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Velo-city 2017 will be held in the Dutch cities of Arnhem and Nijmegen in JUne, and the event is now putting out a call for papers.
The Arnhem-Nijmegen bid promised that Velo-city 2017 would be hosted "by the country that is praised as the ‘bicycle country of the world’, the Netherlands!"
Velo-city was staged in Seville in 2011, Vancouver in 2012, Vienna in 2013, Adelaide, Australia, in 2014, Nantes, France, in 2015, and Taipei, Taiwan, in 2016. The event started in 1980 in Bremen, Germany. Copenhagen has hosted the conference twice (in 1989 and 2010) but the last and only time it was hosted in the Netherlands was in 1987 when it was staged in Groningen.
The Arnhem-Nijmegen bid document said that the time was now right for Velo-city to return to the Netherlands, "where visitors can see the best examples of cycling policy and bicycle use.
The slogan for the 2017 event is "The Freedom of Cycling". The call for papers says the event is "looking for abstracts that show us the way to the future of cycling and how it brings freedom in our lives."
The programme will be divided into:
Infrastructure; People; Bikenomics; Urban planning; and Governance.
The organisers of Velo-city 2017 argued that "the Dutch have become complacent with their cycling levels. We want to think further, challenge the thinking to achieve new levels of cycling, whether that is in Arnhem, Sydney, Paris, Mombasa or Caracas!"
