SCI-Arc Planet City Trailer

In 2024 Re:Ciclos partnered with SCI-Arc, the Southern California Institute of Architecture, to create a custom trailer for the project Planet City: Spoils, supported by Getty PST. John Cooper, professor of architecture, and Krish Dittmer, an architecture graduate student (and our newest intern!) worked with us to fabricate a mobile, interactive workshop trailer. The trailer serves as a platform for a series of workshops held in collaboration with urbanism scholar James Rojas, in which participants envision and prototype their visions for Los Angeles’ future. Workshops have been held at LACAN (a community organization based in Skid Row), SCI-Arc, and Re:Ciclos.

The trailer, constructed completely from salvaged materials, includes a tabletop workspace, drawers that hold workshop supplies, and expanding panels that allow it to double in size. The fabrication process was challenging and educational for the whole team, including multiple rounds of iteration, testing, and reconfiguration.

Urban Soul Farmer Trailer

2024 also saw Re:Ciclos’ collaboration with Urban Soul Farmer, a project dedicated to bringing agricultural education and urban gardening resources to marginalized communities. Founder Rashonda “Zoe Blaq” Bartney partnered with us to design and fabricate a mobile seed library and gardening trailer. The trailer will support her work offering gardening workshops in LA communities to increase access to the mental health and environmental benefits of green space.

The trailer design incorporates drawers and compartments to store seeds, soil, gardening tools, and informational zines. Using recycled materials and human-powered mobility, the trailer reflects the resilient and resourceful ethos of her project. While gardening projects usually rely on cars and trucks to transport their materials, Urban Soul Farmer’s trailer demonstrates that greening communities is possible without causing further environmental harm. We debuted the trailer at CicLAvia South LA in summer 2024, distributing seeds, zines, and inspiration for car-free mobility!

Screen Printing Cargo Bike with Reject Retail

Xela is a long time organizer with OVAS, a community bicycle project
serving Black and brown femme, trans and non-binary folks, in Highland Park and East LA. In 2022, we
commissioned Xela and their business Reject Retail to make our Re:Ciclos shirts and invited them to do
live screen printing at our shop, also selling their original prints on shirts and patches.

As a result of this collaboration, we realized that we NEED to make a live screen printing ready cargo bicycle for Reject Retail. At the
same time Lulu, our volunteer and long time collaborator with OVAS, approached us looking for
opportunities to use her skills as a certified MIG and TIG welder to positively affect communities.

With both opportunities coming together around the same time, we came to discover a very special and
opportune project on our hands. Xela now works in a gang prevention program where she hopes to make use
of the screen-printing-station-cargo-bike.

We are very excited about this project so stay tuned for more developments!!!

Designing Bike Racks for Delivery with BikeLA

One of Re:Ciclos’ first projects was a collaboration with the Los Angeles County
Bicycle Coalition (BikeLA), of which our founder Jimmy Lizama was also a founding member. BikeLA launched a program focused on encouraging small LA business to use bicycles in their operations, particularly delivery services. They contracted with us to design and build bespoke bike racks for 40 e-bikes, tailored to the small businesses’ needs.

With our collective fabrication experience and years of bike nerdiness, we set out to design our first
rack prototypes to fit the needs of their clients. Although we had little experience building bike
racks, we entered into the experiment with zeal and developed a design we loved. Depicted below is one of our custom racks built for a pizza company that has a large flat surface for fastening pizza delivery
bags and two oversized bottle cages designed to fit two soda bottles.

While Re:Ciclos is mostly aimed at creating full fledged cargo bicycles, we know that a burly bicycle fitted with an equally heavy duty rack is a very
capable cargo carrying machine. We genuinely loved
collaborating with BikeLA and if their pilot program takes off (and how could it not?) then we genuinely
look forward to the possibility of continuing this collaborative effort with them in the future.



No More Ghost Bikes: Collaboration and Solidarity

In October 2022 we held a fundraiser celebrating our first year year in
our space–called “Songs” after the muffler shop that we have converted into a bike workshop. We did this in collaboration with No More Ghost Bikes, an affinity group of
bicycle leaders of Los Angeles (think Bicycle Kitchen, Chief Lunes, Trash Pandas, Bike Oven, Bikerowave,
OVAS etc) whose goal is to collectively create a preventative and responsive strategy to address bicycle
deaths. No More Ghost bikes was started up in 2022 with a Town Hall
meeting at Detroit Vesey’s (a cafe by and for bike people) aimed at bridging the gap between the bike
spaces and community bicycle projects in LA. And we have been a part of those conversations since the
beginning.

In May 2022, we helped host the LA Ride of Silence (a national day of remembrance for cyclists murdered
by cars) alongside No More Ghost Bikes. We opened our Songs space to the community as the start of the
ride, where attendants made signs with phrases like No More Ghost Bikes, Don’t Run Me Over, Just Trying to Get Home, etc. to be displayed on their bicycles
during the ride. The microphone was passed around to speak to the community while we waited for
more to gather. El Bicicrofono was staged just outside the space adorned with
signs and served as a platform for people to speak out from. When the ride started, El Bicicrofono took up a whole lane with
its car-sized breadth, as we all rode along in deafening
silence, a harsh contrast from our usual raucous and celebratory bike rides.

So come October we reunited with No More Ghost Bikes to coordinate a night of talks, live music, and
celebration. Raff and Anne Marie (of Trash Pandas and No More
Ghost Bikes) gave an introductory talk on the aims of No More Ghost Bikes as outreach to more members of
our sprawling bicycle community. The fundraiser also stood in solidarity with Bici Libre, a sister community bicycle
project, which at the time was fighting eviction from their long-held home in MacArthur Park
(RIP). Like so many of our events, the whole bicycle community came together to
make the magic happen and propel us onwards and upwards.

Upcoming we are slated to host the five-year anniversary of the Trash Pandas in Songs in February 2023
and we are so excited to continue our partnership of collaboration and solidarity with No More Ghost
Bikes.

Partners, past and current:

  • New Village Girls Academy
  • Bicycle Kitchen/LaBicicocina
  • Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition
  • Bresee Foundation
  • Artworx L.A.
  • Five Keys Charter
  • CSU, Inc
  • CALO YouthBuild
  • LATTC
  • UCLA
  • Sci-Arc