Home :: Sacha Chua

I volunteered to help with Bike Brigade's e-mail newsletter, since they were looking for someone to take over from another volunteer and it might be a good way to build real-life community. I like the cause: volunteer cyclists connecting food banks with people who need those groceries delivered. W-'s been volunteering for that for a while, and A+ and I also did a couple of deliveries, and it's nice to see her enjoy helping out. I also listened to a virtual panel about bikes and social justice, and I shared my sketchnotes afterwards. I'm glad there are people thinking about these issues, and I'm also glad that there are small, concrete, on-the-ground ways that we can help.

We made more progress through the Toronto District School Board's gifted identification process, but I think we're going to opt for a regular class in the public virtual school instead of the gifted placement in an in-person school. A+ gets bored in class, but I think she'll enjoy having the extra opportunities to play with her friends and explore ideas, and she also appreciates the way she can read and sing in the middle of class. (Hooray for the mute button!)

A+ took a pottery painting class and another pottery wheel class at Clay With Me. This time she did a 2-hour wheel workshop, and the teacher was able to help her with a couple of pieces. We've been using the bowls we made in the previous class. It's nice to have hand-made things. This seems to be an ongoing interest, so we're going to experiment with a pottery-related summer camp. I found one that lets me register for a week-long afternoon camp that focuses on the pottery wheel. We like to keep our time pretty flexible, so this is our first experiment with a camp. I think it'll be great to be able to build momentum and learn from a teacher with more experience, using equipment that we don't have access to at home. The camp description says kids will learn how to add attachments and other decorations to their work, so that could be pretty cool.

I experimented with bringing a portable butane stove to the park. We were able to make s'mores on two separate occasions without setting anyone on fire, hooray! It was a good experience. The kids had fun.

On nice days when we didn't have any playdates planned, we I went on bike adventures. We checked out the flower event in Yorkville. We also explored the St. James Park playground, which was included in the recent Doors Open event. A+ liked the tall slide there. We also went to the Art Gallery of Ontario so that she could work on her Group of 7 art assignment while looking at the actual paintings. She picked Figure with Rays of Light by Lauren Harris.

There were quite a few rainy days. We got a lot of sewing done. A+'s getting better at sewing simple seams, and she can stop the machine when things sound weird. We made a fancy skirt with an embroidered mesh layer over satin, a couple of skorts made of spandex so that she can wear it into the splash pad or even the swimming pool, a swim set, and a few tops.

Rainy days were also good for playing together. A+ was curious about playing a farming game, so we started playing Stardew Valley, and we all got into it quite a fair bit. A+ likes collecting eggs, cooking food, and building friendships. I enjoy farming and mining. It's a lot of fun, especially when we play co-op. Even W-'s gotten into it on his phone. This could be a fun way to learn more about life and parenting. Having my own solo farm is also nice, too. It helps me be more patient when we play in co-op because I know I have a different space where I can try things out. It does mean I get tempted to stay up late. I can definitely see the impact of this new interest on my time graph and sleep totals, but that's fine. It's good to ride the wave of our interests, especially when we can do it together.

In our real-life garden, the radishes have been very happy, and other seeds have sprouted too. The mini roses, dahlias, and strawberries have come back, and so has a dianthus. The daffodils are done with their blooms. Last year's compost turned out pretty nicely, and I've started turning this year's trimmings into compost. I love letting A+ plant seeds wherever she likes, and I've been enjoying learning how to identify those sprouts as well as other ones that turn up in our garden.

A+'s been enjoying the sourdough rye from the Dufferin Grove farmers market, so I revived the sourdough starter we got from a trip many years ago, which we'd revived in 2020 or so and then re-dehydrated. I thought I got it to be pretty active again, but I haven't quite figured out baking a proper loaf yet. On the other hand, W- has been on a roll (hah) with all the breads and bagels he's been baking. I put the starter in the fridge for a week because we had lots of potato-rosemary bread in the house, and now I think the starter needs a few days of waking up again. Oh well, flour is tuition for learning how to bake. Fortunately, I've discovered I like sourdough discard pancakes, so at least there's a way to deal with the excess.

In June, I'd like to take A+ on a few more informal field trips during the school week, to take advantage of places before they get swamped by everyone else on summer break. Maybe Centreville, and maybe strawberry-picking like last year. Her friends will probably be more available for playdates too, so that'll be a nice shift in our routines. I'm looking forward to more cooking and sewing and gardening and pottery. We like making things together and enjoying them together. As the days get longer and the weather warms, I shift: less computer time, more outside time. This is good. I'm looking forward to exploring more of the city by bike, now that we know we can make it out to playgrounds on the other side of town. It's the season for it!

Blog posts

Sketches

Time

Category	Previous month %	This month %	Diff %	h/wk	Diff h/wk
A+	30.7	33.9	3.2	58.9	5.4
Unpaid work	4.9	5.7	0.8	9.8	1.3
Discretionary - Play	1.6	1.3	-0.3	2.2	-0.5
Discretionary - Family	0.5	0.2	-0.3	0.3	-0.5
Business	2.4	2.0	-0.4	3.5	-0.6
Sleep	32.2	31.3	-1.0	54.3	-1.6
Personal	11.6	10.7	-1.0	18.5	-1.6
Discretionary - Productive	16.1	9.9	-6.2	17.2	-10.4

I've been staying up playing Stardew Valley. =)

Related: May review in 2023, 2021, 2020, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2010

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You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

Working on the plumbing in a small web community

May 31, 2025| connecting, emacs, blogging

The IndieWeb Carnival prompt for May is small web communities. I've been exploring some thoughts on how a little effort goes a long way to connecting a community. Sometimes I think of it as working on the plumbing so that ideas can flow more smoothly. It feels a little different from the direct contribution of knowledge or ideas. I also want to connect with other people who do this kind of thing.

Emacs is a text editor that has been around since the 1970s. It's highly programmable, so people have come up with all sorts of ways to modify it to do what they want. It's not just for programmers. My favourite examples include novelists and bakers and musicians who use Emacs in unexpected ways. Because Emacs is so flexible, community is important. The source code and documentation don't show all the possible workflows. As people figure things out by themselves and together, more possibilities open up.

I love tweaking Emacs to help me with different things I want to do, and I love learning about how other people use it too. I've been sharing my notes on Emacs on this blog since 2001 or so. In 2015, as I was getting ready to become a parent, I knew I was going to have much less time and focused attention, which meant less time playing with Emacs. Fortunately, around that time, John Wiegley (who was one of the maintainers of Emacs at the time) suggested that it would be helpful if I could keep an eye on community updates and summarize them. This worked well with the fragmentation of my time, since I could still speed-read updates and roughly categorize them.

Text from sketch

Community plumbing

You don't have to fill the pipes all by yourself. Just help things flow.

I want to share some of the things we're doing in the Emacs community so that I can convince you that building plumbing for your community can be fun, easy, and awesome. This is great because enthusiasm spreads.

virtuous cycle

Other places: YouTube, Reddit, HN, lobste.rs, Mastodon, PeerTube, mailing lists….
Blog aggregator
- Planet Emacs Life (uses Planet Venus) - update: [2025-05-31 Sat] I wrote my own RSS feed aggregator instead.
Newsletter: Emacs News, 1-2 hours a week
- summarize & group
- announce calendar events
User groups
- [often use Emacs News to get conversations going]
iCal & Org files: Emacs Calendar
Conference
- EmacsConf: < USD 50 hosting costs + donated server + volunteer time

Tips:

Make it fun for yourself.
Build processes and tools.
Let people help

2024-01-31-05

Some more notes on the regular flows built up by this kind of community plumbing:

Daily: Lots of people post on reddit.com/r/emacs and on Mastodon with the #emacs hashtag. I also aggregate Emacs-related blog posts at planet.emacslife.com, taking over from planet.emacsen.org when Tess had DNS issues. There are a number of active channels on YouTube and occasionally some on PeerTube instances as well. I don't need to do much work to keep this flowing, just occasionally adding feeds to the aggregator for planet.emacslife.com.

Weekly: I collect posts from different sources, remove duplicates, combine links talking about the same thing, categorize the links, put them roughly in order, and post Emacs News to a website, an RSS feed, and a mailing list. This takes me maybe 1.5 hours each week. It's one of the highlights of my week. I get to learn about all sorts of cool things.

Weekly seems like a good rhythm for me considering how active the Emacs community is. Daily would be too much time. Monthly would lead to either too long of a post or too much lost in curation, and the conversations would be delayed.

Sometimes I feel a twinge of envy when I check out other people's newsletter posts with commentary or screenshots or synthesis. (So cool!) But hey, I'm still here posting Emacs News after almost ten years, so that's something. =) A long list of categorized links fits the time I've got and the way my mind works, and other people can put their own spin on things.

Monthly: There are a number of Emacs user groups, both virtual and in-person. Quite a few of them use Emacs News to get the discussion rolling or fill in gaps in conversation, which is wonderful.

Some meetups use meet.jit.si, Zoom, or Google Meet, but some are more comfortable on a self-hosted service using free software. I help by running a BigBlueButton web conferencing server that I can now automatically scale up and down on a schedule, so the base cost is about 60 USD/year. Scaling it up for each meetup costs about USD 0.43 for a 6-hour span. It's pretty automated now, which is good because I tend to forget things that are scheduled for specific dates. My schedule still hasn't settled down enough for me to host meetups, but I like to drop by once in a while.

Yearly: EmacsConf is the one big project I like to work on. It's completely online. It's more of a friendly get-together than a formal conference. I have fun trying to fit as many proposed talks as possible into the schedule. We nudge speakers to send us recorded presentations of 5-20 minutes (sometimes longer), although they can share live if they want to. A number of volunteers help us caption the videos. Each presentation is followed by Q&A over web conference, text chat, and/or collaborative document. Other volunteers handle checking in speakers and hosting the Q&A sessions.

It's a lot of fun for surprisingly little money. For the two-day conference itself, the website hosting cost for EmacsConf 2024 was about USD 56 and our setup was able to handle 400 viewers online (107 max simultaneous users in various web conferences).

EmacsConf takes more time. For me, it's about 1.5 hours a day for 4 months, but I think mostly that's because I have so much fun figuring out how to automate things and because I help with the captions. Lots of other people put time into preparing presentations, hosting Q&A, participating, etc. It's worth it, though.

I like doing this because it's a great excuse to nudge people to get cool stuff out of their head and into something they can share with other people, and it helps people connect with other people who are interested in the same things. Some Q&A sessions have run for hours and turned into ongoing collaborations. I like turning videos into captions and searchable text because I still don't have the time/patience to actually watch videos, so it's nice to be able to search. And it's wonderful gathering lots of people into the same virtual room and seeing the kind of enthusiasm and energy they share.

So yeah, community plumbing turns out to be pretty enjoyable. If this resonates with you, maybe you might want to see if your small web community could use a blog aggregator or a newsletter. Doesn't have to be anything fancy. You could start with a list of interesting links you've come across. I'm curious about what other people do in their communities to get ideas flowing!

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You can comment on Mastodon or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

2025-05-26 Emacs news

May 26, 2025| emacs, emacs-news

Upcoming events (iCal file, Org):
- Emacs Berlin (hybrid, in English) https://emacs-berlin.org/ Wed May 28 0930 America/Vancouver - 1130 America/Chicago - 1230 America/Toronto - 1630 Etc/GMT - 1830 Europe/Berlin - 2200 Asia/Kolkata – Thu May 29 0030 Asia/Singapore
- EmacsATX: Emacs Social https://www.meetup.com/emacsatx/events/307852772/ Wed Jun 4 1600 America/Vancouver - 1800 America/Chicago - 1900 America/Toronto - 2300 Etc/GMT – Thu Jun 5 0100 Europe/Berlin - 0430 Asia/Kolkata - 0700 Asia/Singapore
- M-x Research: TBA https://m-x-research.github.io/ Fri Jun 6 0800 America/Vancouver - 1000 America/Chicago - 1100 America/Toronto - 1500 Etc/GMT - 1700 Europe/Berlin - 2030 Asia/Kolkata - 2300 Asia/Singapore
Emacs configuration:
Appearance:
- Automagic Dark Mode – Automatically create a dark (or light mode) for your existing emacs theme. (Reddit)
- Ryan Fleury inspired theme ported on Emacs. (Reddit)
Navigation:
Hyperbole:
- A Taste of Hyperbole —Automatically linking to Org targets, and more
Dired:
Writing:
- TIL markdown-narrow-to-subtree
Org Mode:
- Chris Maiorana: Make everything a note
- Building an Org-mode Workflow: Timestamped Notes - Jeff Bradberry (Reddit, Irreal)
  - Priority Cookies - Jeff Bradberry (Reddit)
  - Epic Organization - Jeff Bradberry (2023)
  - Lists and Checklists (2022)
  - Scheduling and Deadlines (2022)
  - Multiple Files and Archiving (2022)
  - Basic TODOs (2022)
- Single-click time tracking with links
- Tip: Automatically set org-agenda-files to those files with relevant content
- Introducing codetabs.el – Clément Jean (Reddit) - Org Babel source blocks in tabs in export
- [Emacs + Polymode + Org-mode] fix unfolding on source block entry (01:08)
- org-roam v2.3.0: performance, bug fixes
- Putting org-roam-dailies in one long journal file
Coding:
- git-link: link to a specific line number in a file hosted on a git forge (@shapr@recurse.social)
- Jupyter-Ascending — новый способ работы с Jupyter Ноутбуками в Emacs / Хабр (@habr@zhub.link)
Mail, news, and chat:
- Christian Tietze: Insert Cc and Bcc Mail Headers Conditionally in Emacs message-mode
Multimedia:
- ahihi/strudel.el: proof-of-concept Strudel mode for Emacs (@ahihi@anticapitalist.party) for https://strudel.cc tunes
AI:
Community:
Other:
Emacs development:
- emacs-devel:
  - Re: Introduce .early-init.desktop (inspired by early-init.el) – needed - for consideration?
  - Re: feature/igc: pdump segment never freed - considering other systems with fancy garbage collection
  - Re: MPS inclusion in IGC branch - Re: License ramifications of distribut - alsu opdateco ncerns
  - Re: Build break on Emacs MPS build on Windows in the latest master - need people with experience with WSL
- * lisp/tab-line.el (tab-line-close-other-tabs): New command.
- * lisp/tab-line.el (tab-line-move-tab-forward): New command.
New packages:
- doric-themes: Minimalist themes (GNU ELPA)
- evil-god-toggle: Toggle Evil and God Mode (MELPA)
- kdl-mode: Major mode for editing KDL files (MELPA)
- list-projects: List of known projects (MELPA)

Links from reddit.com/r/emacs, r/orgmode, r/spacemacs, r/planetemacs, Mastodon #emacs, Bluesky #emacs, Hacker News, lobste.rs, programming.dev, lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, planet.emacslife.com, YouTube, the Emacs NEWS file, Emacs Calendar, and emacs-devel. Thanks to Andrés Ramírez for emacs-devel links. Do you have an Emacs-related link or announcement? Please e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com. Thank you!

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You can comment on Mastodon or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

Things I want to learn from Stardew Valley

May 23, 2025| life, play, parenting

This week A+ said she wanted to play a farming game, so we went through this list of farming games on Steam and she picked Stardew Valley. I bought it for CAD 17 under her Steam account. She got pretty good at finishing her homework before playtime. After some fiddling around, we managed to figure out how to play 3-person local co-op using our old PS3 controllers.¹

The first game we played used the basic farm layout and shared money. I realized that sharing all the money wasn't working out so well for me about two game weeks in because I was always reminding A+ to buy seeds before she splurged on gifts, so we started a new playthrough with separate money. A+ decided to pick the meadowlands farm layout, which meant starting with some chickens.

We now have a mayonnaise maker and four chickens. It's summer and I have a variety of crops growing. W- sometimes drops in to do some fishing or help out around the farm. We probably won't make it to the greenhouse bundle this year, but maybe next year. She'd been looking forward to getting a kitchen and trying out some of the recipes, so we saved up for it and worked together to chop down lots of trees.

Stardew Valley feels like a good rainy day activity with A+. It's a cozy place to practise making decisions and working together.

A+ can get competitive and envious, which can get in the way of her having fun. Sometimes she gets envious because I've been leveling up in farming and she hasn't yet. When that happens, she becomes more motivated to help out around the farm. Sometimes it's harder for her to channel that frustration into growth. At the trout derby, she got grumpier and grumpier. First it was because W- had caught a rainbow trout and she was only catching trash. Then, when she caught a rainbow trout, she was grumpy that W- had caught a rainbow trout with a golden tag and she hadn't gotten one with a tag. "I'm never going to catch anything," she grumbled, eventually spiraling into a lump on the couch. To her credit, she kept trying for a while instead of rage-quitting, so that's progress.

I chatted with her about it the next day, when she was well-regulated. "It doesn't have to be a competition, you know," I said.

"Of course it was a competition," she said matter-of-factly. "It was the trout derby."

Apparently this competitiveness and sensitivity is pretty common and totally not out of place for a 9-year-old, especially since she's an only child. Common approaches include:

Stopping the game when whining starts, in the hopes that eventually the kid will learn to avoid whining: I'm not sure about this approach with A+ because I think she might benefit from some more help and support learning these skills.
Team sports and a structured environment: This doesn't quite feel like a good fit for us, but I'm glad it works for other people.
Switching to more cooperative activities: I couldn't redirect her from the trout derby because the time-limited event was too fascinating. We had to take the loss and try again another time. This, too, is a fish on the line; sometimes it escapes and there's nothing to do but to accept it and fish again.

There's a lot we can learn together in the process of working on day-to-day things. I can put A+ in charge of most of the harvests, and she's getting better at minding the mayonnaise. I think A+ likes mining with me (I'm in charge of fighting monsters), and we can probably also chop some wood together. Maybe she'll enjoy collecting the eggs and petting the chickens now that there are more of them, especially since one of them is called Hei-hei. Then we can fish when we're in the mood for fishing, farm when we're in the mood for farming, and so on.
Getting used to losses by playing lots of games: Fishing is good for this. It's easy to start trying again, and there are plenty of little rewards along the way. Once we can cook, we can use meals like chowder to boost her skill.

I love it when games gently help me notice ways I can grow as a person. I want to get better at focusing on processes, not outcomes.² It's neat to see this in contrast. At the moment, A+'s attention focuses a lot on outcomes. She thinks about things like upgrading to kitchen or getting to a certain level, but it's harder for her to focus on the steps that will get her there. I notice there's stuff for me to work on, too. I struggle a little with trying to make sure I have seed money if I let A+ take care of harvesting and selling (somewhat alleviated now that I've got chickens and corn), that I can get everything watered before bedtime, that I've kept some of the produce back for bundles or quests, or that I'm making progress towards a silo before winter. I can also practice focusing on processes, not outcomes.

I know my job isn't to maximize the farm's profit. Maybe my job for now is to water the farm so that A+ can enjoy the harvest. Doesn't that sound like some kind of parenting thing I can work on learning in my bones… I know grown-ups are better at delayed gratification than kids are. I'm better at the grind. If she can enjoy a bit of the harvest and figure out if she likes it, then we can back up a little. Maybe she can water a small part of the field, and then grow from there. Maybe I can make her a little 1x1 patch with the season's fastest-growing crop, and then expand every time she gets it all the way to harvest. Tiny habits, right?

Also thinking as a grown-up, I can stagger the planting of 4-day crops like wheat so that there's always something for her to harvest.

There are other little ways we can use game mechanics to practise life skills. We can occasionally check the traveling cart for quality sprinklers, which will give us a reason to keep track of the days and save some money for opportunities. It would be great to practice this with virtual money before she needs to deal with real money.

I can also invite A+ to go mining and then use the copper to upgrade the watering cans. It's a multi-step process (copper ore, wood, coal, copper bar, upgrade), so it makes sense that I can handle that better than she can. She can focus on one step at a time and slowly get the hang of how everything comes together, just like when she was learning how to solve the Rubik's cube. It's also like the incremental independence she's growing into in other parts of her life. My job is to support her so that she can learn at the right level: not too hard, not too easy.³ Someday, after many many runs through this kind of process, she might even get the hang of creating those sequences for herself or finding people who can help her. Small steps to lifelong learning.

And when I start to get fidgety about how we play, like when she doesn't accept any of my invitations to do something (chop wood? carry water?), I can repeat: process, not outcome. It's okay for her to stand around waiting for the shop to open while I water the farm. She's excited, she's focused on the very next step towards her goal, and that's good for where she is. It's okay for things to take a while. I want to keep the process fun. The fun is the important part.

Also, there's this whole thing about taking time to talk to people, remember what they like and dislike (… or look that up in the notes), give them gifts, celebrate their birthdays, and so on. Right. There are even clear benefits for doing so. Plenty of things to get better at. =)

Stardew Valley seems like it would be great for practising these things. The general advice from the community seems to be to take it easy and not rush. Don't worry about making it to certain milestones by certain times, just have fun together. We've been playing for only a few days, but I have a feeling there's much to learn over the next few years.

Footnotes

¹

PS3 controllers: On Windows, we needed DsHidMini and a powered USB hub. On Linux, we just needed the powered hub.

²

This reminds me of Atomic Habits.

³

Zone of proximal development

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Having fun with words

May 22, 2025| parenting, play

I love strewing ideas in front of A+ in case something catches her interest. A rich source of in-jokes is the word "antidisestablishmentarianism", which I introduced to her when she was… what… maybe 3? 4? and which she decided to master with her usual determination. Sometimes, when she's in a "Mom! Mom! Mom!" phase, I joke about changing my preferred name so that she has to say "Antidisestablishmentarianism! Antidisestablishmentarianism! Antidisestablishmentarianism!", which always gets either a laugh or a groan.

One of A+'s friends is a 4-year-old. She was playing the copying game with her, the one where a kid repeats everything the other person says. Whenever A+ wants to wind the game down, she confidently rattles off "antidisestablishmentarianism" and that's the end of that.

I didn't want A+ to rest on her laurels, of course. I introduced another word: paradichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane. That piqued A+'s curiosity, so I told her about DDT and I shared the limerick I learned it from.

A mosquito was heard to complain,
"A chemist has poisoned my brain!"
The source of his sorrow
was paradichloro-
diphenyltrichloroethane.

A+ got the hang of the limerick within a few days. Apparently, she's already shared it with her teacher and her nature club counselors. I think she's even been coaching the 4-year-old through saying it syllable by syllable, so perhaps there will be two of these word geeks someday.

Since A+ liked the rhythm of the limerick and she also likes math, I looked up this other fun limerick, which is attributed to Leigh Mercer:

A dozen, a gross, and a score
Plus three times the square root of four
Divided by seven
Plus five times eleven
Is nine squared and not a bit more.

Small words, but fun to play with too.

For our next steps, I want to get the hang of saying "pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis" and "hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia" (although sesquipedalophobia is the more common term).

We also pun about whatever she's interested in. At the moment, it's all red panda all the time, thanks to her enjoyment of Turning Red. ("Which animal loves books?" "A well-read panda!") We love alliteration and rhyme. We change the lyrics to her favourite songs. I had a hard time sitting down and playing with A+ when she was smaller, but now we've got so many words to play with. This is fun!

What's the use of these things? Mostly to tickle our brains and make each other smile, but also maybe the tiny chance of bumping into someone else who happens to overhear it and who chuckles out of recognition. There are people out there who like to play the kind of way we like to play, and she'll find her tribe someday.

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You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.

Creating sustainable futures in unsustainable times: Bicycles, justice, and resistance - Sabat Ismail, Cyprine Odada, Deepti Adlakha, Rachel Wang

Posted: May 22, 2025 - Modified: May 29, 2025| sketchnotes, biking, life

[2025-05-29 Thu]: Updated links for Cyprine Odada and Rachel Wang.

W- has been volunteering for Bike Brigade for a number of months now. A+ and I occasionally tag along. It's encouraging to be part of this initiative to deliver groceries and other essentials to people who need help. One of the organizers spoke at this panel discussion about bicycles and social justice organized by York University.

Session description

Bicycles hold immense potential for addressing today’s pressing social and climate justice challenges. However, coordinating and sustaining grassroots cycling movements remains difficult, especially as global development aid for climate action and broader humanitarian work rapidly declines. Indeed, we are living in a moment of profound global injustice, where imperialism, colonial violence, and systemic oppression dictate whose struggles and resistances are recognized. In this context, grassroots organizing and local self-determination have become more pressing than ever. This webinar explores how bicycling serves as a tool for justice, sustainability, and collective resistance. Indeed, we see bicycling/mobility justice in responding to uncertain global contexts, including a rise in right-wing fascist governments, climate change and its unequal effects on vulnerable communities, and an escalation on anti-immigrant policies and sentiments. Those most affected – racialized, Indigenous, low-income, and gender-diverse communities – are leading powerful mobility justice movements. They are reclaiming space, resisting exclusion, and challenging systemic inequalities through cycling activism. Speakers will share insights from different regions, highlighting how bicycles are more than transportation – they are a means of survival, self-determination, and community care. This conversation will thus bring together activists, researchers, and practitioners striving to make transportation more accessible and equitable.

Panelists:

Dr. Deepti Adlakha (Associate Professor, Delft University of Technology)
Sabat Ismail (urban planner, multi-disciplinary artist, and writer)
Cyprine Odada (urban planner, cycling advocate, Founder of Women Shaping Cities)
Rachel Wang (Founding Executive Director, The Bike Brigade – Toronto; environmental practitioner and community organizer)

Here are the notes I took:

2025-05-21-03 Creating sustainable futures in unsustainable times: Bicycles, justice, and resistance - Sabat Ismail, Cyprine Odada, Deepti Adiakha, Rachel Wang -- biking justice community

Text and links from sketch

Creating sustainable futures in unsustainable times: Bicycles, justice, & resistance

Sabat Ismail: urban planner
- Mid to late 2010s: books on cycling, inequality, gentrification
- Couriers in Toronto, Albert Koehl (2024)
- Food delivery couriers - Do Lee
- Migrant farm workers
- Girls on Bikes
- Gaza Sunbirds
- Gaps in conversation, data: race, gender (incl. trans/queer) - not just commuters
- Disability access: CultureLink, Trailblazers
- Bike hubs
- Equity lens
Cyprine Odada: urban planner, Critical Mass Nairobi
- The goal is to get people back on bicycles.
- I started noticing inequalities.
- We needed to diversify our cycling experiences.
- Nairobi bike train: Commute to work
- Children: Bigger impact than main ride
- Kenya Cycling Women
- Need for Speed
- Cycling marketplace
- CSR
- New:
  - ride buddy
  - city bike tours
- Access: pairing, tandems, training
- Teen mobility & pregnancy in rural
- Equity: give voice to marginalized, package for the city
Deepti Adlakha: assoc. professor, Delft University of Technology
- Extreme heat & lack of shade
- Active transport… has to be built into city priorities.
- 8 Ds: local urban design principles
- healthysustainablecities.org
- societies, environment, people, systems
- Score cards
- commuting vs. trip chaining
- connecting the dots, looking at mobility through a justice lens
- Academic institutions can take a bigger role: research, data, evidence
- Building accessibility into infrastructure (ex: storage)
- Rural: Linking to transport
- Equity: Require assessment, weighted scoring
Rachel Wang: founding exec. director, Bike Brigade
- Before pandemic: 1 in 5 households were food insecure; many >1km from food
- Food banks shifted to home delivery (no gathering in lines)
- 40+ mutual aid groups
- Beautiful stories of how people get involved: starting w/ deliveries, becoming community organizers
- Equity: Allies are important - strategic messengers
Lyndsay Hayhurst, Jess Nachman
- Bicycles are powerful tools for justice.

https://sachachua.com/2025-05-21-03

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I like that so many people are thinking about this from different perspectives around the world: from the ground up with the experiences of people who are out there, to groups like Critical Mass Nairobi and Bike Brigade where people can work together to make things better, to academics and urban planners who can think about how systems are designed.

We probably lean more towards the very small scale end of things, for now: whatever little deliveries we can squeeze into our schedule. A+ is particularly proud of putting things in her own basket and also hauling a full bag of groceries once we get to the recipient's building. Who knows, maybe we'll find ourselves moving along that pipeline from volunteer grocery deliveries to community organizing…

Anyway, I don't know if a recording will get posted, but if I come across one, I'll update this.

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