How does the shown object point to a better world?

This is my bike. More pre­cisely: That was my bike, because unfor­tu­nately it was stolen from me recently. In a bet­ter world this would not have happened, which would have had many advant­ages: First, the person(s) who decided to steal the bike by force would not have had to do so. They would have had no reas­on to do so because they would have been fine. Secondly, I would not have had to think in cat­egor­ies of “pos­ses­sion” and mark my bicycle as “in pos­ses­sion” by lock­ing it in the ban­is­ter with a hard to pick lock, because I could have shared it and relied on it being treated with care and com­ing back to me. Thirdly, more people would have enjoyed their bike and our ban­is­ter would have remained undam­aged.

Any­way…

My bicycle is some­how the first thing that comes to mind when I think of a bet­ter world, the second would prob­ably have been a veget­able garden or an urb­an com­munity garden. Back to the bicycle: for me it still means to be inde­pend­ent and to be able to ride off at any time — a means to be able to relate to some­thing, to con­nect with some­thing: be it to get from A to B in a very prag­mat­ic way, to be able to vis­it people or to go out on a tour and feel the con­nec­tion between body and machine. That’s why my bicycle also means sus­tain­able mobil­ity for me, espe­cially in urb­an areas. The fact that in some towns of Cov­id-19 the urb­an bicycle trans­port net­work has been improved to a cer­tain extent gives me hope that in future the bicycle can per­haps play a great­er role in urb­an devel­op­ment issues and that we can per­haps at some point live in car-free towns where every­one can still have equal access to mobil­ity, even if they can­not ride a bicycle.

This is how I imagine a better world:

The import­ant thing would be that all people can live and reside where they wish and that they can and must be able to design this place as they wish without harm­ing oth­ers in their imme­di­ate sur­round­ings and else­where. They must be able to reach this place without being hindered. People must have the oppor­tun­ity to shape their lives in the way they con­sider worth liv­ing, without hav­ing to fear exist­en­tial fears and/or struc­tur­al dis­ad­vant­age — but also without restrict­ing the well-being of oth­ers through their life­style.

I wish for a social togeth­er­ness and for each oth­er, an empower­ment of each indi­vidu­al to be able to par­ti­cip­ate in social decision-mak­ing pro­cesses. I wish for a dif­fer­ent way of doing busi­ness, which works bey­ond profit max­im­iz­a­tion…

Actu­ally, quite hon­estly, the ques­tion of uto­pia and a bet­ter world over­whelms me. Very big ques­tions come up very quickly, very quickly, and the res­ult is a whirl­pool of thoughts and con­fu­sion that twirls the com­plex­ity and inter­woven­ness of the world, as I can grasp it through my per­cep­tion, into an almost end­less twirl. That’s why I prefer to start at my own front door and go into the com­munity garden to do some hoe­ing, so that the next café is nice for the neigh­bour­hood. In the mean­time I might eat some rasp­ber­ries from the com­mons… The line between uto­pia and escap­ism is per­haps very thin in the attemp­ted lived real­ity?

This text was translated by machine. See original text.

Mara, Stadt in Ostdeutschland