The bicycle is born in the city. It is a typical product of industrial civilization, its "prehistory" coincides with the industrial revolution and the consequent process of urbanization. The bicycle is an individual object, normally private but non-domestic, used exclusively in the public space. The introduction of bicycles in social life resulted in a series of changes in the urban way of life between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Cycling developed initially as a leisure and sporting activity that interested the leisured and moneyed classes, for which aristocratic and bourgeois clubs were set up, in order to anchor the pastime socially and even politically, as well as contributing to the development of rules and regulations. Progressively, the direct regulatory function of clubs over their members and sporting activities was taken over by regional and national federations, and as cycling democratized, clubs became progressively less socially restrictive and more numerous.
The period during which the velodromes flourished was marked by the rise of professionalism, the decline in the role of clubs in the organization of races, the rise in the importance of the sporting press, the strengthening of links between racers and manufacturers and overall, a democratization of cycling. Cycle racing in the early decades had been organized on public roads or in public spaces such as parks or urban boulevards, but the need had soon developed for permanent facilities. It was thus that early influential clubs built their own race tracks, to be used both for races and training.
Some of the historical places of the world wars such as hills, villages and finish lines, became familiar to people who had never seen them before because of cycling trips and races. The itineraries of the national tours showed citizens how their country was constituted. Geography was reinvented through epic races. 
If it had been for the most attentive guardians of good costume, women would never have been allowed to go on a two-wheeled bicycle and otherwise have to settle for the more “appropriate” tricycle. But careless of this fake morality, at the end of the 19TH century, the ladies flickered on the main streets of big cities, on track circuits, on road circuits, on velodromes and racing on the road.