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)

Critical Geographies of Mobility Using Digital Data

Call for papers for special sessions at the AAG meeting in Denver, CO, April 6-10.

Organized by Mei-Po Kwan (Chinese University of Hong Kong) and Tim Schwanen, (University of Oxford)

As one of the keywords in Geography (Kwan and Schwanen, 2016), mobility is attracting widespread attention in the discipline with research sprawling in many directions and cutting across epistemic communities. One of the biggest changes in mobility research in recent years has been the emergence and uptake of new digital data about mobility, including the much touted big data assembled from sensors in vehicles, bikes, phones, access gates, payment cards and the like. Such data are increasingly used to understand mobility patterns and urban structures in innovative and productive ways.

We plan to organise one or more paper sessions looking at how the new digital data are used to advance critical analysis of questions of disadvantage, inequality and (in)justice in the everyday mobility of people, goods and information. Topics that might be considered include, but are not limited to, the use of digital data to:

  • Understand transport-related social exclusion
  • Analyze motility (Kaufmann, 2002) or access to employment, education, social networks and/or healthy living
  • Examine socially and spatially differentiated exposure to pollution and harmful substances
  • Investigate the socially and spatially uneven patronage of ride-hailing, bike-sharing and similar mobility services
  • Probe inequalities in carbon emission from motorized transportation
  • Evaluate social and spatial differences in vulnerability to disruption of everyday mobilities
  • Scrutinize social and spatial inequalities in the relationships between mobility and wellbeing
  • Explore potentially exploitative labour relations in the transportation sector

Papers that consider how digital data are used by governments and firms to monitor and discipline ‘unwanted’ mobilities, including the formalization of ‘informal’ transport services by minibus, rickshaw, motor taxi, and so forth, are also very welcome.

Please submit your abstract (250 words max) plus AAG PIN (Personal Identification Number, obtained after registration for the conference at the AAG website) to tim.schwanen@ouce.ox.ac.uk and mpk654@gmail.com by October 23, 2019.

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.

 

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.

CFP AAG 2017: Advances in Analyzing Contextual Effects on Behavior, Practice and Experience

2017 AAG Annual Meeting, Boston (5-9 April, 2017)

Organizers: Mei-Po Kwan (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) & Tim Schwanen (University of Oxford)

Much of geographic and social science research is concerned with the influence of various contextual factors on human behavior, practice, and experience. Widely understood as the neighborhood effect in urban and health research, contextual influences on people’s behavior and experience were often analyzed using arbitrary and static enumeration units (e.g., census tracts or post-code areas), which may deviate significantly from the “true causally relevant “ geographic contexts and lack sufficient consideration of past contexts.

The spatial dimension of this problem has been recognized and recently articulated as the uncertain geographic context problem (UGCoP): the problem that findings about the effects of area-based attributes (e.g., neighborhood walkability, access to health food outlets, or social deprivation) may be affected by how contextual units (e.g., neighborhoods) are geographically delineated and the extent to which these areal units deviate from the “true causally relevant” geographic context at a given moment (http://www.meipokwan.org/UGCOP.html). It is a significant methodological problem because it means that analytical results can be different for different delineations of contextual units (e.g., census tract, circular buffers, network-based buffers, or perceived neighborhood) even if everything else is the same.

There is also a temporal dimension to the problem of contextual causation: contexts from earlier times may still exert influence at later moments (e.g., during the day or during the life course) when physical proximity has been replaced by connectivity. Such relational effects have been described in many different ways (e.g., historical dependence, spill-over or life-course effects), but they remain poorly understood and their evaluation presents major methodological challenges. It is difficult to identify which, when, where and how past context(s) matters. Spatially uncertain contextual effects are mediated and often amplified by temporal uncertainties.

We seek to organize several sessions to further explore and deepen understanding of various spatiotemporal uncertainties in the analysis of contextual effects on human behavior, practice, and experience. We welcome papers from all geographic subfields and perspectives. Topics may include but are not limited to: (1) more accurate representation and assessment of the space-time configurations of environmental risk factors, individual daily mobility, and their interactions (e.g., capturing situational contingencies and real-time context with ecological momentary assessment; reconstructing the daily paths and activity spaces of individuals of different social groups using means like GPS, mixed methods, and qualitative GIS; and collecting and using high resolution space-time data of environmental influences and individual mobility); (2) examination of the differences between the UGCoP and the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP); (3) exploration of means for mitigating the UGCoP; (4) conceptualizations of temporally extended and spatiotemporally uncertain contextual effects; (5) realistic representations of such effects using quantitative and mixed methods approaches; and (6) empirical examination of temporally extended as well as spatiotemporally uncertain contextual effects.

If you are interested in participating in the sessions, please send a short abstract of no more than 250 words to Mei-Po Kwan (mpk654@gmail.com) and Tim Schwanen (tim.schwanen@ouce.ox.ac.uk) by October 14, 2016. Please follow AAG guidelines for preparing and submitting abstracts at: http://www.aag.org/cs/annualmeeting/call_for_papers

International time-geography days

A while has past since the last post, and a lot has happened. This includes not least the annual conference of the Association of American Geographers in Tampa (FL) in April during which Mei-Po Kwan and myself convened seven inspiring sessions on the ‘Geographies of Mobility’, in which geographers from many different hues — i.e. working from a wide range of theoretical and methodological perspectives and focusing on a vast array of topics — come together and learned about each other’s work.

More recently, 14-16 May, I attended the International Time-Geography Days at Linköping University, organised by Torsten Hägerstrand’s former student, professor Kajsa Ellegård, and her former student, Elin Wihlborg. They did a wonderful job in organising an excellent conference, and took us to the rural area around Åsby parish where Hägerstrand conducted the fieldwork for his PhD thesis (together with his wife). Nowadays Åsby is a peaceful — if ageing and still shrinking — community. It is quite hard to imagine now that this is the setting in which Hägerstrand began to develop his ideas about budget-space, Rum, and the competition between projects for space and time as scarce resources, all of which are at the heart of time-geography. Life in the Åsby area must have been much harsher some 50-60 years ago. Obviously, the fact that we as casual visitors — tourists almost — were visiting the area on a very sunny day must have formatted my perceptions as well.

Tucked away in boxes and on shelves in a back office somewhere in Linköping University can Hägerstrand’s books and notes be found. It was here that I made the following picture:

QuoteHagerstrand

 

 

 

 

 

 

In a way the quote from Goethe typed up by Hägerstrand sums up time-geography quite nicely: “Everything that comes into being searches for space and will last, thereby crowding out something else from its place and shortening its duration“. Competition for space and time — the essence of time-geography as envisaged by Hägerstrand in the 1970s — articulated at its best.

Urban and suburban geographies of ageing

Call for papers for two papers sessions at the RGS/IBG Conference, sponsored by the Urban Geography Research Group and the Geography of Health Research Group.

Convenors

  • Bettina van Hoven (Cultural Geography Department; Faculty of Spatial Sciences; University of Groningen; The Netherlands)
  • Debbie Lager (Cultural Geography Department; Faculty of Spatial Sciences; University of Groningen; The Netherlands)
  • Chiara Negrini (School of Geography, Geology and the Environment; Faculty of Science, Engineering and Computing; Kingston University; Kingston upon Thames)
  • Tim Schwanen (School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford)

We seek to organise two sessions to explore the relationships of older people and ageing with place, with a particular focus on urban and suburban environments. Up till now, research in the field of ageing and place has been dominated by social and environmental gerontologists. Recently, Schwanen et al. (2012) advocated a more ‘sustained engagement’ with ageing from geographers in order to draw attention to the different spatial configurations of old age and the socio-spatial inequalities in later life. These socio-spatial inequalities stem from a complex interplay of the social and material environment and the biological and psychological aspects of the ageing body (see e.g. Ziegler, 2012). Research on ageing in urban environments has highlighted the exclusionary processes to which older adults can be subjected, such as the obstacles for everyday mobility and the challenges of everyday life in deprived urban neighbourhoods (see e.g. Smith, 2009; Buffel, 2013). However, it has also been acknowledged that older people can make active and important contributions to their community and can make their (urban) neighbourhood and home into a place that evokes positive experiences and attachments.

Arguably, however, the vast majority of older people in the near future will age-in-place in suburban areas rather than live in densely populated urban centres. Whilst historically not developed for older people, suburban areas are now being (re)designed and (re)organised to meet the material and social needs of their older residents (e.g., through the implementation of integrated service areas – ISAs). Given the policy relevance of this trend, further research is needed with regard to how ageing-in-place in suburban neighbourhoods is experienced and what the socio-spatial implications of these environments are for its older population.

We encourage papers that investigate the multiple relationships between ageing and the urban and suburban environment, with particular attention to:

  • Intersections of age with gender, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation and other forms of social identification and exclusionary processes related to these intersections;
  • Theoretical advancement within the field of ‘geographies of ageing’;
  • Participatory methodologies and ethical considerations relating to this type of research;
  • Contributions of older people to their local community;
  • Meanings, experiences and emotions related to ageing-in-place; and
  • Planning processes that make cities and suburbs more age-friendly and the role of older people herein.

Abstracts (max. 200 words) should be submitted by 10th February 2014 to Chiara Negrini (c.negrini@kingston.ac.uk) and Debbie Lager (d.r.lager@rug.nl).

Happy New Year

Happy 2014! It has been a while since my last post, which is largely because I have been in Hong Kong for most of December to work on some joint research with Prof Donggen Wang on well-being and to attend two conferences. I gave a plenary during the 18th Conference of the Hong Kong Society for Transportation Studies on the insights that can be derived from Whitehead’s philosophy for the analysis of processes of change in transport (see picture).

151

And on the day prior to the main conference I gave a keynote on how I believe activity analysis in transport studies should be reconfigured so that we can better understand how socio-technical innovations in urban transport (e.g. car sharing schemes or electric vehicles) change, develop and diffuse over time in particular places. I will probably discuss this work in a later post.

Apart from working and attending conferences, I have also had the opportunity to experience the fantastic city that is Hong Kong — a paradise for urban geographers interested in processes of urban expansion, growing sociospatial inequality and low carbon urban mobility. I visited Hong Kong in 1998, just after the hand-over, but the city has changed almost unrecognisably since: it has grown in terms of population size, ‘neoliberal’ urban (re)development projects are now much more common, social inequalities have increased markedly, and the city has become much more Chinese than it was in my memory. It has not, however, lost any of its positive energy. If anything, its vitality has only increased and easily surpasses that of Europe’s major cities. It is now truly a global city where East and West mingle in all kinds of innovative and inspiring ways!

Living in enclave cities: Towards mobility-based perspectives on urban segregation

Call for papers for a seminar in Utrecht, the Netherlands, 21-22 March 2014

Organisers: Ronald van Kempen (Utrecht University), Tim Schwanen (University of Oxford), Bart Wissink (City University Hong Kong)

We are inviting abstracts for contributions to the upcoming two-day expert workshop on “Living in Enclave Cities: Towards Mobility-Based Perspectives on Urban Segregation”. An exciting list of confirmed speakers can be found below, and we are looking to accept abstracts from some 10 additional speakers. Upon selection, participants are expected to submit an unpublished original full paper by 3 March 2014. There is no registration fee for the workshop and lunch and drinks will be provided but we are unable to reimburse expenses for travel and subsistence. Please send abstracts of 200-250 words to b.wissink@cityu.edu.hk no later than 3 November.

Topic

Urban spatial segregation has long been a core concern in urban studies research. Recently, it has received new impetus through the emergence of a new form of enclave urbanism with cities restructuring into patchworks of separate enclaves that are each of home to a selected group or activity. While premium enclaves are well connected by new privatised infrastructures, enclaves for the underprivileged are increasingly cut-off. ‘Enclave urbanism’ thus radicalises segregation. Critics stress that ‘enclave urbanism’ prevents social interaction. Well-off people can go about their daily life in premium enclaves without confrontations with others. While we agree with critical questions regarding the social effects of ‘enclave urbanism’, we also observe a strong bias in this argument: research one-sidedly focuses on the effects of residential segregation. It is assumed that segregated living will automatically have social effects. However, with increased ‘mobilities’, people easily can and will meet in other places – on-line and off-line – than residential neighbourhoods; and ‘outsiders’ might also visit urban amenities in residential enclaves.

Objective of the seminar

The usefulness of place-based perspectives on residential segregation seems to have diminished considerably in today’s world of mobilities, where living in the same neighbourhood does not necessarily imply face-to-face contact and living in different neighbourhoods does not prevent such contact. This seminar aims to develop a mobility-based perspective on segregation, bringing together world-class researchers on segregation, mobilities, transport, and infrastructure.

Nature of the event

This objective will be realised through a 2-day intensive seminar hosted by Utrecht University on 21-22 March 2014. The seminar will cover theoretical discussions on ‘enclave urbanism’, segregation and mobility, and empirical studies on these issues in global city-regions.

Confirmed participants

The confirmed participants include five keynote speakers: Susan K. Brown (UCI), Mei-Po Kwan (UIUC/Utrecht University), Karen Lucas (University of Leeds), John Urry (Lancaster University), and Donggen Wang (Hong Kong Baptist University).

Additionally, the following group of experts have confirmed their participation: Rowland Atkinson (University of York), Willem Boterman (University of Amsterdam), Martin Dijst (Utrecht University), John Dixon (Open University),  Maarten van Ham (TU Delft), Markus Hesse (University Luxembourg), Christa Hubers (TU Delft), Lucia Lo (University of York), Thomas Maloutas (Harokopio University), Sako Musterd (University of Amsterdam), Antonio Paez (McMaster University), Deborah Phillips (University of Oxford), Gill Valentine (University of Sheffield), Helen Wilson (University of Manchester), David Wong (George Mason University), and Ngai-ming Yip (City University Hong Kong).

Approaches to Time in Transport Studies

This week I have been to the wonderful Forge Network summer school in York organised by Greg Marsden and Elizabeth Shove on ‘Time, Travel and Everyday Life‘ and attended by young researchers in a range of disciplines (transport, geography, sociology, etc.) from the UK and a number of European countries.

I gave one of the talks, and mine was on different theoretical understandings of time in transport and mobilities research and how understandings of time can be used to change current transport research and planning practice. I used the works of Barbara Adam, David Harvey and Henry Lefebvre to highlight how time (a) is a multi-faceted construct intimately tied to space and matter, and (b) understood in very partial ways in mainstream transport research and practice.

With regard to the first point, I discussed Harvey’s distinction between absolute time (a Newtonian, linear and immovable grid), relative space-time (dependent on the frame of the observer as proposed by Einstein) and relational spacetime (emergent from the relations between entities as suggested by Leibniz, quantum mechanism and complexity theory, among others) and criticised Harvey’s idea that time is all three, arguing that (space)time is ultimately relational. I also discussed Lefebvre’s distinction between linear and cycles rhythms and times, whereby the former pertain to a man-made pure repitition as epitomised in clock-time and the latter to nature and the cosmos where each re-occurence differs from a previous manifestion. And I drew on Adam’s timescapes framework to argue that mainstream transport research and practice are deeply commited to her five ‘C’s. That is, in transport research, planning and practice time is commonly and continually:

a) constructed, through the privileging of clock time to the exclusion of almost any other form of time;

b) commodified and monetarised, among others through the widespread use of values of time;

c) compressed, primarily through the valorisation of acceleration (i.e. the assumption that travel time is a waste and disutility) in transport appraisal (cost-benefit analysis) and basically all micro-economic theory inflected thinking about transport;

d) colonising the future, among others because of the failure to reduce transport’s extreme dependence on oil and its contribution to anthropogenic climate change; and

e) considered something that must be controlled in that the different features of time (such as the duration, timing, etc. of travel time) must be shaped and steered in some way or another, and this perhaps best exemplified with the preoccupation in some circles of research and planning with the reliability and travel times and transport networks.

I do believe, however, that the deep commitment to Adam’s five ‘C’s and the privileging of absolute and linear understandings of time in mainstream transport research and planning are ultimately a barrier to making transport more environmentally sustainable and socially just and to more effective transport policies. As the privileging of these understandings is one of the factors that got us where we are at the present (i.e. transport as a major contributor to both carbon consumption and social inequalities), we — researchers and practitioners in transport, urban planning and cognate fields — need to reconsider how we ‘think’ time (and space) in relation to transport and travel behaviour. So, in the end my talk was a plea for (a) more sophistated understandings of time (and space) in transport research and planning, and (b) greater attention being paid to relational and cyclical understandings of time in connection to transport as these allow us to better understand how the users of transport systems act and respond to the situations they face whilst travelling. I sought to illustrate the latter point by contrasting mainstream transport studies of how travellers respond to travel time variability and my own research on this topic and on what arriving late at a destination is and means (as summarised here and here).

I do realise of course that talk about the nature of time (and space) and how it relates to transport & mobility is rather abstract and philosophical, and in many ways challenges common-sense understandings of how the world is. But those common-sense understandings are partly responsible for the non-sustainable nature of contemporary transport systems, and bringing the typically taken-for-granted understandings of time (and space) into focus and challenging them is one way in which social scientists can make a major contribution to transport policy and practice.

I would be very happy to share the slides of my talk with anyone who is interested. Just drop me an e-mail.