Urban Mobility, Wellbeing and Inequality

On Thursday 6 June I will give a keynote lecture at the 15th NECTAR conference with the theme ‘Towards Human Scale Cities — Open and Happy’ in Helsinki.

I will use this opportunity to reflect on the burgeoning literature on travel behaviour and wellbeing in transport studies and argue that this literature can benefit from broadening its concepts of wellbeing to also consider questions of inequality and justice. I will elaborate an expanded version of Amartya Sen’s capability approach that considers
the relational, emergent and experiential nature of capabilities as they relate everyday mobility. Empirically, the talk will utilise empirical research about cycling and walking in São Paulo and London to illustrate salient aspects of the interrelations between wellbeing and travel behaviour. One insight emerging from this manner of thinking is that wellbeing cannot be understood as inhering in individuals but rather is an always-emergent quality of shifting configurations of humans and all kinds of other urban elements.

The empirical materials on which the talk draws have been collected as part of the ESRC funded DePICT project.

 

One thought on “Urban Mobility, Wellbeing and Inequality

  1. Have been following your research for quite some time now. It has been truly inspiring!
    Got to know about this session today. Unfortunately there’s no way I can make it to Helsinki. But will be helpful if you could share a link (if there’ll be any) to your session or any material related to your work on CA. Will appreciate it!
    Have done a piece of work on the application of CA to understand mobility patterns in the context of tea plantation workers in North Bengal, India. Would be happy to share the piece with you.

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