AAG 2023 Call For Papers: Transportation Justice

Transportation equity is an important and growing component of urban social and spatial justice. The crises associated with the Covid-19 pandemic, global economic recession, climate change, and racial injustice have only made more urgent the need to consider transportation as a key input in building an actionable “right to the city” for all.

Previous research has developed both a robust vocabulary through which to discuss transportation in light of diverse theories of justice, and a range of quantitative and qualitative metrics by which to evaluate transportation equity initiatives. The foundations set by this body of research and the pressing examples of urgent need in the contemporary transportation environment together suggest new, creative, and rigorous engagements by asking what transportation equity and justice mean today and how a more just distribution of transportation resources can be achieved.

In particular, the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change have shifted how people travel in cities around the world. Many cities have used these crises as opportunities to experiment with various strategies to promote more equitable travel options, especially for those who lack access to an automobile.

Recognizing the interdisciplinary nature of this topic, and building on the theme of this year’s Annual Meeting “Toward More Just Geographies”, we encourage submission of conceptual, theoretical, or empirical research that draws on different research traditions within our discipline – i.e., transport geography, urban geography, urban planning, urban design, etc. – and/or takes different methodological approaches – i.e., quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods. We encourage papers that: a) move beyond the analysis of socio-spatial inequalities to more explicitly discuss the need for procedural, recognition, restorative and epistemic justice within the transport domain; b) highlight equity/justice-oriented research that better describes the mobility, accessibility, and/or safety of users who travel by means other than automobiles; and/or c) those that look at key examples from the Global South.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

  • Transportation-related gentrification/neighborhood change
  • Modal shifts of workers in response to climate change/pandemic/displacement
  • Innovative or cross-sectoral partnerships to address transit and active travel in the new normal
  • Addressing equity and justice issues for public transit and/or active travel users during the pandemic
  • Mobility related equity and justice issues with a focus on vulnerable populations such as immigrants, racial minorities, elderly, persons with disabilities, etc.
  • User centric transportation system design focusing on equity and justice issues
  • The geographies of predatory financial practices in transportation
  • The geographies of urban protest in transport spaces
  • Affordability, housing policy and transportation justice
  • Environmental justice research pertaining to transportation infrastructure
  • Linkages between climate change, carbon emission mitigation and transportation justice
  • Policy and/or grassroots initiatives contributing to equitable mobility outcomes, and planning practices
  • Emerging theories, conceptualizations, standards, or practices in mobility equity and justice
  • Data collection for measuring transport poverty and its consequences
  • Measuring the benefits of achieving improved transport equity

Interested presenters may submit their title, Personal Identification Number (PIN), and abstract (max 250 words) to Joshua Davidson (jdavids@design.upenn.edu by October 26, 2022. In your message, please use the email subject header “AAG 2023 – Transportation Justice abstract”. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Organizers: Joshua Davidson (University of Pennsylvania); Hannah Hook (Ghent University); Hannah King (University of California, Los Angeles); Shaila Jamal (McMaster University); Dr Steven Farber ( University of Toronto); Dr Karen Lucas (The University of Manchester); and Dr Tim Schwanen (University of Oxford)

Climate Mobilities and the Informal City

On Sunday 31st October it will be World Cities Day. To celebrate this, the Oxford Martin School organised a seminar about informal urbanisation and its links with migration, health and climate change. With colleagues from PEAK-Urban and the OMS programme on Informal Cities, I discussed climate change-induced migration or, as we prefer, climate mobilities centred on informal settlements in cities.

I first spoke about the outcomes of a systematic review we have conducted of the literature published in 20111-2020 on climate change, migration and urbanisation (see also this blog post by my colleague Dr Jin-ho Chung). I also summarised some preliminary findings from our research about climate mobilities into Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

The Martin School has recorded the event and placed the recordings on its YouTube channel

Mobility levels and socioeconomic status during England’s first nationwide lockdown in Spring 2020

Today Won Do Lee, Matthias Qian and myself have published our first paper on the sociospatially differentiation in person mobility levels across England at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in Health & Place. In the paper we use data from 1.1 m mobile phones and spatial statistics to analyse how income levels and a wide range of other variables were correlated with the reduction in mobility levels in 191 clinical commissioning group (CCG) areas in March and April 2020. The CCG area classification is used because most of England’s hospital services, including care for seriously ill patients during a pandemic, are planned on this basis.

Like other studies, we find that the extent of mobility reduction is significantly higher in areas with more high income households (belonging to the top quintile of the household income distribution at the national level). The relationship between income and mobility reduction remains after controlling for spatial autocorrelation but does vary across the country: they are most pronounced in and around the post-industrial cities of northern England.

On a more technical note, geographically weighted regression models offer substantially better goodness of fit indicators than global regression models (in which one coefficient is estimated to characterize the relationship of mobility reduction with income indicators and other independent variables), with or without correction for spatial autocorrelation. Spatial heterogeneity in correlations with mobility reduction must be accounted for if the effect of, say, income is to be characterized accurately.

We are currently conducting a series of follow up analyses, looking at temporal variations in mobilty reduction over the Spring of 2020, and the complex relationships between changes in mobility levels on the one hand and (local variations in) COVID-19 infection and mortality levels.

Expanding the debate on transport and mobility justice

CALL FOR PAPERS
AAG Annual Meeting, April 10-14, 2018, New Orleans, LA
Organisers: Ersilia Verlinghieri and Tim Schwanen

Transport and mobility play a critical role in current social and environmental crises and are vital to creating more just societies at different spatial scales. Across various disciplines, including Geography, researchers are now routinely drawing attention to the spatial dimensions of justice. Some have begun to consider the interconnections of transport and mobilities with justice and space (e.g. Soja 2010; Sheller, 2011; Cook and Butz 2016; Verlinghieri and Venturini 2017), but important conceptual and empirical work remains to be undertaken. Cross-fertilisation of the thinking and practice around justice in Urban Geography, and urban studies more widely, with ongoing work on transport and mobility justice seems to be a particularly effectively way forward.

In this session we seek to consider and explore the concepts of transport and mobility justice and their interconnections with the wider frameworks of social, spatial and environmental justice. We welcome both theoretical contributions and case studies from across the globe that focus on procedural and substantive aspects of transport and mobility justice. We are particularly interested in contributions that stage dialogues of transport and mobilities research with urban scholarship and so explore how one can contribute to, and open up new questions for, the other.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • The nature of transport and mobility justice;
  • The right to mobility;
  • The relationships of transport and urban planning with transport and mobility justice;
  • Urban struggles and transport and mobility justice;
  • The use of participatory and critical social science methods for research on transport and mobility justice; and
  • Research ethics for studies of transport and mobility justice.

Please email enquiries and abstracts (250 words) to Ersilia Verlinghieri (ersilia.verlinghieri@ouce.ox.ac.uk) and Tim Schwanen (tim.schwanen@ouce.ox.ac.uk) by October 20. Authors must register for the conference and submit their abstracts through the AAG website by the October 25 deadline to be added to the paper session. AAG guidelines for preparing and submitting abstracts at: http://www.aag.org/cs/annualmeeting/call_for_papers.

 

Two Paper Sessions at 2017 RGS/IBG conference

I am co-organising two paper sessions at the upcoming Annual International Conference of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers, which will be held 29 August-1 September in London.

Everyday Mobilities and Climatic Events

Convenors: Anna Plyushteva (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Nihan Akyelken (Oxford), & Tim Schwanen (Oxford)

Deadline: 7 February 2017

Weather and climate shape the everyday mobilities of people worldwide, in both mundane and increasingly disruptive ways. Transportation, on the other hand, is closely linked to climate in at least three ways: as a major contributor to climate change; as a sector progressively more vulnerable to its effects; and as a set of individual and institutional practices which have proven resistant to transformative change. We are interested in bringing together theoretical and empirical contributions which examine the ways in which climatic events play out in the everyday mobilities of different groups and locales.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Everyday mobilities and vulnerability to climatic events;
  • The role of gender, life course and household dynamics in climate and everyday mobility;
  • Social, spatial and environmental inequalities in transport and climate change vulnerability;
  • Examples of transport policies which address the social implications of climatic events for everyday mobility.

We are especially interested in papers which take a comparative approach, and/or focus on the global South.

 

Exploring the socio-spatialities of urban goods mobility

Convenors: Debbie Hopkins (Oxford) & Tim Schwanen (Oxford)

Deadline: 6 February 2017

As centres of production and consumption, cities rely heavily on the mobility of freight for the provision of goods and services to residents, visitors, firms and organisations. Volumes of freight mobility are increasing and courier, express and parcel (CEP) services are growing rapidly with ongoing urbanisation and changes in consumption and shopping habits and delivery structures. Further change can be expected in light of the ongoing restructuring of logistics and supply chains and the rise of the smart city and vehicle automation. Yet the parcels, distribution centres, vehicles and pipelines that make up the systems of freight delivery often remain invisible in geographical studies of transport and mobilities. Similarly, policies to reduce the negative impacts of road freight transport are seldom focused at the city scale, and urban mobility is rarely prioritised in urban planning. In this session, we seek to address these gaps, through in-depth explorations of the social-spatialities of urban goods mobility.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Innovations in urban freight and logistics — e.g., urban consolidation centres, drone delivery, electric and autonomous vehicles, cargo-bikes;
  • Freight and logistics in the ‘smart city’;
  • The political economy of urban goods mobility;
  • Geographies of new business models for CEP services in cities; and
  • The lived experience of freight mobilities.

Struggling to understand objects

One of the most exciting developments in social theory and philosophy in recent years has been the articulation of object oriented ontologies, and a range of geographers (e.g. Katharine Meehan, James Ash) have been actively involved in this development. One of the most influential thinkers in this nascent body of work is Graham Harman, one of the leading Speculative Realists who has taken the phenomenological philosophies of Heidegger and Husserl into completely new directions, along the way adding elements from Latour, Whitehead and others.

Fascinated by Harman’s writings I have over the last two years been thinking about if and how his ideas can be used to enrich our thinking about everyday mobilities in cities. The (first) results of this have now been published in EJTIR. It is fair to say that working with Harman’s philosophy proved less straightforward than I had anticipated. This was not just because of high level of abstraction that characterises his thinking about objects compared to the particularities and context-specificity of everyday mobility that one encounters in empirical research. It was especially so because his work — or at least those parts I have engaged — have often little to say about change, dynamics and process. It would appear that geographers seeking to work with his ideas need to combine them with other philosophies or perspectives if they want to study mobilities, cities, landscape, nature or whatever it is they are interested in.

Cities and Transition towards Low Energy Mobility

The first paper from my research on Innovations in Urban Transport has recently been published in the open access journal Sustainability. It summarises some of the analyses on the emergence and early development of low energy innovations in the everyday mobility of two UK cities, Brighton and Oxford. In many ways these cities are ahead of the curve in transitioning towards urban mobility systems characterised by lower energy consumption and greater energy efficiency compared to systems that are strongly dominated by private car use. And the empirical analysis confirms that many innovations related to cycling, bus and rail transport, shared mobility and clean cars are developing in both cities.

The paper argues that geography matters to transition processes in various ways. Innovation trajectories with regard to low energy mobility are differentiated geographically: where Oxford has a stronger orientation towards electric mobility (hybrid buses, electric vehicle charging, a car club with electric vehicles), Brighton tends to stand out in its attempts to create a cycling friendly infrastructure and the rapid expansion of car clubs. But the analysis also shows that cities should not be seen as independent and discrete spatial units in which innovation processes unfold. This is because most of the financial resources for those innovations come from elsewhere, notably the national government but also the EU. Thus, like technology and expertise do (as the literature on policy mobilities suggests), the finance of innovations in low energy mobility ties cities into wider uneven and networked constellations that encompass cities, states and EU institutions.

From this perspective, the budget cuts that local authorities across the UK will be experiencing due to changes to national level policy are not good news: they are likely to threaten the much needed continuity in support — finance, expertise, officers’ social capital, etc. — for innovations in low energy mobility in the early stages of their development. Indeed, a discourse of localism cannot prevent that significant reductions in national funding for local transport are likely to slow down of the rate change towards lower energy consumption in everyday mobility in many UK cities.

Moving towards low carbon mobility

Moving Towards Low Carbon Mobility

A few weeks ago the Moving towards Low Carbon Mobility book edited by Moshe Givoni and David Banister came out. This is a book with chapters written by researchers of the Transport Studies Unit on different dimensions of low-carbon mobility, including technology, governance, infrastructure finance and pathways to a low-carbon future.

My contribution to the book consists of a chapter that reviews the latest thinking on socio-technical transitions in transport. It covers key theories — the multi-level perspective advanced by Frank Geels and others, social practice theories advocated by Elizabeth Shove and colleagues and the complex systems approach that John Urry has elaborated over the past decade — and seeks to outline how these strands of social science research can inform thinking about how to effectuate the step change towards low carbon transport.

I have also contributed to the final chapter of the book on how transport policy should be reconfigured for a low-carbon transport future to become a more realistic prospect. Here Moshe, David, James Macmillan and myself argue that what I tend to call the ‘logic of provision’ — the idea that providing alternative, better, speedier, more fashionable, etc infrastructure is the primary means for bring about change in the transport system — and prevailing understandings of travel time as a cost to be minimised are more of a hindrance to step change than that they will really help to bring a transition about. We also begin to outline a list of guiding principles for alternative transport policy but it must be said that this is only the beginning. Much more thought needs to go into answering the question what policies should look like if they are to help to bring about fundamental change in transport.

Peak car travel?

A topic that is currently attracting considerable attention in transport studies is the slowing down or even decline in the growth of car use across the Global North. The car evidently remains the the dominant mode of transport for everyday activities, but among young adults – and especially young men – holding a driver’s license, car ownership and the per capita distance by car have been decreasing since 1990 or thereabout. This trend has been attributed to a range of factors (see, for instance, Newman and Kenworthy 2012):

  • a revival of public transport in urban areas
  • a slowing down of the pace of urban sprawl
  • (re)emerging cultures of urbanism, implying among others that more younger adults than before remain in the city rather than relocate to the suburbs
  • population ageing
  • the rise in fuel prices since 2000
  • the economic crisis followng the 2007/07 credit crunch
  • the waning influence of the car industry and lobby on public attitudes towards transport
  • possibility that growing number of car users now spend so much time in their cars  that they are unwilling to drive even more

It is beyond doubt that automobility — the practices, institutions and landscapes centred on the private car — is changing in countries like the UK, Germany, Japan and even the USA. But it is far too early to read the end of the car’s dominance into these developments. For one, a stabilising of the growth in car use and ownership is just that: it does not mean that as yet there are fewer people who are actually using or owning a car. And it remains to be seen what the future brings: it is not unlikely that the growth of car use and car ownership picks up again in the near future, for instance when the capitalist economies of the Global North enter a new growth cycle.

More significant, however, is that automobility has gone global over the past decades. At the global scale automobility continues to expand rapidly — think of the rapid growth in China, India, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Ghana, Nigeria, etc. We could therefore say that the global system of automobility is in great ‘health’, however undesirable that is from the point of view of environmental degradation, CO2 emissions and social justice. Peak car travel in the Global North is a significant development at the national level but it is also dwarfed at the global level by the developments in the Global South. A narrow focus on the developments in car use in the Global North is therefore a variant of western-centric thinking.

One might argue that the developments in the Global North are still significant as they are countries like Japan or Germany are the front runners and that the patters observed there will eventually be replicated in places that now experience rapid growth in car use. This argument, however, is developmentalist: it assumes that there is a more or less universal development trajectory that all countries will ultimately follow — a form of thinking that is not only Western-centric (as it positions Europe, the USA and Japan as leading by example) but also sidelines the role of spatial multiplicity (see Doreen Massey’s book For Space for further elaboration of this argument).

Peak car travel is a significant development but it must be placed in perspective: it is ultimately a local phenomenon that hardly dampens the global growth of car use. This means that transport’s contribution to global warming remains enormous and that there is no time for complacency: it remains absolutely critical that transport planners and professionals think more seriously and creatively about how step changes away from automobility can be realised. Conventional policies (investment in new public transport infrastructure, urban compaction, mobility management, road pricing) may have facilitated peak car travel in the Global North — though their effects should not be exaggerated as these policies’ public acceptability is partly a result of the same cultural, social and demographic changes that made peak car travel possible — but they appear quite inadequate at fundamentally reducing the growth of automobility across the Global South.

Foucault and Mobilities Workshop

After a hectic December and a break over the festive season I am at last able to write a new and long overdue post. At this moment I am in Lucerne and the workshop on Foucault and Mobilities that I co-organised with Katharina Manderscheid and David Tyfield has just finished. It has been a wonderful experience: great people, great papers, great discussions, great atmosphere.

I have learnt a lot about how others work with and along Foucault in studying im/mobilities in a great variety of contexts: water management in Singapore, fire in County Durham, madness in Scotland, prisons in Belgium and electric transportation in China are only some of the topics that have been discussed. And I have also learnt a great detail about how others understand (and sometimes struggle with) such concepts as the dispositif/apparatus and discursive practice, as well as Foucault’s methods.

There was a strong sentiment that our discussions about Foucault and mobilities should be taken forward, and we will be setting up some sort of internet platform or resource, where publications on Foucault and mobilities will be brought together and where discussions can be conducted. The powerpoint presentations from the workshop may be made available there as well. More on this will follow shortly.