Transport innovations in the cracks: reading for potential post-growth transport and mobilities with Deleuze and Guattari

Abstract

ABSTRACT The post-growth literature has recently started to engage with transport and mobilities in more depth. However, despite its radical societal critique, it has done so largely in ways that either reproduce recommendations of the sustainable mobilities paradigm or apply context-independent post-growth frameworks without sustained empirical analysis. The literature has thereby largely “closed down” more open-ended explorations of what kind of transport and mobility futures are desirable and possible from a post-growth perspective. This article seeks to remedy this by highlighting the role of innovative practices in bottom-up initiatives that have been invisibilised, in expanding our imaginaries of possible post-growth transport and mobility futures. It builds on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the minor, an orientation towards difference-in-itself emerging immanently, to explore such innovative and experimental practices that may be of interest for post-growth transformations. We illustrate the minor’s usefulness by studying two bottom-up initiatives, a French railway cooperative and a German “rolling supermarket”, which we examine with a view towards “difference” that allows for open-endedness and the generation of questions. This article contributes to post-growth transport and mobility scholarship by advocating for a shift in three analytical focal points, building on the minor’s generativity: moving from a-contextual recommendations to examinations of socio-spatially specific transformation (1), from a concern for the “right” modes of transport to minorities (2), and from a near-exclusive focus on the public sector to a more diverse range of economic actors and practices (3).