Theorising mobility justice

Abstract

Mobility justice is one of the crucial political and ethical issues of our day, when the entire world faces the urgent question of how to make the transition to more environmentally sustainable and socially just mobilities. All around the planet urban, regional, and international governing bodies are grappling with a series of crises related to how we move: an urban crisis of pollution and congestion, a global refugee crisis of borders and humanitarianism, and a climate crisis of global warming and decarbonisation. This article seeks to think across these crises showing how each is part of a wider disturbance in prevailing institutions concerned with the management of mobilities and immobilities. Mobility justice offers a new way to think across the micro and macro scale of transitioning toward more just mobilities.

The Role of Mobility Digital Ecosystems for Age-Friendly Urban Public Transport: A Narrative Literature Review

“…Reports from the World Health Organization and publications such as those by Alley, Liebig, Pynoos and Banerjee [ 33 ], Buffel, Handler and Phillipson [ 34 ] and Steels [ 35 ] will be used to get an insight into transport and mobility in age-friendly cities ( Section 3.2 ). In Section 3.3 , we will discuss the importance of mobility rights for older people by building on Sheller’s concept of “mobility justice ” [ 36 ] comprising differential access to spaces, services and social goods as “not just the result” of racial, gendered, classed, sexed, and, in our study, aged formations, but also “as productive of those hierarchical systems of differentiation, through various kinds of enablement and disablement” [ 36 ]. The studies by Behrendt, Murray, Hancox, Sourbati and Huber [ 37 ] and Sourbati and Behrendt [ 38 ] will be used to explore how we can move forward to age-friendly smart mobility in Section 3.4 .…”

Transport and mobility justice: Evolving discussions

“…In parallel to these strands of work, mobilities scholars became interested in questions of uneven mobilities – in everyday trip-making and urban transport, as well as tourism and migration – and the politics of mobility. They developed a series of concepts to aid understanding of uneven mobilities, such as ‘motility’, or the capacity to become mobile ( Kaufmann, 2002 ), and analysed the multiple ways in which discourses legitimise and normalise uneven mobilities ( Sheller, 2018a ). They proposed to consider such mobilities in terms of uneven experiences; access to infrastructure; materialities; subject formation; and events and processes of moving, passing, stopping, pausing and waiting ( Sheller, 2018a ; Adey et al, 2014 ).…”

“…Enright's conception of transit justice edges towards Sheller, 2018a , Sheller, 2018b multi-scalar concept of mobility justice introduced earlier. Both direct attention towards the ways in which power and inequality shape people's movements, motility and immobility, as well as the attempts of states and other actors to govern and control mobility.…”

“…When this double movement of recognition and taking responsibility is coupled with Davidson's (2020) understanding of mobility as a material-semiotic process of energetic transformation, it can help to reframe mobility justice as an emergent process of participatory reflection, decision-making and action. Recognition then becomes a process of unravelling in the situated and multi-scalar way that Sheller, 2018a , Sheller, 2018b proposes and Henderson (2020) adopts for electric vehicles (EVs) the assumptions on which current mobility systems are based, the ways they operate, and how they bind together specific socio-technical, politico-economic, and energetic configurations. This means, firstly, asking, for each movement enacted, how much violence and (human and non-human) suffering goes or has gone into making that specific form of mobility possible, thereby fully charting the implications of the socio-technical and energetic configuration enabling movement for other humans and living forms.…”

Walking city streets: Spatial qualities, spatial justice, and democratising impulses

“…Spatial justice is “the push to assist human growth [and] open connections and to enhance quality of communication to encompass fuller elements of experience” (Bridge, , p. 315). Spatial (and indeed mobility) justice concerns rights to the city and capacity to engage in politics per se, and involves the democratising politics of walking more specifically (Hinchliffe & Whatmore, ; Lefebvre, ; Sheller, ; Solnit, ). Such matters are central to this paper.…”