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.

 

Marking 25 years of the Journal of Transport Geography – past/current/future developments

Call for Papers “Marking 25 years of the Journal of Transport Geography – past/current/future developments”

RGS with IBG Annual International Conference, 28-31 August 2018, Cardiff, UK.
Session sponsored by Transport Geography Research Group.

Convened by Richard Knowles, Frank Witlox and Tim Schwanen

We are inviting abstract submissions from two TGRG sponsored sessions at the 2018 RGS/IBG Annual International Conference, titled “Marking 25 years of the Journal of Transport Geography – past/current/future developments”.

In 2018 the Journal of Transport Geography – the leading interdisciplinary journal focusing on the geographical dimensions of transport, travel and mobility – will celebrate its 25 years of existence. To commemorate this anniversary we invite leading transport geography scholars to put forward their prospective views on the field. This field is very broad in scope, ranging from conceptual innovations, theoretically-informed advances, to empirically-oriented contributions on the movement of people, goods and/or information by any mode and at every geographical scale. We welcome papers that reflect on the field. How has our discipline evolved? What can we learn from the past? What are the new research avenues?

All accepted session papers will be published (after peer-review) in a Special Issue of Journal of Transport Geography.

If you interested in presenting a paper in this session, please submit to the session convenors (r.d.knowles@salford.ac.uk, frank.witlox@ugent.be, tim.schwanen@ouce.ox.ac.uk) the following information by Friday 9 February 2018: Title, authors, affiliations and addresses, presenter and abstract (300 words).

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.