs.
So…:
Which of your numbers would land differently if people felt them instead of read them?
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