Mobility Justice Research Articles

Splintered Mobilities as Viral Vector: Mobility Justice and Racial Kinopolitics

ABSTRACT Covid-19 has made self-evident the insidious effects of infrastructural splintering, especially in the United States, which are the outcome of the very processes first identified by Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin 20 years ago. Splintered infrastructures have left behind unequal access to safe streets, public transit, urban green space, social distancing, and remote work, revealing deep racial, ethnic, and class disparities in risk exposure and vulnerability. Inequitable mobilities within splintered infrastructural contexts are key contributing factors to the vast racial and ethnic disparities seen in SARS-CoV-2 exposure and death rates in the United States. This brief commentary on the intersection of infrastructure studies and critical mobility studies argues that a racial justice perspective offers an understanding of the materialities of injustice at multiple sites and scales that have shaped the pandemic in such uneven and detrimental ways. Focusing on the US context, it centers the racialized kinopolitics of American history at the heart of the Covid-19 pandemic. Beyond the unmaking of splintered urbanism—or a dream of universal infrastructure—pandemic recovery requires mobility justice as a reweaving of fugitive planning represented by critical ideas such as commoning, Marronage, and the undercommons.

Delivery workers and the interplay of digital and mobility (in)justice

On-demand delivery services are experiencing a moment of expansion, which the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to foster. For cities in quarantine, these services allow the supply of food and other primary goods without moving from home, making riders move and access them on behalf of the clients. During a pandemic, working as a rider potentially increases the risks of an already precarious job given the contractual arrangements and the algorithmic control that characterize this gig economy sector. We argue that platforms have generated forms of injustice that are reproduced and amplified by digital platforms encoded in the Global North, which are governed by regulations and optimization criteria that do not dialogue with the precarious reality of Global South cities. Focusing on the case of Santiago de Chile, our analysis draws on the triangulation and complementarity of two instruments: interviews before the COVID-19 pandemic and surveys involving riders during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings show that platforms generate specific forms of injustice that affect riders and their mobility in particular. The COVID-19 pandemic worsened such forms of digital injustice, increasing the pressure for constantly working and the exposure of riders to threats such as accidents, criminality and health risks.

Access to Urban Leisure: Investigating Mobility Justice for Transgender and Gender Diverse People on Public Transport

Literature on mobility justice suggest that socially disadvantaged people experience uneven access to movement. The theme of diversity in terms of gender and its interplay with mobility and leisure have attracted some scholarly attention. However, research into transgender and gender diverse mobilities and its impact to leisure access remains limited, particularly from non-Western perspectives. This paper endeavors to fill this gap by investigating transgender and gender diverse mobilities in Istanbul, Turkey. Drawing upon 49 qualitative interviews with gender diverse and transgender public transport users in Istanbul, this study contributes to a scholarly discussion exploring the relationship between gender diversity, mobility, and their access to leisure. As such, it furthers the field of gender-oriented leisure. Transgender and gender diverse individuals continue to face significant issues, such as violence, discrimination, and harassment, when using public transport. Based on the experiences of the respondents, this paper concludes that driver training and education, and proactive educational messaging around gender minorities in public spaces could significantly improve the comfort and safety of transgender and gender diverse public transport users.

Sacrificing entitlement for self-preservation: ‘privatising vulnerability’ as a cyclist in Dublin

ABSTRACT In this paper, I present and explain the process of ‘privatising vulnerability’ that cyclists in Dublin engage in as a means of coping with structural conditions of ‘precarious entitlement’ to public space. First, I introduce and situate my study in relation to seminal work exploring cycling mobilities. Second, I describe the context of the study – Dublin, Ireland. Third, I explain the classical grounded theory methodology and approach to qualitative interview data collection employed throughout the research. Fourth, I briefly posit the core category of the grounded theory – precarious entitlement – so that privatising vulnerability can be understood as a process of response and one element of ‘precarious entitlement theory’. Fifth, I delineate the process of privatising vulnerability, and its four variations: anticipating disregard, waiving entitlement, tolerating transgression, and precautionary transgressing. Sixth, I conclude that privatising vulnerability can be understood as a process of pragmatic adaptation and submission to conditions of domination – in particular, to the spatial domination of automobility. Following these perspectives, I delineate the unique contributions privatising vulnerability can make to understandings of cycling experience and practice and toward wider matters of mobility justice.

Justice in the COVID-19 Pandemic: Mobility Capital and New Social Order

The COVID-19 pandemic forces us to reconsider the conceptual boundaries of the world and everyday social order, affecting such pairs of concepts as: natural / artificial; habitual / extraordinary. The author considers one of the aspects of the changes having occured: the transformation of spatial mobility, which is connected with deep social changes. In the first part, the experience of isolation is interpreted on the basis of the theoretical resources of the social theory of mobilities, primarily the concepts of mobility capital and mobility justice. Not all social groups were equally mobile, because they had different mobility capital. The issue of mobility equity has taken in a new context: a natural global threat that has exacerbated the existing inequalities caused by the emergency. The second part of the article deals with the concept of "state of emergency" by G. Agamben and analyzes the issue of transgression of the system of the world social order, including its everyday dimension. The answer to this question is given on the basis of an analysis of the interpretations and forecasts of the leading contemporary European intellectuals (Agamben, Žižek, Latour, Sloterdijk, Fuller). The problems of social distancing, the transformation of higher education, the increase in the powers of the state, associated with medical justifications are considered. Important parameters of the new social order are the environmental factor and the need for sociocritical optics to understand the consequences of the pandemic. Analysis captures the increasing role of digital intermediaries of social interactions, which forms a new context for the problem of justice, opening up perspectives for issues of distance with digital technologies and issues of digital ecology.

Exploring Women’s Experience of Gender-Based Violence and Other Threats to Safety on Public Transport in Bangladesh

Equal access to safe transport is increasingly conceptualised as a fundamental right for women, with demonstrated impact on health outcomes, social and economic mobility, and societal participation. This study analysed qualitative and quantitative data to examine travel patterns and experiences among 200 women (aged between 18-64 years) using paid transport for work or educational purposes in Bangladesh. Results showed that the women faced multiple threats to their safety, including gender-based violence, harassment and crime, and traffic and non-traffic injury and that the use of paid transport was associated with high levels of anxiety and fear. Despite these circumstances, the women were captive travellers, forced to make transport choices based on price, availability, and ease of travel rather than safety. Unable to choose safe transports, the women attempted to mitigate risks by changing their travel pattern and behaviour, and by restricted their travel frequency. These findings are discussed within the context of women’s rights and mobility justice.

Intraurban geographies of car sharing supply and demand in Greater Oslo, Norway

• Car sharing is unevenly distributed in the Oslo region and within the municipality. • Ares with middle income and higher education levels scores higher on car sharing. • Car sharing is more prominent in areas with high share of cultural industry workers. • It is more frequent in areas with higher shares of men and multifamily housing. • Car sharing correlates with areas scoring high on public transport competitiveness. This paper examines urban patterns of car sharing supply and demand at neighbourhood level. By using literature on spatial inequality and unequal mobility access, we provide new insights into the urban geographies of car sharing. We draw on register data of members and vehicles of station-based car sharing for Oslo, Norway, spatially coupled with population composition, urban form and public transport accessibility ratios. We find both the demand and supply of station-based car sharing to be unevenly distributed. Some of the most profound contributors to car sharing demand include middle income levels, middle and higher levels of education, higher shares of the population working in cultural sectors, higher shares of men, higher shares of multifamily housing, and higher strengths of the public transport regime compared to that of the private car. The paper discusses the implications of these findings for sustainable urban mobility, mobility justice and urban and transport planning.

Critical geographies of transport and mobility: Studying power relations through practice, academia, and activism

AbstractOver the last decade, there has been increasing interest among geographers in a critical perspective on studies of transportation and mobility, or studies that take into account the power relations within systems of transportation that produce space, place, mobility, and/or identity. This ever‐growing body of work includes people who might not consider themselves as transportation geographers per se, but nevertheless are expanding geographies of transportation beyond the traditional focus on vehicles, infrastructure, and economics. In this article, we review such work from three different perspectives: critical studies of professional practice, the interdisciplinary approach of Caribbean Studies, and the work of activists and scholar‐activists to connect environmental justice with mobility justice.

Territorial and mobility justice for Indigenous youth: accessing education in Ecuadorian Amazonia

ABSTRACT Indigenous people of Ecuador have suffered for a long time from marginalisation in access to quality education, which for them means culturally and ecologically pertinent education close to their own communities. During the past decade, education reform and closure of small rural schools worsened the spatial accessibility of schooling and increased the eco-cultural distance of education from the students’ lives. These two elements – spatial and eco-cultural representation – are constitutive of territorial rights claimed by Indigenous people. In this study, we aim to articulate the relationship between access to eco-culturally pertinent education, and mobility and territorial justice. Based on the review of studies on education reform, fieldwork in Amazonia in 2018–2019, and remote conversations in 2020, we identified and analysed three events – education reform, Indigenous protests and the Covid-19 pandemic, which have disrupted access to education within Indigenous territories. These turbulent events make visible territorial and mobility injustices, including the dismissal of Indigenous visions of education, the strategic weakening of Indigenous territorial defence, and the lack of state support for access to education in remote areas. The analysis advocates for the recognition of mobility and territoriality as part of the social justice agenda in quality education.

The political economy of mobility justice. Experiences from Germany

ABSTRACT Recently, there has been an intense debate around the concept of mobility justice, which has been developed from approaches in political theory in articulation with social struggles. In this paper, I argue that a political–economic foundation of the concept is helpful to determine the constitutive meaning of inequality within the framework of capitalist societies and, based on this, to elicit the possibilities and limits of implementing the concept in practice. The analysis focuses on the debate concerning the ongoing sustainable transformation of transportation and mobility (the Verkehrswende) in Germany. I contend that issues of justice are fundamental to such a transition and, in practice, are implicitly negotiated; nevertheless, at present, narrow interpretations of the Verkehrswende (as shaped and constrained by dominant political and economic actors) effectively marginalise considerations of mobility justice. Aspects of justice (climate justice, just transition) that are compatible with straightforward automotive electrification are taken up, whereas aspects that go beyond this, such as resource justice or questions of access to mobility, remain marginalised.

Justice mobilitaire et retour du tourisme après la pandémie

The collapse of travel demand due to the coronavirus pandemic-related closure of borders has severely disrupted tourism around the world at a time of already existing concerns over climate change, over-tourism, pollution, and the general sustainability of existing modes of tourism. In these circumstances, this article addresses how we might begin to imagine tourism’s ethical futures. This is a compelling moment to find new approaches to reduce the over-dependence on tourism, to mitigate the heavy carbon-footprint of tourism, as well as to repair the harmful effects of “over tourism”. Yet the viral mobilities of Covid-19 have also unleashed a vast intensification of existing uneven relations of (im)mobilities. This article argues that sustainable tourism must be integrally linked to projects of mobility justice that help support the rebuilding of resilient regional ecologies and regenerative economies rather than extractive economies and predatory tourism.

Why Mobility Justice Means Prioritising Accessible Walking Environments

Promotion of active travel is a fixture in transport policy and planning. Yet, this paper argues, walking and the availability of comprehensive and accessible pedestrian environments have an importance for mobility justice and sustainability which is not currently recognised. The paper investigates how and why walking provision matters for justice, and explores what this means for decision-making affecting mobility systems and the built environment. It begins with an argument that a coherent conception of mobility justice would be simultaneously concerned with environmental and social implications of transport since both affect people’s physical lives, welfare and flourishing. That requirement frames the types of mobility systems which could be compatible with justice, and points to a need for prioritisation of active travel far beyond current policy and practice. Specifically, the need for environmental sustainability coupled with social inclusion creates a case for systematically prioritising provision for walking over other mobility. This means the removal of all forms of barriers to walking so that no one is excluded by severance, impassable surfaces or lack of safety.

Reimagining the physical/social infrastructure of the American street: policy and design for mobility justice and conviviality

ABSTRACT Public roadways are ubiquitous and extensive urban infrastructures, typically regulated and engineered for vehicular flow. But streets are also public places. Social infrastructure debates beg the question: How might transport infrastructure be reimagined for circulation and sociality? This paper further asks: How can public roadways be regulated and designed for mobility justice and conviviality? Constructed over a century as motorized thoroughfares, American streets are now focus of movements challenging automobility to promote multimodalism and livability. First are multimodal policies and design standards. Second is the nascent – but accelerated by pandemic – reclamation of streets for more-than-mobility, from temporary events to public space retrofits. This research highlights complexities of transport spaces as physical and social infrastructure, and possibilities in reimagining streets for flow and urban life. These raise thorny mobility/social justice questions of “for whom?” But building fair and convivial cities might begin with reimagining the infrastructural possibilities of public streets.

Cycling Lungs: Understanding Mobile Subjectivity as Enfleshed

AbstractScholarship and advocacy on mobility justice needs to attend carefully to how presumptions about mobile embodiment are reproduced. This paper critically assesses some of the presumptions about the mobile subject within cycling interventions that focus on behaviour and infrastructural change. Bringing material and Black feminist theory together with ethnographic fieldwork on urban cycling in Los Angeles in 2014–2015, I suggest mobile subjectivity can be understood through the process of enfleshment, rather than centring on individualised cycling embodiment. Imagined through the cycling lungs, enfleshment allows for a mobile subjectivity that is inherently exposed in highly uneven ways; configured through matter and meaning; and a materialisation of relations of power distributed across space and time. Thinking with enfleshment contributes to cycling advocacy, mobility justice and geographical theory on the body by shifting how mobile subjects are understood and how difference, justice and the politics of the street are imagined and practised.

Mesoscale Infrastructures and Uneven Development: Bicycle Sharing Systems in the United States as “Already Splintered” Urbanism

Public–private transportation megaprojects such as toll roads and rail networks have received attention as expressions of neoliberal urban development processes, but what we call “mesoscale” mobility infrastructures have become increasingly common in the United States. Such infrastructures are large enough to have systemic qualities (e.g., fixed nodes, instrumented networks, and operational requirements) and complex institutional arrangements but small enough in cost and impact that they do not systemically transform urbanization patterns. In this article, we analyze one such mesoscale infrastructure system, bicycle sharing, across three urban regions in the United States: Austin, Texas, Philadelphia, and the San Francisco Bay Area. We argue that bicycle sharing systems in the United States have three key features: (1) widespread expectations of fiscal self-sufficiency restrict their geographical reach to urban centers; (2) they largely follow existing patterns of racialized uneven development, leading to major service gaps; and (3) their implementation involves contingent institutional configurations that create modest openings for steering them in more equitable directions. At the same time, newer venture capital–funded “dockless” competitors have exploited the coverage gaps of station-based bike sharing without departing from their basic market-driven logic. Mesoscale infrastructural experimentation is increasingly central to efforts to increase mobility options in the United States but, when implemented within existing urban political economies, tends to produce scales of infrastructure that are at odds with more substantive forms of mobility justice.

Challenging Eurocentric perceptions of mobility justice through climate diaries

Challenging Eurocentric perceptions of mobility justice through climate diaries

Embodied spatial mobility (in)justice: Cycling refrains and pedalling geographies of men, masculinities, and love

AbstractThis paper seeks to better understand spatial mobility justice with reference to the bodily sensations of cycling, discerned here as different pedalling rhythms in emergent territories that our participants narrate as “love.” Differential or striated mobility is not just the result of gendered, classed, and racialised social norms but is productive of the frictions and affordances of these social hierarchies. We build on these arguments by asking the question: Are some places more affective than others in working for and against mobility justice for cyclists? This paper takes up this challenge by drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of the refrain. In this way, mobility justice is conceptualised as repeated sequences of living that temporarily order space, time, bodies, and selves through which differential subjects and uneven spatial conditions are constituted. Through an appreciation of mobility justice as a mobile assemblage comprised of rhythmic qualities of spatiality, contingent subjects, embodied knowledge, and fleeting practice, the paper draws on the experiences of three men‐who‐cycle and drive to map processes of gendered, classed, sexed, and aged inclusion and exclusion from public space in the car‐dominated small city of Wollongong, Australia. Considering the politics of “love,” we explore the possibility of cyclists, pedestrians, and drivers to move together, or not, in proximity with each other.

Contributors

Contributors

Insurgent citizens: mobility (in)justice and international travel

Goal 16 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SGDs) emphasizes the importance of providing just and inclusive societies for all and target 16.10 underscores the importance of ‘protect[ing] fundamental freedoms, in accordance with national legislation and international agreements’. The United Nations (UN) and World Tourism Organization (WTO) frequently describe tourism as a phenomenon that promotes peace and dialogue between different cultures. Nonetheless, the UN rarely sees tourism as political. Despite the ongoing struggles of the members of marginalized communities throughout the world, social justice in the context of international travel remains unattainable for some and neoliberal understandings of freedom of movement and right to travel replicate and contribute to the existing systems of injustice and inequality. Guided by a critical mobilities framework, the aim of this research is to explore how dual citizenship shapes the border crossing experiences of Canadians who have travelled internationally in the post 9/11 era. To that end, we had in-depth interviews with 11 Canadian dual citizens to learn how citizenship shape their border crossing experiences. Findings revealed that some dual citizens are treated as insurgent citizens as they are legally citizens but are not treated as such and are deprived of their rights. Moreover, race plays a crucial role in how dual citizens are hierarchically categorized and international mobilities of some citizens are favoured over the others.

Pluralising (im)mobilities: anti-Muslim acts and the epistemic politics of mobile methods

ABSTRACT A critical agenda towards pluralising the politics and practice of mobile methods can enable more diverse epistemologies of uneven mobility and urban knowledge. In this article a challenge is offered to normative treatments of mobile methods including walking practices that inscribe dominant ways of seeing the city in anticipation of a liberal, secular, and sovereign subject. Taking empirical examples to ground conceptual insights on ‘fields of power’ and social difference, I suggest that researching together with Muslim women in UK cities (Manchester, Leicester, Birmingham) challenges normative approaches in Euro-American social sciences towards producing knowledge about people and place. It addresses two key questions: how do different Muslim women’s experiences of urban space and anti-Muslim acts impact upon walking practices? What are the everyday politics and conflicts that shape multi-layered and entangled temporalities of urban walking practices? Drawing on Urry’s movement/moorings dialectic, I advance that we need to take seriously stasis caused by physical and perceptual barriers to mobility, such as threat of violence, and to rethink entirely our right as researchers to orchestrate the movement of others. By re-framing mobile methods we can become more attuned to mobility justice and distinct registers of difference in the politics of knowledge production.