Moving Towards Transition: Commoning Mobility for a Low-Carbon Future 9781786998965, 9781350237520, 9781786998989

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MOVING TOWARDS TRANSITION

JUST SUSTAINABILITIES Just Sustainabilities contributes to understanding, theorizing and ultimately developing strategies towards the development of more just and sustainable communities in both the global North and South. Through a collection of solutionsorientated books, the series looks at policy and planning themes that improve people’s quality of life and well-being, both now and into the future; that are carried out with an intentional focus on just and equitable processes, outputs and outcomes in terms of people’s access to environmental, social, political and economic space(s); and that aim to achieve a high quality of life and well-being within environmental limits.

SERIES EDITOR Julian Agyeman TITLES ALREADY PUBLISHED Julian Agyeman, Introducing Just Sustainabilities: Policy, Planning, and Practice Karen Bickerstaff, Gordon Walker, Harriet Bulkeley, Energy Justice in a Changing Climate: Social Equity and Low-carbon Energy Peter Utting, Social and Solidarity Economy: Beyond the Fringe Jenny Pickerill, Eco-Homes: People, Place and Politics Dean Saitta, Intercultural Urbanism: Planning from the Ancient World to the Modern Day Phoebe Godfrey and Mary Buchanan, Global Im-Possibilities: Exploring the Paradoxes of Just Sustainabilities

MOVING TOWARDS TRANSITION

Commoning Mobility for a Low-Carbon Future

Peter Adey, Tim Cresswell, Jane Yeonjae Lee, Anna Nikolaeva, André Nóvoa and Cristina Temenos

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 This edition was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2023 Copyright © Peter Adey, Tim Cresswell, Jane Yeonjae Lee, Anna Nikolaeva, André Nóvoa and Cristina Temenos 2022 Peter Adey, Tim Cresswell, Jane Yeonjae Lee, Anna Nikolaeva, André Nóvoa and Cristina Temenos have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design by Burgess & Beech Cover image: Brown Globe, Or Gallery, Vancouver, by Kristina Lee Podesva, 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Adey, Peter, author. Title: Moving towards transition: commoning mobility for a low-carbon future / Peter Adey, Tim Cresswell, Jane Yeonjae Lee, Anna Nikolaeva, André Nóvoa and Cristina Temenos. Description: New York, NY: Zed Books, 2021. | Series: Just sustainabilities | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021018046 | ISBN 9781786998965 (hardback) | ISBN 9781786998996 (epub) | ISBN 9781786998989 (pdf) | ISBN 9781350237520 (ebook other) Subjects: LCSH: Transportation and state. | Transportation–Environmental aspects. | Electric vehicles. | Sustainability. Classification: LCC HE193.A44 2021 | DDC 388–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021018046 ISBN: HB: 978-1-7869-9896-5 PB: 978-1-7869-9897-2 ePDF: 978-1-7869-9898-9 ePub: 978-1-7869-9899-6 Series: Just Sustainabilities Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS List of Figures Acknowledgements

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Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION 1 Chapter 2 APPROACHES TO TRANSITION

13

Chapter 3 A MOBILITIES APPROACH TO MOBILITY TRANSITIONS

35

Chapter 4 MECHANISMS, AGENTS AND STRUCTURES

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Chapter 5 POLICY ASSEMBLAGES: MULTIPLICITY, TEMPORALITY AND ACTORS IN A TIME OF ‘CRISIS’

81

Chapter 6 LIBERAL LOGICS AND LIFESTYLE

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Chapter 7 COMMONING MOBILITY TRANSITIONS

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Chapter 8 CONCLUSION: TOWARDS JUST MOBILITY TRANSITIONS

143

Notes Bibliography Index

159 166 184

FIGURES 2.1 2.2 2.3 3.1 4.1 6.1 6.2 7.1 7.2 7.3

Forms of mobility in Zelinsky’s mobility transition hypothesis Multiple levels as nested hierarchy A revised Multi-Level Perspective on transitions Reshaping commuting practices through the material elements and timing and spacing of societal services and institutions Congestion Free Network – a quick summary Reducing one tonne of greenhouse gas per day Advertising lifestyle changes in Singapore ‘Reduction is a theft’ Santiago region with Costanera Norte outlined in blue Costanera Norte

18 23 25 46 74 104 108 126 137 138

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The research upon which this book is based was funded through a grant – Living in the Mobility Transition, funded by the Forum Vies Mobiles/Mobile Lives Forum (en​.forumviesmobiles​.​org) – and through the directorship and input of Christophe Gay, Sylvie Landriève and Javier Caletrio. We thank them for their generous support and guidance within the research phase of the project, but also Mimi Sheller – who acted as an external advisor – for her insightful comments and critique, and David Bissell for his guidance on an early version of the book’s proposal. We are also grateful for the chance to have the work overseen and commented upon through an advisory group, the Mobile Lives Forum assembled in Paris. We also acknowledge financial support from Northeastern University and from the Department of Geography at the University of Manchester for the redrawing of several figures used within the book. The original project team also included Astrid Wood, who worked initially on the UK, South Africa and Turkey case studies on the project before taking up a lectureship position after a year in the post. We thank her for her work and perspectives. We would like to acknowledge the time and enthusiasm of the many participants involved in this research from fourteen different countries and personnel from within the EU and the UN. Thanks and acknowledgements go to Generation Zero and Korea Climate and Environment Network for permission to reproduce figures used within the book, and to Eduardo Osterling for research assistance in Santiago. In the course of this research we have benefited from audience remarks, questions and suggestions at workshops and academic conferences, including Landscape Surgery and colleagues at Royal Holloway University of London; sessions we organized at the RGS-IBG in Exeter 2015; joint conference T2M and Cosmobilities Network, Caserta, in 2015; a panel at the Association of American Geographers Annual Conference in 2016, audiences at the T2M conference in Mexico City 2016; the Cosmobilities Conference at Bad Bol, Stuttgart, 2016; the Society and Environment Research Group in the Department of Geography at the University of Manchester, and Cities Politics and Economies Writing Group at the University of Manchester; the 9th International Conference on Urban and ExtraUrban Studies in Heidelberg, 2018. In the process of the grant and writing and completing this manuscript, five babies arrived within the households of this team of co-authors! We thank our families and partners for their amazing love and support.

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CChapter 1 INTRODUCTION

We write in times of dramatic change. In April 2020, amid an economic and mobility slowdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic, global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions declined by as much as 17 per cent. This is the equivalent of a return to 2006 levels. Fourteen years of increases eliminated in one month (Le Quéré et al. 2020). How did this happen? Essentially, governments around the world made it happen by banning, or severely limiting, all forms of travel that involve the use of fossil fuels. Energy continues to be produced, many factories are still producing goods but forms of travel from urban commuting to global aviation have been drastically reduced around the world. Before Covid-19 was recognized at the end of 2019, travel was responsible for about 23 per cent of global GHG emissions. Over 50 per cent of the dramatic reduction is attributable to reductions in surface transport (cars and trucks). In addition, air travel has been cut by as much as 90 per cent almost instantly. Travel by car in the UK went down to levels not seen since 1955 (Carrington 2020). Scientists, politicians, journalists and others are wondering if the Covid-19 crisis might lead to a permanent, crisisinduced transition to a lower-carbon future. Airlines are talking about a long-term reduction in business and the need to significantly downsize as passengers will be wary of travelling in such close quarters even after bans are lifted. Covid-19 is a global crisis leading to millions of deaths worldwide. Governments have ostensibly responded to that direct threat by reducing the means for the virus spreading – the ways we move. From limiting daily walks to banning incoming passengers, governments have sought to flatten the curve in order to save lives. While the discourse of economic (neo)liberalism has certainly continued, it has largely been drowned out by the threat of societies unable to cope with significantly increased mortality. Alongside the dramatic reductions in GHG emissions largely caused by reductions in, and transformations of, mobilities, there have been significant economic downturns which have been deliberately engineered by governments. The UK’s GDP fell by 19.1 per cent in the three months to May 2020. Similar effects are being felt around the world. While the exact links between Covid-19, GHG emissions and economic growth are nuanced and varied, and indeed still emergent, the current crisis makes one thing clear. If a threat is perceived as big enough, governments have it within their grasp to think and act differently, in ways that can very quickly bring about at the very

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Moving Towards Transition

least a temporary transition in the ways we move or do not move. The question then emerges, why haven’t governments reacted in a similar way to the crisis of global heating – a crisis that is also causing millions of premature deaths as well as mass migration, poverty and homelessness on massive scales? And while the consequences of Covid-19 are stark, the long-term consequences of global heating caused by GHG emissions are many times worse. We live in a time of human-induced global heating. The production of greenhouse gases by humans is the prime cause of contemporary climate change. These gases include water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and ozone. Since the advent of the industrial revolution the production of carbon dioxide has increased by 40 per cent such that the atmosphere now (2020) has around 415 parts per million (ppm), whereas in 1750 it would have been around 280 ppm. The research for this book started in 2013. In that year, carbon dioxide topped 400 ppm for the first time. It has increased by 15 ppm as we have been writing and researching. In that time, and for long before, human activity has resulted in the emission of carbon into the atmosphere. These emissions result from the combustion of carbon-based fuels such as coal, gas and oil which have been necessary for the production and maintenance of industry and economic growth, and have sustained our lifestyles and livelihoods, albeit in highly unequal ways across the globe (IPCC 2013). Industrial-scale combustion, as well as personal and domestic heating, has involved massive socio-material transformations. While these have raised our living standards, they have also meant unearthing hydrocarbon-rich materials from the ground, moving them about the planet and releasing into the air, the ground, waterways and our oceans ever more complex chemical materials and compounds. Some of the localized effects of these exhaustions are expressed on the body and the landscape around us. Air pollution is perhaps one of the most deadly of these. The semi-visible atmospheres of urban haze and smog belie their roles as semi-visible killers in the form of complex respiratory diseases and cancers. D. Asher Ghertner has recently discussed this in the terms of a so-called ‘Airpocalypse’ (2020). We also live in, or around, the time of ‘peak oil’. That is to say that we have probably passed (or, optimistically, will soon pass) the point of peak oil production globally (Hubbert 1956). Nobody argues that the supply of oil is infinite. The only arguments are over when we will pass, or whether we have passed, the year in which the most oil is extracted. The most optimistic projections say that this point will occur around 2040. Many believe we have already passed that point. The actual point of maximum extraction is, of course, a product of both supply and demand. As oil that is easy to extract becomes depleted, more difficult forms of extraction occur, and these are more expensive, more polluting and create an even greater risk of environmental degradation. At some point the cost of extraction is greater than the value of the oil and extraction decreases. This process is subject to dramatic fluctuations in the short term. Again, as governments restricted global mobility in the wake of Covid-19, we saw in April 2020 the price of oil drop to below zero for the first time in history. In the long term, supply will be depleted and extraction will be too expensive. At this point humans have to look elsewhere



1. Introduction

3

for sources of energy. Thankfully, we already are. Global social movements have declared a ‘climate emergency’ and have demanded global political action. Unfortunately, like the response to the current Covid-19 crisis, despite the broad scientific consensus over what is happening and why, and largely positive citizen and public appetite for change, inconsistent and ineffective political leadership on the challenges has not galvanized global change nor fulfilled the potential of global action promised in the early climate action movements of the 1980s and 1990s. Linking these observations on climate change and the decreasing economics of oil extraction is human mobility. As much as mobility is essential to the global distribution and exhaustion of the materialities of energy and resources to the atmosphere which is at the root of climate change, the mobility of people and things is one of the prime producers of greenhouse gases. It is estimated that the transportation sector is the second largest contributor to carbon emissions after the production of electricity and heat. Globally the transportation sector was responsible for 23 per cent of carbon emissions in 2010 (IEA 2012) – a figure that had grown by 45 per cent in the previous twenty years. Road transport accounts for 72 per cent of all transport-related carbon emissions, marine transport for 14 per cent and aviation for 11 per cent. Marine emissions are particularly polluting as large ships use minimally refined forms of fuel. Ninety per cent of the world’s trade travels by ship (George 2013). The aviation sector is the fastest growing of the three and the most carbon intensive. One return flight from London to New York generates roughly the same emissions as a European citizen does through heating their house for a whole year.1 While the movement of people as drivers and passengers is a significant factor in carbon emissions, the movement of goods is even more significant and one we have the least control over as individuals. So too are the movements and logistics of military personnel, munitions and vehicles (Cowen 2014) which are rarely transparently measured or clearly publicized. On liquid fuel alone, the US military’s ‘carbon bootprint’ places the institution between Peru and Portugal in fuel purchasing, and on fuel alone is the forty-seventh largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world and the largest institutional purchaser of hydrocarbons in the world. For Belcher et al. (2020) militaries are not only important for climate change in terms of simply vehicle emissions either but the vast mobilities of geo-ecological material flows of fuel, water, concrete and sand that they marshal within their extensive supply-chain systems and operations. In addition to being a significant source of carbon emissions, the transportation sector is the most important consumer of oil. In 2012 around 63.7 per cent of the oil that was consumed was consumed in the transportation sector. In 1973 the figure was 45.4 per cent.2 While other energy users are moving to more sustainable noncarbon-based energy sources, the transport sector is easily the most oil dependent. It will, therefore, be one of the most vulnerable to the post-peak oil world. While these figures provide us one way with which to grapple with the scales of climate change, or the indebtedness of the problem to the energy use and emissions of various mobilities, they are also part of an aesthetic of climate change reporting that simplifies massive, complex global changes to flows and budgets, inputs and outputs to be reduced to beguilingly simple global figures. In this way they tend

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Moving Towards Transition

to reduce the issues to a calculative imagination, which can occlude the social and environmental implications of this way of organizing the world (such as Belcher et al. 2020 show). The effect can be to dematerialize the light and heavy, intensive and extensive infrastructures and systems that produce those worlds, while they also hide the very lives and their relations, practices and habits that have depended upon such a system of carbon-intensive mobility for their livelihoods and lifestyles. Researchers critical of the putative ‘Anthropocene’ have been equally careful to understand the deformation of the world, its atmospheres and geologies, without separating those processes from the marginalized lives caught up in the violences, extractive practices and infrastructures (Cowen 2020; LaDuke and Cowen 2020) necessary to its production (Yusoff 2013, 2018). Baldwin and co-authors have recently suggested we think now of ‘Anthropocene mobilities’ as a way to reposition mobility as a ‘key reference for thinking with, through and against, the Anthropocene’ and, moreover, to centralize understandings of the dynamic nature of the earth, with ‘the inescapable reality that climate change stands to effect new patterns of migration and mobility (of flora, fauna, water, fire, etc.) globally’ (Baldwin, Fröhlich and Rothe 2019: 290) within the ontological assumptions we make about moving in the world – about mobilities. Given the fact of anthropogenic global warming, the fact that we are entering a post-peak oil world, the contribution of mobility to the production of carbon emissions and the reliance of transport on oil, it is clear to us, as well as others, that there is going to have to be some kind of mobility transition. Such a transition to forms of mobility that produce less carbon emissions and use less oil is both desirable and inevitable. It is for these reasons that the central concept of this book then is the ‘mobility transition’. We mean by this the necessary and inevitable transformation from a world in which mobility is dominated by the use of fossil fuels, the production of greenhouse gases and the dominance of automobility to one in which mobility entails reduced or eliminated fossil fuel use and GHG emissions and is less dependent on the automobile. Such a transition is similar, but not identical, to the ‘sustainable mobility transition’ (Nykvist and Whitmarsh 2008) – that includes multiple economic, social and environmental factors of sustainability within it. While the transition outlined earlier is central to this book, it is equally clear that a number of other hoped-for and/or actual transitions are connected to this and that mobilities are transitioning in many ways across the globe, including ways that are not helpful in combatting climate change. There are, indeed, multiple mobility transitions.3 The need for a transition to low-carbon (or carbon neutral) mobilities is hardly surprising. Various efforts to enact such a transition come to us in our daily paper or newsfeed. Often such stories focus on technology. It is hard to read the paper or browse a news site these days without coming across a story about some technology or other that will help humanity move towards a future of lowercarbon emissions. Many of these technologies involve the ways we move and the ways we move the stuff of capitalism. Consider three stories from The Guardian. In 2017 The Guardian reported that the benefits of Elon Musk’s ‘hyperloop’ concept ‘really kick in . . . when you consider its environmental benefits’ citing a



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5

US Department of Transport study that estimated that the hyperloop ‘could be up to six times more energy efficient than air travel on short routes’ (Harris 2017). The same newspaper reported on Norway’s leadership in electric car ownership, stating that ‘Norway is the undisputed world leader in electric cars, run almost exclusively off the nation’s copious hydropower resources. Nearly a third of new cars sold in the country this year will be a plug-in model – either fully electric or a hybrid – and experts expect that share to rise as much as 40 next year’ (Vaughan 2017). Finally, in 2016, The Guardian news site featured a story with the title, ‘Why aren’t ships using wind-power to cut their climate footprint?’. Noting the growing contribution of container ships to global carbon emissions as they move ‘90% of everything’ around the world, the report suggests that the problem could be eased by using ‘more efficient, low-carbon ships’ and possibly using advanced super-size kites in order to save 2–4 tonnes of fuel per day (Levitt 2016). A focus on the transformative potential of technological shifts in the battle against climate change is not limited to newspaper stories. The promise of new or reconfigured transport technologies is also featured in the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) update report, after which a Chinese official is reported to have said that ‘this is more about technology than about politics’ (quoted in Watts 2018). While the uncoupling of technology from politics is clearly naive, the commentary does not do justice to some of the other pathways to decarbonization that have made their way into the latest IPCC report. The panel allocated percentages to certain decarbonization pathways in the transport sector including 29 per cent from ‘efficiency improvement’, 36 per cent from the increased use of biofuels and 15 per cent from electrification. The share allocated to electrification is larger than previous estimates due, in the panel’s words, to ‘the recent growth of electric vehicle sales worldwide’ (IPCC 2018: Chapter Two, 65). There are clearly considerable hopes being pinned on the ability of transformations in technology to enact a transition to a decarbonized mobile future. Novel technology can make for appealing, or even spectacular, stories and provides a seemingly painless pathway to a cleaner and greener future. By focusing on technological solutions to wicked problems such as global heating, a number of other key issues are ignored. The implication is often that by changing one technology for another we do not have to think about the structures that surround technology: the basic operation of capitalism, existing social hierarchies of class, race, gender, ability, etc., or even the general spatial structure we inhabit. Technosolutionism seems to absolve us of other worries. It lets us off the hook. There are other routes to transition that sometimes grab our attention. Before the dramatic reductions in plane travel that came with Covid-19, the media was fascinated by responses to the environmental consequences of plane travel and the movement to reduce travel by air. So-called flight shaming (or flygskam in Swedish) identifies excess air travel and seeks to instil guilt in those who fly unnecessarily. The flight shaming movement emerged in Sweden and has become associated with the teenage activist Greta Thunberg who took to train travel and boats to spread her message, connecting global heating to species extinction, across Europe.4 The movement led to an increase in scheduled trains and a decrease in air passenger

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numbers in Sweden, as well as defensive announcements from the aviation and airline industries.5 Thunberg’s non-aerial journeys suggest a simplicity that mirrors the arguments for technosolutions. Perhaps all we need to do is change our behaviour. In 2019, Thunberg crossed the Atlantic by yacht in order to attend the UN Climate Action Summit in New York. The yacht was offered by a member of Monaco’s royal family. This is clearly not an option open for everyone. Yet relatively cynical and patronizing critics have labelled Thunberg’s activism as a kind of slow mobility privilege that the rich could only enjoy or have time for.6 This kind of critique tends to see slow or low-carbon mobility as a kind of regressive, even de-modernizing fantasy that activists or time-rich liberal intellectuals want to foist upon the rest of us. Thunberg is certainly not the only advocate for saying no to air travel. Sociologist Roger Tyers, who researches carbon emissions in the aviation industry, recently travelled from the UK to China and back by train in order to carry out research. While the cost of his journey in money and time was large, he saved 90 per cent of the emissions he would have caused by flying (Tyers 2019). Changing behaviour is far from a simple solution to the production of GHG emissions. Just as a focus on technology elides the structures that surround them so, too, does a focus on behaviour. The beguilingly straightforward suggestion of not flying ignores the fact that there are often no options but to fly, and that our life and social structures can mean that not flying or moving in particular ways may inhibit employment prospects and other economic opportunities, diminish the ability to enter and navigate social networks and sustain the maintenance of familial relations and more (Holdsworth 2013). Academia is one of the sectors perhaps most guilty of excessive travel and where co-presence has been highly prized especially for early career scholars and those at ‘remote’ institutions (Higham, Hopkins and Orchiston 2019). Academics are noted as being ‘highly aeromobile’ and, for some, can demonstrate a hypocritical attitude to decarbonizing mobility (Higham and Font 2020). As Higham and others demonstrate practical ways for academics to reduce their carbon emissions significantly in the attendance at international conferences (Klöwer et al. 2020), other alternatives are less plausible. Travelling from the UK to China by train might make for a good story, but it is not a realistic solution for those of us who might have good reason to go to China. Behaviour change needs to be considered alongside the viability of alternatives and the (infra)structures that are needed to enable them. Whether it is through technology or through changes in behaviour there is clearly a need for a mobilities transition, but it is highly questionable whether it should be left to individuals to make the ‘right choice’ about how they move about, even if Thunberg and Tyer’s journeys both demonstrate the potential of less carbon-intensive modes of mobility. The transportation sector has recently become the largest producer of carbon emissions in the United States (Randall 2017) and was responsible for 23 per cent of carbon emissions globally in 2010 – a figure that had grown 45 per cent in the previous twenty years. It is with this in mind that we want to outline a perspective on transition to low-carbon mobilities



1. Introduction

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arising from mobility theory – an approach that includes technology but does not valorize it. It is worth pausing to consider the word ‘mobility’ in ‘mobility transition’. When we are choosing to talk about mobility transitions we mean more than what is normally signified by words like ‘movement’ or ‘transport’. The approach to mobility transition we take in this book is rooted in the ‘mobilities turn’ or ‘new mobilities paradigm’ in the social sciences and humanities. This interdisciplinary change of focus took scholars to task for treating mobility as a kind of residual outcome of other, more important, processes. For some mobility is erstwhile conceived as ‘derived demand’. The mobilities turn has sought to centre mobility in the way we think about society and culture (Cresswell 2006; Sheller and Urry 2006; Urry 2007). Central to this challenge has been the task of thinking about mobility in a fuller way – not simply as a quantifiable fact but as a meaningful and significant aspect of more-than-human life which plays an important role in the constitution of society. Thinking about mobility in this way forces us to focus on what mobility means, how it is practised and experienced, and how it is connected to the maintenance and transformation of power in society. It is not sufficient to think of mobility in largely technical terms – as something that can be mapped, measured and enumerated. Transitioning mobility is about more than moving less frequently, at different speeds, over shorter distances or in a more efficient vehicle. All of these things are part of the equation but mobility exceeds these demands. The mobility of humans is linked to the mobility of things and the mobility of ideas. It is more-than-human. Different mobilities are often related. Similarly, mobilities are necessarily related to stillness, to immobilities (Bissell and Fuller 2010, 2011). Often these relations highlight issues of social justice – and social injustice. The idea of transition needs to take issues of justice seriously. It is a central assertion of this book that however necessary it is to transition to lower-carbon forms of mobility, it is also necessary to make such a transition with an eye on issues of justice (Sheller 2018). A mobility transition must both reduce dependency on fossil fuels and be socially just. The idea of a ‘just transition’ is rooted in the perspectives of trade unions, people of colour, women and other disadvantaged and marginalized groups. A just transition is one that both reduces dependence on fossil fuels and helps to build equity, democratic governance and accountability. This stands in contrast to versions of transition that prioritize the reduction of carbon emissions without due attention to issues of social justice. Some examples might help. One popular, and often effective, way to reduce carbon emissions is through carbon taxes. A carbon tax, such as the one introduced in British Columbia, Canada, in 2008, taxes carbon dioxide emissions. In British Columbia, the tax was originally ten Canadian dollars for every tonne of carbon dioxide produced. By 2019 it was C40$ a tonne. Emissions were reduced immediately following the imposition of the tax. By 2019, GDP had grown 19 per cent while emissions had declined by 3.7 per cent.7 The equation seems straightforward. Tax carbon emissions and they will be reduced. The policy is simple to understand and simple to implement. British Columbia, however, is a geographically diverse province. On the one hand, there is a densely populated

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global city like Vancouver with a well-developed public-transit system and a maritime climate. On the other hand, there are remote, rural towns and settlement in the north of the province where winters are significantly longer and colder. The demand for both heating and transport is significantly greater. A carbon tax in the simplest sense would thus produce an unequal burden on remote, norther, rural communities, many of which are also First Nation (Indigenous) communities. Without any compensatory adjustments, a carbon tax is a regressive tax. The government of British Columbia actually did take significant steps to redistribute the costs through tax credits to low-income and rural families. In the end, the effects of the tax have been moderately progressive with net gains for the bottom 20 per cent of BC families by income.8 At a smaller scale consider the proposed development of a commuter light rail line in Los Angeles. In 1994 the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) of Los Angeles proposed an extension of the Pasadena Blue Line. The cost was $123 million. The Blue Line is a light rail line that serves a disproportionately white commuter population. The MTA proposed to raise the money to fund the extension through a raise in bus fares. Light rail is widely considered to be an environmentally friendly means of moving – and environmental arguments were among those put forward for the extension. In this case, however, the extension came at the cost of access to buses which served predominantly people of colour, women and people on a low income. An organization called the Bus Riders Union fought the extension and won in court – forcing the MTA to invest in the bus system through the provision of both more buses and greener buses (natural gas instead of diesel) (Bullard 2007). A similar tension can be seen in Santiago, Chile, where the rapid rollout of the Transantiago bus system in 2007, a system intended to help avert both environmental catastrophe and the social stigma of bus use, resulted in the increased marginalization of both the mobility disabled (who the buses were not designed to serve) and the very poor (as prices increased and an electronic ticketing system provided an extra barrier to ridership) (Witter and Hernández 2012). And indeed, the most recent fare increase across Santiago’s metro system triggered the widespread protests that erupted in 2019 across not only the capital city but all of Chile. The ongoing protests are linked to ongoing justice issues surrounding the privatization of public services and increased cost of living over the past thirty years. A mobility transition, then, cannot simply be about the reduction or elimination of carbon emissions. While such a course of action is necessary for the planet, it is not sufficient. A transition needs to consider mobility in all its dimensions – and that includes its burden of meaning and power.

The background and structure of the book This book is informed by a large comparative research project that considered policies related to mobility transitions in fourteen countries across the world, as well as within the international context of the EU and the UN. The countries



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considered include Brazil, Canada, China, Kazakhstan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and the UK. The rationale for the choice of case studies included the following factors. a) Geographical (or physical) features of country: approaches to mobility transition are clearly affected by the size of the country over which mobility occurs. Issues facing Canada, including long distances and remoteness, are very different from an island state such as Singapore with its problems of land scarcity. Also, different weather conditions affected how mobility transitions were designed. For instance, countries with extremely hot weather such as the UAE and Singapore had clearly different approaches to walking and cycling compared to countries with less extreme weather conditions. b) Levels of development: highly developed nations have more resources available to combat climate change and enact mobility transition than less developed ones. Higher levels of education and health care provision may also be related to the success or otherwise of transition policies. On the Human Development Index our countries ranged from Norway (ranked 1st) to South Africa (ranked 116). In terms of GDP per capita our countries ranged from Norway (5th) to South Africa (ranked 93rd) according to the UN. c) Forms of government and governance: strong central governments are able to enact transition policies relatively easily if they want to. On the other hand places with more developed civil society are places where it is possible to push for transition ‘from below’. Using the Economist Intelligence Unit’s ‘Democracy Index’ our countries ranged from Norway and New Zealand (1st and 4th respectively) to UAE (145th) and Kazakhstan (135th). d) Evidence of transition policies: some countries are well known for their efforts to promote transition to low-carbon futures. We were aware, for instance, of the leading role played by consultants in the Netherlands; the promotion of electric vehicles in Norway; road pricing in Singapore; and Vancouver’s ‘greenest city’ policy in Canada. We sought out countries where there were visible transition efforts in order to explore their success or otherwise. e) Cultural variables: while we do not believe that countries can straightforwardly be said to have singular cultures, it is the case that cultural norms such as religion, attitudes towards gender differences, modes of work and housing or the centrality of traditional family life may play a part in how mobility and transition are imagined. With this in mind we included diverse countries geographically, culturally and governmentally from liberal democracies across the West and Asia alongside more autocratic countries including representatives of the Middle East and the ex-Soviet Union. Every continent with the exception of Antarctica is represented in our research.

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f) Connections between countries: while our case studies are largely national ones we were keen to find ways of avoiding ‘methodological nationalism’ and sought out instances where we were aware of flows and of policy and practice between countries. These include, for instance, the exportation of the ‘Singapore model’, the global reach of Dutch transition expertise, Canadian knowledge in Dubai and forms of emulation such as Kazakhstan’s interest in the UAE. We were also interested in making sure that particular case studies (such as Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), telework, cycling schemes or energy mobilities) occurred in more than one case study. In each case we produced surveys of national policy regarding low-carbon mobilities, as well as three more local case studies that may or may not have been generated by national policy. These include such things as Rapid Bus Transit, cycle schemes, the development of electric vehicles, forms of telework and road pricing among others. As a result of this project we have fourteen accounts of national government policy and over forty-two local case studies in addition to accounts of policy constructed at the international level in the UN and EU. The research has included over 150 interviews with key policy stakeholders worldwide. We are not aware of any research project that has such a wide scope and is able to develop such a complicated comparative agenda. While this book is not simply a report of that project, it draws on and is informed by it. The book is structured as follows. In Chapter 2 we review the idea of transition and outline a number of approaches to it. We delineate a number of ‘shapes’ of transition in order to show how they are not always linear. We explore some precursors to contemporary transitions including theorization of post-socialist transitions, Wilbur Zelinsky’s Mobility Transition Hypothesis, Metz’s fourth era of travel, Ivan Illich’s notion of energy equity, the programme of the Transition Town movement and the work of the UK’s New Economics Foundation. The second half of the chapter outlines the now dominant Multiple Level Perspective (MLP) approach emerging out of the work of Frank Geels, Rene Kemp, Johan Schot and others. In Chapter 3 we outline an alternative approach to mobility transitions (which nevertheless draws on insights from MLP approaches) derived from work in the field of mobility studies, from within what some have called a ‘new mobilities paradigm’. In this chapter we argue for the decentring of technologies of transport in thinking about transition in favour of a fuller social notion of mobility as a combination of movement, meaning and practice in the context of power. This argument informs the rest of the book. Mobility transitions will not occur spontaneously in a vacuum. They are occurring in particular relations to the local, regional and national state as well as international regimes of regulation and meaning-making. In a place such as Singapore, a strong central state is able to impose top-down policies such as road pricing with little resistance. When we were exploring transition policies in Canada, on the other hand, the Federal government was not even allowed to discuss climate change while the City of Vancouver and the Province of British Columbia were busy advertising their green credentials. In Chapter 4 we explore



1. Introduction

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top-down, bottom-up and third-way routes to transition. We outline the varied roles of the State and civil society in comparative context focusing on different levels of authority and authoritarianism, as well as accountability. We explore mobility transitions in relation to wider political transitions, different scales of governance, the existence of non-state actors and the embedding of national governments within international organizations. Mobility transition policies are connected to other transition policies or other narratives that exist in complicated ‘policy assemblages’. In Chapter 5 we define the idea of assemblage and explore the multiple ways in which mobility transition policies are linked to other agendas and transitions. Some of these are environmentally focused such as discourses on air quality, pollution, land scarcity and congestion. Others are broadly economic in nature and often act to directly contradict mobility transition efforts. It is comparatively rare to find policies that are entirely framed as low-carbon transition policies. In contrast, assemblage describes the drawing together of people, technologies, practices and policies to create national and local level responses to problems of mobility and of low-carbon transition. Policy responses are interconnected and rarely straightforward. Despite overarching international climate debates, treaties and emissions reduction targets, there is no predominant model of lowcarbon mobility transition. Mobility transition policies are almost impossible to disentangle from other agendas, intentions, purposes or effects, such as scarcity, liberal logics or the persistence of automobility, within which they are embedded. The chapter considers the often-contradictory impulses of low-carbon transition and issues of social justice. In Chapter 6 we consider the most significant contradiction in transition discourses and policies. The majority of the transition policies and discourses we have encountered are framed within what we call (neo)liberal logics. Most broadly speaking, this centres on the dominance of a narrow framing of freemarket economics. More conceptually the chapter reflects on three tendencies of (neo)liberal logics: individualization and choice (the tendency to responsibilize the individual in enacting transition rather than the state of corporation), measurability and quantification (the sense that transition can be reduced to numerical data that can be transferred and exchanged), and competitive advantage (the sense that transition policies themselves can be marketed and transferred). A corollary of this is the repeated focus on the issue of ‘lifestyle’ as the space in which transition can occur rather than within the policies of corporations or governments. In Chapter 7 we develop an approach to mobility transitions that presents an alternative to dominant (neo)liberal formulations. This approach links mobility transitions more tightly to issues of social justice and the growing literature on ‘just transitions’. The chapter examines the logics of mobility transitions, focusing in particular on the discussions of ‘scarcity’ of various resources and ‘austere mobilities’ as a response to multiple scarcities that are at play in mobilities transitions discourse. The chapter concludes by offering an alternative response to the logic of scarcity – commoning mobility, that is rethinking meaning, movement

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and practice through the lens of the commons and breaking away from the highly individualized neoliberal logics of mobility policies. The final chapter, Chapter 8, has two aims. The first is to circle back to the conceptualization of mobility transition as a fully social concept that includes movement, meaning and practice in the context of power. It traces how such a conceptualization leads to the observations and critiques in each of the chapters. The second is a series of suggestions for policymakers to take on board when planning for transition. These include considerations of policy scales, mobility equity, unintended consequences, heterogeneous mobile bodies, appropriately identifying stakeholders and questioning dominant narratives that surround mobility now and in the future.

CChapter 2 APPROACHES TO TRANSITION

Introduction In this chapter, we explore the notion of transition, addressing different approaches to transition that inform our own approach, which we then develop in Chapter 3. The word ‘transition’ refers to change over time from one state to another. This beguilingly simple definition obscures the fact that there are different components of any transition and many forms that transition can take. There might, for instance, be a very sudden (in historical terms) change brought about by a revolution or some kind of natural disaster. At the other end of the spectrum there may be very slow gradual change. Change may occur in an even and linear way or it might occur in steps. Transitions sometimes move both forwards and backwards – proceeding hesitantly at best but certainly do not necessarily imply a kind of evolution or progression. Transition can mean a retrograde or regressive kind of change. Different components of a transition also change at different speeds and in different ways. Most simple models of transition suggest a linear movement from one state to another without any clearly specified spatial context (the implication being that they happen everywhere evenly). Following G. A. Wilson we can specify six basic models of transition (Wilson 2007). The simplest kind, and one that is often assumed, is a linear transition: a transition from state a to state b which changes at a steady rate through time along a predictable path. These transitions are deterministic and easily predicted. A slightly more complicated type is a stepped transition where there is a transition from state a to state b through a series of relatively abrupt transformations (steps) between relatively stable and unchanging phases. A well-known version of this is Thomas Kuhn’s explanation of scientific paradigms and revolutions (Kuhn 1996). A random transition is an unpredictable, non-linear and chaotic transition – a probabilistic and non-deterministic version of transition that mitigates against predictability. In a random transition it may not even be clear what points a and b are, and the direction of change may also vary. This kind of transition is associated with open systems and chaos theory. A retrograde transition is essentially a failed transition where change occurs along a trajectory from a to b but b ends up being the same as a. In some instances, it may be impossible to clearly identify a singular point b at the end of a transition and there may, in fact, be multiple point bs. This

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non-deterministic model of transition can be referred to as a Deleuzian transition. Here there are many possible trajectories (a thousand plateaus) that parallel each other. Any of the multiple options might be the one that actually happens. Often what actually seems to happen is a non-transition. This is a steady-state model in which nothing changes over time. While this seems familiar to anyone waiting for the transition from capitalism to something else (for instance), this model may, in fact, be only hypothetical as change of some kind is always happening to some degree. At the other end of the spectrum there are also what appear to be all-at-once transitions such as revolutions and natural catastrophes. Something like this can certainly be said about the worldwide changes in mobility happening in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. In terms of mobility, many scholars might see a ‘natural’ disaster such as Hurricane Katrina (Bartling 2006; Cresswell 2006) in 2005 or the Haiti Earthquake of 2010 (Sheller 2013) as serious ruptures in the social and infrastructural fabric, and where various kinds of mobility broke down. This is like a stepped but retrograde and yet (sometimes) enduring transition but with only one step. At the same time, vast international mobilities that brought aid, supplies, medical equipment and expertise, and even disease, were brought to Haiti through the US-controlled airport in Port-Au-Prince. In this sense, such a one-step transition backwards was extremely unevenly produced and experienced. Perhaps one of the most dominant approaches to a mobility transition in actual public planning discussed in Chapter 4 is the ‘Avoid, Shift, Improve’ approach which envisages what Schwanen has called more of a simultaneous ‘nexus’ of moves to low-carbon or sustainable mobility (Schwanen 2018). Whatever form transition takes in time and space, we also need to address the question of exactly what it is that is transitioning. Some aspects of life may be transitioning, while others remain relatively unchanged or transition along a different pathway. Transitions are frequently related to each other. Here we are primarily focused on transitions from forms of mobility that are ‘high-carbon’ to forms that are ‘low-carbon’. One of our main conclusions, however, is that it is neither possible nor desirable to consider transitions in isolation. We would like, for instance, to ensure that mobility transitions include both their direct and indirect consequences in terms of fossil fuel use and carbon emissions and their consequences for social justice. A mobility transition should be a just transition. It is never possible to delineate a transition that is solely about lowering or removing carbon emissions. In the examples in this book such a transition is always entangled with other visions of transition ranging from neoliberal visions of transition to an ideal free market to more everyday concerns such as air pollution, health and congestion. Actually existing transitions policies are never about a starting point a and an ending point b with a clear linear path between them. All of these aspects of simple transition models are problematic. Transitions vary in scale in both time and space. Some transitions occur relatively quickly, while others take considerably longer. Transitions also occur in defined spaces, while clearly not happening in others. In this book we are focused on the possibilities of low-carbon mobility transitions at national and international



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scales. With this in mind we consider previous approaches to transitions at different temporal and spatial scales.

Grand theories of transition Recognizing the variety of transitions, and the interdependencies between them, it is clear that while mobility transitions are a specific form of transition within the wider world of moves to a sustainable world there have been other transitions (and approaches to transition) in the past that we might learn from. In recent history the most notable of these has been the transition from socialist to capitalist economies in the ex-Soviet bloc. The historic transition from socialist to capitalist economies in Eastern Europe appeared to take place very suddenly around 1989 and the collapse of the Berlin Wall. There was of course a process that led up to this centred on the processes of Glasnost and Perestroika in the Soviet Union. It is also the case that the relatively simple fact of a wall falling did not mean that whole economies transformed overnight. But even these processes were remarkably abrupt in historical terms. What seemed like a deeply sedimented geographically marked division in (say) 1975 was seemingly completely undone by 1995. This provided an opportunity for researchers to explore the processes by which transition happened. The mainstream explanation for the transition across Eastern Europe relied on the perspective of liberalization. This perspective outlined a twofold process. Socialist economies had to be liberalized and markets formed while socialist polities had to be democratized. These two processes were happening slowly before 1989 and rapidly after 1989. Once the processes were complete, mainstream transitions theories argued, Eastern Europe would have proper capitalist liberal democracies and become full members of the community of nations. Needless to say, ‘actually existing transition’ was not so straightforward or linear. The main reason for this was geographical variability. The Czech Republic and Bulgaria (for instance) were and are very different places. ‘The challenge then is to negotiate ways in which we can understand the diversity of forms of transition’ (Pickles and Smith 1998: 2). The problem, according to Pickles and Smith, was that mainstream transition theory was written from the perspective of liberalization foreclosing any other possibility for ‘actually existing transition’. Mobility is not a key theme in accounts of post-socialist transitions (for post-transition, see Tuvikene 2018; Burrell and Hörschelmann 662014), but these accounts are instructive for our understanding of transitions in general. Post-socialist transitions suggest a need to consider transitions as diverse in form and responsive to where they occur. They also illustrate that theories of transition which imply particular beginnings and ends, as well as means, may – because they come from somewhere – not always be so appropriate or easily applied in another context. Many theories of transition do include implied mobility transitions. Most famously there are the arguments in Marx’s theory of historical materialism (Marx 1996) concerning the transition from feudalism to capitalism. While the

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key drivers in this transition theory were the relationship between the forces and relations of production – it was clearly key to the move from feudalism to capitalism that serfs and peasants were freed from the obligation to Lords and the land and formed a mobile army of workers moving in on the rapidly expanding cities. Any account of the industrial revolution in the UK and Western Europe is, at least in part, an account of the rise of steam power and the railway. Equally, critiques of transitions to advanced capitalism find that the right not to move, to immobility, has become antithetical, ‘the countries that still maintain the rigidities of labor and oppose its full flexibility and mobility are punished, tormented, and finally destroyed by global monetary mechanisms’ (2001: 337–8), suggest Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Indeed, in light of the misery of mobility in modernization, they conclude: ‘In fact, a stable and defined place in which to live, a certain immobility, can on the contrary appear as the most urgent need’ (Hardt and Negri 2001: 155). Revolution for Hardt and Negri has become a different kind of problem of transition, of consolidated and sustained transformation (2009) The other significant use of the idea of transition in the past refers to much longer-term transitions in population. This is the idea of demographic transition familiar to many students of geography which they learn at either school or college. The demographic transition model arose out of the work of Kingsley Davis (1945) and, later, the Club of Rome (Meadows and Club of Rome 1972). The model is based on differences between birth (fertility) and death (mortality) rates at different stages in a process of development that moves through four or five defined stages. The model is based on the experience of Western countries that appear to have already gone through the transition process, but it is suggested by the model that it is a process that all countries inevitably pass through. In Stage One a country has high death and birth rates (and thus a small and stable population). Over time the death rate declines leading to rapid population growth. Eventually, the birth rate declines too and population growth comes to an end. This process coincides with processes of industrialization and development. As with approaches to post-socialist transition, the model has been widely criticized for its universal nature and lack of sensitivity to geographical variation in demographic processes (Kirk 1996). It is also unclear whether the transition is a cause or effect of other changes in society such as industrialization, modernization and urbanization. These are lessons that need to be taken on board for our theorization of mobility transitions. Until recently, the term ‘mobility transition’ was notably associated with the work of Wilbur Zelinsky, co-founder of the journal Transitions published by the Association of American Geographers in the 1960s and 1970s. The journal was the result of the efforts of the Social and Ecologically Responsible Geographers research group and was a precursor to the founding of the journal Antipode (Peake and Sheppard 2014). In his model of mobility transition, Zelinsky wanted to match the general hypothesis of the demographic and development transition model or ‘modernization’ with a ‘second sequential spatio-temporal process, the mobility transition’ (249). He stated his Mobility Transition Hypothesis as follows:



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There are definite, patterned regularities in the growth of personal mobility through space-time during recent history, and these regularities comprise an essential component of the modernization process. (Zelinsky 1971: 221–2)

Zelinsky broke this hypothesis down into a series of related statements that together confirmed an irreversible link between modernization and mobility through time that paralleled the demographic transition. Despite the universalizing nature of the hypothesis and the high level of generality at which it is stated, Zelinsky’s paper actually prefigures much of the more nuanced language of more recent mobility theory. He is sensitive to the social implications of spatial mobility comparing differential scales of movement, for example, from a white family relocating across the American continent to a black family moving a city block. In addition to Zelinsky’s awareness of what we might call the politics of mobility he was also mindful of the other forms of virtual and imaginative mobility only recently highlighted by Urry and others (Urry 2007). Despite realizing the implications of mobility for social life, for some, Zelinsky’s approach failed to properly account for the embeddedness of mobility processes within other wider social transitions, whether in technology, gender relations or health (Skeldon 2009). The transition model itself is very broad also. It traces a transition from a ‘Premodern Traditional Society’ (such as medieval Europe) in which residential migration is almost non-existent and circulation is limited to the very few through to ‘the Advanced Society’ in which residential mobility is at a high level, migrants move between cities, unskilled and semi-skilled migrants move from underdeveloped lands and forms of circulation such as work-related travel and tourism are accelerating. The final phase in the transition is the ‘Future Superadvanced Society’, in which improved communication and ‘delivery systems’ begin to cut into the rates of residential migration and we experience ‘further acceleration in some current forms of circulation and perhaps the inception of new forms’ as well as, prophetically, ‘strict political control of internal as well as international movements’ (Zelinsky 1971: 231). One notable aspect of Zelinsky’s Transition Hypothesis is the attention he pays to different forms of mobility. Figure 2.1 shows four types of mobility ranging from international mobility to circulation (commuting, tourism, etc.). In each phase of the transition there are different mixtures of mobilities. While Phase I is marked by little mobility of any sort, Phases II and III are marked by high rural to urban migration as traditional forms of feudal agriculture breaks down and urbanization ensues. In Phases IV and V people move mostly between and within cities, and there are very high agglomerate rates of circulation (including international circulation). Many historians have been critical of the accuracy of these phases and suggest that the earlier stages of Zelinsky’s model actually experienced far more mobility than he realized and even some inter-country migration – especially in Europe (Lucassen and Lucassen 2009). In addition to providing an account of past transitions in mobility, Zelinsky also looks into the future to wonder what a future ‘Superadvanced’ society might look like in terms of mobility. He describes this as Phase V. While he does not

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Figure 2.1  Forms of mobility in Zelinsky’s mobility transition hypothesis.

anticipate the local or global environmental consequences of mobility – particularly automobility and aeromobility – he does anticipate a kind of mobility ‘saturation’, and the potential urgent planning and rethinking of mobility systems, in the near future. Although there is an absolute minimum for both fertility and mortality, it is more difficult to fix an effective upper limit to human mobility, even if the phenomenon is obviously finite. Is there a point beyond which mobility becomes counterproductive economically and socially or even psychologically and physiologically? . . . When and how will mobility saturation be reached? In any event, further general socioeconomic advance may well bring in its wake socially imposed mechanisms for controlling location and movement of populations. What might be technically and politically feasible is unclear, but planning for a restructured urban system and for circulation and migration therein may become urgent in the near future. (Zelinsky 1971: 246)

Zelinsky’s Mobility Transition Hypothesis is framed within a descriptive positivist ontology. It is supposed to be an account of what has happened and is happening around the world with a final projection into the future (from 1971). Despite its universalizing nature (modelled on demographic transition), its attention to both different forms of mobility and the different meanings given to mobility (the jetsetter vs. the black family moving across town) are useful observations to carry forward, as is the historical and spatial resolution Zelinksy applies to mobility transition which has largely eluded contemporary theorists of mobility transition.



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Societal modernization, for Zelinsky, is a mobility transition expressed in different and socially differential spatial and temporal patterns of movement, what we refer to later as a ‘politics of mobility’.

Empirical analyses of transitions Most approaches to mobility transition are not grand theories that map onto mainstream accounts of modernization or historical epochs. They focus on identifiable transitions in the concrete ways we move. Their focus is spatially and temporally more limited. A Guardian report on 30 April 2015 suggested that the United States, United Kingdom and other advanced economies might have reached or passed their point of peak car use.1 The economic crash of 2008 – according to one argument – meant that car traffic, growing since cars were invented, plateaued and fell. This has led to discussions of whether this was simply a result of less money circulating or something more fundamental in the world of mobility. One hypothesis is labelled the ‘interrupted growth’ hypothesis, and this simply suggests that car traffic will increase again once the economies recover and grow. Other arguments suggest that there has actually been a cultural shift in favour of forms of mass transit and dense city living. It might also be the case that roads have simply become saturated, and there is little desire to have more of our landscape given over to more and bigger roads. This is a hypothesis put forward by David Metz the former chief scientist of the Department for Transport in the UK. He argues that we are entering a new fourth era of travel. While this approach carries with it some of the baggage of grand theories, its focus is actually more specific and rooted in observable current changes. In the first era of human travel, our hunter–gatherer ancestors walked out of Africa and populated the earth. In the second era, they settled in agricultural communities and towns, where travel was generally limited to about an hour a day on foot. The third era began early in the nineteenth century with the coming of the railways, when the energy of fossil fuels could be harnessed to achieve faster travel through a succession of technological innovations, culminating in mass mobility made possible by the motorcar. There is now emerging evidence that growth of personal daily travel has ceased, so that we are entering a fourth era in which, on average, travel time, trip rate, and distance travelled hold steady. The ‘peak car’ phenomenon, whereby car mode share in cities like London reached a peak and has subsequently declined, marks the transition from the third to the fourth era. (Metz 2013: 267)

In the UK the recent report ‘All Change’ carried out by the Commission on Travel Demand2 finds these trends have been sustained and actually reach further back to the mid-1990s far before the 2008 global economic crisis, slowdown and recession. The report’s evidence shows that today’s under thirties have seen a reduction of 20 per cent of miles driven per capita and are much less likely to own a driving

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licence. These facets of declining mobility demand may relate to greater employment precarity, declines in home ownership and reductions in relative disposable income. These reductions move alongside steady increases in van delivery, home food and consumer delivery and a massive increase in next-day deliveries. Why would such a transition happen? Metz argues that this is because of a reduced marginal value of additional car travel in a world with decent and efficient public transport. People in cities like London or Singapore simply do not have to travel more to reach the things they need or want. Supermarkets, clinics, schools, entertainment, etc., are all near enough to make driving further and longer pointless. The increased use of mobile communications technology also plays a role. Metz argues that the macro-economic factors are not, in fact, the major determinant in the transition to a fourth era. Transition scholar Frank Geels has also commented on reduced automobility as the likely cause of the 12.7 per cent decrease in domestic transport-related CO2 emissions between 2007 and 2013 in the UK in his analysis of a potential system wide or ‘gradual system reconfiguration’ (Geels 2018). Metz’s argument for a transition to a fourth era of travel is certainly not the first argument focused on historical transitions in mobility. As with Zelinsky’s Mobility Transition Hypothesis, it is a decidedly westernized view of personal mobility. In most South American and southeast Asian countries, for instance, personal car usage and ownership is growing (see further post-colonial critiques of transition narratives). In many ‘developed’ countries, however, car use does appear to have reached a peak. In 2013 aggregate car use had been shrinking in Japan since 1999 and in the UK since 2007. It had been stable in France for a decade. Rates of growth were shrinking in Germany.3 Metz is drawing on well-known periodizations that may not put mobility at the centre but do, nonetheless, have something to say about mobility. Most famously there are the arguments about the birth of the city that Metz draws on.4 Despite their similarities, Metz and Zelinsky come from different domains of academic interest. Metz is firmly embedded in the empirical world of transport and his account of transition is one of changing modes and intensities of travel. Zelinsky’s account is embedded in an interest in migration, and although it includes references to advanced technologies and various forms of mechanized mobility, it is looking at world historical transformation in the kinds of migration and circulation that humans engage in. This is where recent work on mobilities that seeks to centre all forms of mobility – their patterns, frequencies and velocities as well as their meanings and characteristic practices – can do some useful work (Cresswell 2006; Sheller and Urry 2006; Adey 2009; Cresswell and Merriman 2010; Sheller 2012). We will turn to this in Chapter 3.

The multi-level perspective on transition Metz’s analysis is certainly not the only account of transition centred on empirical analysis of transport. The same could be said of a popular mode of transition analysis known as the multi-level perspective (MLP) on transitions. Discussion



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of this perspective is linked (with many of the same authors using much of the same language) to conceptions of ‘transition management’ and ‘strategic niche management’, but it also forms part of a wider but more diverse body of approaches within the field known as Transition Studies (Schwanen 2018). As Schwanen explains, the field has formed out of interdisciplinary connections between ‘Science and Technology Studies, History of Technology, Evolutionary Economics and Innovation Studies’ but also including ‘Biology and Ecology, Environmental Studies and Demography’ (2018: 266). The MLP arose out of the work of Dutch researchers centred on René Kemp and Frank Geels (Kemp 1994; Geels 2002, 2005, 2010, 2011; Geels and Kemp 2012; Schwanen 2013). In a foundational paper Kemp and colleagues ask why it is that new sustainable technologies, such as electric cars, fail to become mainstream. They set out to theorize resistance to innovation. A central concept for them is the technological regime: ‘the whole complex of scientific knowledges, engineering practices, production process technologies, product characteristics, skills and procedures, and institutions and infrastructures that make up the totality of a technology’ (Kemp 1994: 182). This concept allows the authors to connect a technology to a wider set of factors that, nevertheless, have the technology (an electric car, for instance) at their heart. The term ‘regime’ is chosen because it refers to a set of formal and informal rules that tend to steer the direction that research and development take. The idea behind the technological regime is that the existing complex of technology extended in social life imposes a grammar or logic for socio-technical change, in the same way, that the tax regime or the regulatory regime imposes a logic on economic activities and social behaviour (Kemp 1994: 182). This regime (which later became known as the socio-technical regime) tends towards stability and discourages radical change. It is a structuring force in the terms of structuration theory. Relatively stable regimes produce and encourage particular technological trajectories in which engineers and others move forward in a habitual, routinebased manner – a process that mitigates against innovation and change. The key question, then, is how one regime transitions into another. Their answer initially focused on the role of what MLP scholars call niches. Niches are ‘protected’ spaces or contexts which exist outside of the normal rules of the game where innovation is allowed to take place. Examples often come from the military, early markets and laboratories, and even early-modern automobility, where the wheel was first used for ritual and ceremonial purposes (Kemp 1994: 184). These spaces apart have been key to the approach of Kemp, Geels and others to managing the process of future transition, although how they work in concert with the other ‘levels’ has become much more complex in later iterations of the approach. They use the term ‘strategic niche management’ to refer to the process of creating and protecting niche spaces for the development of new technologies and their attendant practices and knowledges. Over time, it is argued, the new technology will encourage new markets and new constituencies of producers and users. Eventually, it would no longer be necessary to protect the niche space as the technology becomes part of the wider world. During this process, a series of ‘articulations’ occur where the technology gets slotted into areas such as government policy, cultural norms and

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new infrastructures. In Actor Network Theory terms, a new network is produced as a series of actants are enrolled in order to stabilize the technology (Latour 2005). A key question for Geels and others is how regimes change. How do the innovations occurring in niches breakthrough to the regime level to enact a more substantive change? One answer he gives is ‘niche-cumulation’ – the process of niche-level developments linking both with each other and with older technologies to produce new hybrid forms (think of the hybrid car such as the Prius). The final part of the MLP model is the socio-technical (ST) landscape. The landscape is the highest order level of the three and the hardest to change. It is more or less analogous to what structuralists would refer to as a structure. Technological trajectories are situated in a socio-technical landscape, consisting of a set of deep structural trends. The metaphor ‘landscape’ is chosen because of the literal connotation of relative ‘hardness’ and the material context of society, for example, the material and spatial arrangements of cities, factories, highways and electricity infrastructures. The socio-technical landscape also contains a set of heterogeneous factors, such as oil prices, economic growth, wars, emigration, broad political coalitions, cultural and normative values, environmental problems. The landscape is an external structure or context for interactions of actors. While regimes refer to rules that enable and constrain activities within communities, the ‘socio-technical landscape’ refers to wider technology-external factors. The context of landscape is even harder to change than that of regimes. Landscapes do change, particularly when subject to shocks such as the current Covid-19 crisis but more slowly than regimes (Geels 2002: 1260). The MLP, then, is based on three analytical levels – socio-technical landscapes, socio-technical regimes and niches. These levels are often described as a ‘nested hierarchy’ with niches existing inside of regimes inside of landscapes (Geels and Kemp 2012). Traditionally the literature has been relatively a-spatial in its conceptualization of the MLP (Coenen, Benneworth and Truffer 2012) which means that the implicit scalar ontology of the MLP goes uncommented upon until recently (Smith and Raven 2012). Initially, these nested levels were represented as such in diagrams which show a base layer of small niches feeding into a large and higher regime, which is itself part of a still larger and higher landscape. Diagrams such as this (Figure 2.2) – a diagram that is repeatedly used to illustrate the levels of this form of transition theory – could be viewed as an almost perfect representation of the kind of scalar ontology so roundly condemned by advocates of flat ontologies – MLP theorists used to refer to ‘micro, meso, macro’. Marston et al., for instance, write of a ‘nested hierarchy of differentially sized and bounded spaces’ (Marston, Jones and Woodward 2005: 416) in which we see a horizontal axis of size and vertical axis of importance (see also Merriman 2019: on problematic distinctions between micro and macro mobilities). As Bouzarovski and Haarstad wrote most recently, ‘language of niche, regime and landscape – seemingly geographical metaphors – translates uneasily into geographical scales’ (Bouzarovski and Haarstad 2019: 3). In the early diagram that was used to illustrate MLP the three levels are represented quite literally in scalar terms, although those scales may not map simply and easily into Euclidean spatial dimensions, and



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Figure 2.2  Multiple levels as nested hierarchy (after Geels 2002).

‘wider’, ‘large’ or ‘bigger’ scale change is one of the foundational assumptions of what transition actually is. The niches are pictured as groups of small circles, the regimes as larger circles and the landscape as a singular and larger circle. As we move up vertically the circles become simultaneously larger and fewer in number. In these ontologies it is almost always the largest horizontal scale which is placed at the highest point in the hierarchy. It is the space of structure, whereas the lowest level is the space of agency. Despite the fact that advocates of socio-technical transition theory place innovation at the scale of the niche, it is also the scale which matters least. In the first iterations of MLP, landscape level remains unchanging and inaccessible to the activity at the niche scale (see the upward arrows in the diagram that never reach the landscape directly). As we move from niche to landscape we move from relatively autonomous senses of agency to overbearing senses of structure. As various authors have offered, more socio-relational notions of scale (Bouzarovski and Haarstad 2018), as well as other geographical concepts, have tended to have been circumscribed from some transition theory perspectives originating in the early MLP work (Bridge et al. 2013). Some advocates for MLP approaches contest this link between levels and spatial scales, as well as the apparent rigidity and uni-directional assumptions of Geels and Kemp’s initial approach. Rob Raven and colleagues, for instance, note what they see as a lack of attention to spatial scale within studies of socio-technical transitions (Raven, Schot and Berkhout 2012; Smith and Raven 2012) proposing a spatially attuned ‘multi-scalar MLP’. They note that such studies most often take place at a national scale with relatively little work on transnational networks and connections. They also point out: Indeed, empirically the three levels (. . .) are often implicitly conflated with specific territorial boundaries: regimes tend to be depicted with national features (these being the focus of much empirical research); landscape dynamics with international features; and niches with (sub-) national or local features. (Raven, Schot and Berkhout 2012: 64)

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Despite these implications, Raven and colleagues insist that the three levels of MLP do not need to be conflated with specific scales, and Geels (2011) has been explicit in supporting this critique, especially in the assumptions around hierarchy and the ‘nested’ nature of innovation occurring ‘within’ a particular level. Instead, Raven et al. propose both temporal scales (niches can change more quickly, landscapes relatively slowly) and scales of agency (high degrees of agency in niches and the dominance of structural forces at the landscape level). On the other hand, however, they acknowledge that ‘the very notion of niches assumes specific local conditions that allow particular innovations to emerge’ (Raven, Schot and Berkhout 2012: 67). Theoretically, however, there is no reason to conflate the MLP levels with specific territorial boundaries. The MLP levels refer to processes with different temporal dimensions and modes of structuration that could each have a variety of spatial positionings and reach. In niches, social networks are less extensive, less stable, expectations more fragile and learning processes are less institutionalized than in regimes, but such networks need not be exclusively local (Raven, Schot and Berkhout 2012). Likewise, ‘socio-technical regimes may be transnational in physical extent, in the institutions that constitute them, or in the economic and technological base that supports them, or, conversely, remain regional or local in their spatial reach’ (Raven, Schot and Berkhout 2012: 64). For others, the first diagrams of the MLP assume relatively simplistic and one-way directional flow between innovation at one level and its capacity to make changes at wider and more stubborn and rigid regime and socio-technical landscape levels. Schot and Kanger (2018), in their critique of MLP, focused particularly on regime change as it was initially theorized and complained of a triangulation of ‘unilinearity’ so that regime change assumes that niche changes move upwards at the expense of changes that could operate ‘downwards’ (see also Berkhout, Smith and Stirling 2004). They also worry about the ‘univalency’ of political intentionality assumed within the MLP of political consensus and ‘unidimensionality’, in that the contexts through which change occurs seem overly simplistic. Change could be the product of historical contingencies or direct political action. In short, we do want to be careful not to be dismissive (Schwanen 2018) of more recent developments in the approach or further iterations of this conceptualization by Geels and his collaborators as they have responded to and adopted critique very sympathetically (Figure 2.3). While Geels and Schot (2007) have been explicitly self-critical of the dangers of using figures to articulate concepts and the way they might write out actors, others suggest that they should indeed be seen as ‘partial and selective’ also (Schwanen 2018: 267). Transformation and transition can emerge through the regime itself and destabilize the common assumption that transition is led by niche-level developments (Ghosh and Schot 2019). They also argue that the onus of transition being driven by niche-level innovation may speak to a predominance of Western Global North perspectives that are universalized (Schwanen 2018). In the context of Kolkata where mass public transport is already the most common form of mobility, Ghosh and Schot (2019) identify several different pathways to regime transformation through the modernization of the train, tram and auto-rickshaw



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Figure 2.3  A revised Multi-Level Perspective on transitions (after Geels and Schot (2007) which had been adapted from Geels 2002).

services, partly through changes in the legal, cultural and social norms around the auto-rickshaw driver, use of fuel types and drives towards sustainability and lowering air pollution. The MLP on socio-technical transitions mixes a diverse array of theoretical inputs. Much of the geographic work on transition theory takes as its starting point evolutionary economic geography (Cooke 2008) and evolutionary theories of technical change. Markard et al. define work on sustainability transitions as focused on ‘institutional, organizational, technical, social, and political aspects of far-reaching changes in existing socio-technical systems (e.g., transportation and energy supply) which are related to more sustainable or environmentally friendly modes of production and consumption’ (Markard, Raven and Truffer 2012: 959). It is also easy to see the influence of structuration theory here with the socio-technical regime level constituting the mediating level between structure and agency. But Geels and others are also drawing on science and technology studies and Actor Network Theory. All three levels are more-than-human – combining human

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action with technologies, infrastructures, rules and beliefs. The socio-technical landscape, for instance, includes ‘infrastructure and other physical aspects (such as houses and cities), political ideologies, societal values, beliefs, concerns, the media landscape and macro economic trends’ (Geels and Kemp 2012: 57–8). The landscape, like the regime and the niche, is a socio-technical assemblage. There is a somewhat jarring clash between the centrality of structuration theory with its insistence on the continuing importance of structure and agency on the one hand and the frequent references to Actor Network Theory (with its insistence on ‘flat ontologies’) on the other. Perhaps the clearest thing about the MLP is that it is a model of transition centred on technology. For instance, green innovations and entrepreneurship concerned with energy and transportation infrastructure are receiving increased attention (Spath and Rohracher 2010; Verbong and Geels 2010; McCauley and Stephens 2012; Gibbs and O'Neill 2014). Its advocates are keen to show how this entails some kind of engagement with worlds beyond technology. Geels and colleagues frequently gesture towards the ways in which technology is more than just invented things. Their use of the term ‘technology’ enrols all manner of knowledge and practice as well as cultural norms that help to maintain and solidify technology into a regime, and equally the meanings of mobility which might shape those norms or be shaped by them. As Geels et al. have recently suggested, the social-technical systems that afford societal functions such as mobility can be considered an ‘interdependent and co-evolving mix of technologies, supply chains, infrastructures, markets, regulations, user practices, and cultural meanings’ (Geels et al. 2017: 264). This wider sense of technology is signified by the use of the term ‘socio-technical’ at all levels of the model and is reflected in recent studies, such as those on cycling transitions. Faith Canitez’s (2020) work on Istanbul sees user practices such as cycling habits and routines, alongside the symbolic and cultural norms and meanings surrounding gender, as well as the activities of pro-cycling activist groups, as the harder spatial forms and arrangements such as urban infrastructures that might permit cycling. Despite this desire to embed technology in wider social worlds, however, technologies still appear at the centre of the explanatory model, as does an implicit multi-level naturalization of capitalism which has constituted several other ‘blind spots’, such as around the privileging of perspectives and assumptions at the expense of the Global South, ‘where anti- or non-capitalist logics have informed critiques of “Western” sustainability transitions and related frameworks of progress and development’ (Feola 2020). This has meant an often less-serious exploration of grassroots and community-based organizations who are assumed to have limited spaces or possibilities of alterity in stimulating and driving transition (Feola 2020) when compared to private business or the nation state. In short, the MLP has been remarkably receptive in its integration of critique, concepts and more into a unifying theory. While we will bring aspects of the MLP with us, especially in its sensitivity to the mixes, (mis)alignments and relationality of change, and actors of change, within mobility transition, we follow the ethos of pluralism recently suggested by Hopkins et al. (2020). Set out in the next chapter, we find other spaces for mobility transitions from outside the MLP.



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Political analyses of transition A third broad category of approaches to transition, and mobility transitions in particular, can be categorized as political approaches. These accounts are neither grand historical theories nor primarily empirically focused. Rather they stem from political urgency and political logic. Perhaps the most committed revolutionary commentator on the world of mobility is Ivan Illich. In his essay Energy and Equity he sets out a remarkable vision of a mobility transition rooted in the politics of speed (Illich 1974). Illich’s argument about mobility rests on a larger argument about energy. He insists that high energy use, in all its forms, corrodes social relations and degrades the landscape. He argues for a low energy, slow, low mobility society. Only if there is a low ceiling on per capita energy use, he argues, will there be equity. He demonstrates his general argument about energy with reference to speed, using speed limits as what he calls a ‘critical quantum’ – a point beyond which equity decreases. As speed increases (whatever the mode of transport) then people become less autonomous. ‘Participatory democracy’, he argues, ‘demands low-energy technology, and free people must travel the road to productive social relations at the speed of a bicycle’ (Illich 1974: 8). More energy fed into the transportation system means that more people move faster over a greater range in the course of every day. Everybody’s daily radius expands at the expense of being able to drop in on an acquaintance or walk through the park on the way to work. Extremes of privilege are created at the cost of universal enslavement. An elite packs unlimited distance into a lifetime of pampered travel, while the majority spend a bigger slice of their existence on unwanted trips. The few mount their magic carpets to travel between distant points that their ephemeral presence renders both scarce and seductive, while the many are compelled to trip farther and faster and to spend more time preparing for and recovering from their trips (Illich 1974: 9).

The car, to Illich, is a spectacularly inefficient form of transport. He calculates that the average American male (in 1974) dedicated more than 1,600 hours a year to automobility (including the labour needed to pay for it). This 1,600 hours was used to travel 7,500 miles – an average of less than five miles an hour. This is little different from a society with very limited transport systems and comparatively little spent on transportation. In high mobility, high energy economies, transport plays a greater role in the production of social space. Motorways expand, driving wedges between neighbors and removing fields beyond the distance a farmer can walk. Ambulances take clinics beyond the few miles a sick child can be carried. The doctor will no longer come to the house, because vehicles have made the hospital into the right place to be sick. Once heavy trucks reach a village high in the Andes, part of the local market disappears. Later, when the high school arrives at the plaza along with the paved

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Moving Towards Transition highway, more and more of the young people move to the city, until not one family is left which does not long for a reunion with someone hundreds of miles away, down on the coast. (Illich 1974: 11)

The high energy, high speed transport system turns people into passengers caught in a system they cannot escape. Instead of rebelling against the system, these passengers demand more – more roads, more cars, faster and ‘better’ forms of public transit, not realizing that this is all part of the same energy/speed system. And this mobility system is massively unjust as high speeds for small minorities continuously produce negative outcomes for the majority (Cresswell 2010). High speed capitalizes a few peoples time at an enormous rate but, paradoxically, it does this at a high cost in time for all. In Bombay, only a very few people own cars. They can reach a provincial capital in one morning and make the trip once a week. Two generations ago, this would have been a week-long trek once a year. They now spend more time on more trips. But these same few also disrupt, with their cars, the traffic flow of thousands of bicycles and pedicabs that move through downtown Bombay at a rate of effective locomotion that is still superior to that of downtown Paris, London, or New York. (Illich 1974: 13)

To Illich transport is a particular kind of monopoly. Not the monopoly of a company but the monopoly of a system. In a high energy, high speed world so much of that world is given over to moving. The roads, parking lots, train stations, tracks, oil wells, processing plants and factories are just the start. All of space is arranged in accordance with this monopoly system so that other systems – particularly the system of self-propelled mobility (now called ‘active transport’) are negatively impacted. Everything, from the location of your house to the place you shop, is a result of the monopoly system known as mechanized transport and what John Urry has described as the ‘lock-in’ to carbon forms of mobile (mainly automobile) life, which has provided its producers, suppliers and consumers with increasing returns on their investments (Urry 2008). And while the appearance is one of more and more convenience it actually means more and more time spent getting from A to B – hence the average speed of less than five miles an hour. What appears to be choice is actually compulsory consumption. In Illich’s world transition is about challenging this radical monopoly in a radical way. He insists on the need for the demystification of speed which includes limited public expenditure on any form of transportation that does not support equal mutual access to time and space. Liberation (a radical form of transition) has to be a decision made by government. Liberation which comes cheap to the poor will cost the rich dear, but they will pay its price once the acceleration of their transportation systems grinds traffic to a halt. A concrete analysis of traffic betrays the truth underlying the energy crisis: the impact of industrially packaged quanta of energy on the social environment tends to be degrading, exhausting, and enslaving, and these effects come into play even before those which threaten the pollution of the physical environment and



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the extinction of the race. The crucial point at which these effects can be reversed is not, however, a matter of deduction, but of decision. (Illich 1974: 29)

A similarly forward looking and political (with a small p) perspective emerges from the ‘Transition movement’. The particular transition that is at the heart of the movement is the transition to a post-peak oil world. This is seen as a fact of life that will force transitions of one kind or another anyway (Hopkins 2008; Aiken 2012). The Transition movement also responds to the threat of climate change and the kinds of catastrophes that climate change involves. The thinking of the Transition movement is that it is best to be prepared for both of these eventualities. The movement focuses on producing local environments that are resilient to inevitable change. It originates from the work of Rob Hopkins, a practitioner and teacher of ‘permaculture’ (Hopkins 2008, 2011). He expanded his interest in sustainable living while living in Totnes, in Devon, England. Totnes became the first Transition Town in 2006. In 2019 there are nearly 1,000 transition initiatives worldwide. ‘Transition culture’ (the term for the wider system of beliefs, meanings and practices that Transition Towns are embedded in) is determinedly localist. It focuses on small-scale practices within defined areas. It forms part of a critique of globalization in general and, particularly, global economic dependency (Mason and Whitehead 2012). While mobility is not foremost among their concerns, their general philosophical orientation is towards relocalization. Practically, this means emphasizing locally appropriate organic and biodynamic agriculture, eating local diets, building out of local materials, practising local consensual forms of democracy, developing local currencies through local economic transfer schemes (LETS) and generally acting against the incorporation of place into wider global networks. The movement is thus orientated towards dramatically reduced mobilities of food, energy, capital and materials as well as people. Transition, to this movement, is about starting and staying where you are. Being local. The agents for transition are communities. Governments, Hopkins argues, will be too late and individuals too ineffective (Hopkins 2011). The umbrella term for the kind of transition that the Transition movement envisages is ‘(re)localization’. The Transition movement is certainly not the only form of relocalization, but the development of local alternatives to global systems has a long history of what David Harvey has called ‘militant particularism’ (Harvey 1996). Any number of intentional communities, communes and the like can be seen as examples of this and there are many proponents of localization strategies outside of the Transition Town movement (Trainer 1995; Cavanagh et al. 2004; Murphy 2008). Contemporary versions of (re)localization are a specific response to conditions of economic globalization in the twenty-first century as well as postpeak oil and climate change. The core of localization is a claim that economic decisions should focus not on profit maximization and economic efficiency to the exclusion of all else but on meeting needs as locally as possible (North 2010: 587). Murphy, for instance, looks to a reversion to life before suburbanization with reductions in food consumption, energy use and transportation of both people and goods (Murphy 2008). (Re)localization strategies for transition generally involve producing as much as possible locally and thus reducing the total miles of transport involved in production and consumption, developing as diverse

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economies as locally as possible and paying attention to the material consequences of networks – particularly in relation to oil use and carbon emissions. As transport is the fastest-growing producer of greenhouse gases, a focus on the local promises to contribute to both reduced oil use and decreased carbon emissions. The focus on relocalization in the Transition movement has led to critiques from the left about exactly what kinds of transition are being envisaged. Mason and Whitehead give an account of the objections of a group known as the Trapese Collective who argue that ‘only when the rules of the game are changed can carbon dioxide concentrations and all the associated problems be truly tackled . . . it isn’t really possible to decouple economic growth from carbon emissions’ (quoted in Mason and Whitehead 2012: 499). The Trapese Collective responded in a positive way to the impetus behind Transition Towns. They broadly agreed with their objectives and attempted to engage with them in the community of Rossport, County Mayo, Ireland. They suggested to the TT group there that they might want to join the struggle against Shell who were building a high-pressure pipeline through the community. They were told that this was an inappropriate topic as it did not draw on positive energies shared by a local community. In other words, the TT community did not want to get involved in Political struggles (with a big P). This is the point of the Trapese Collective critiques made in their document The Rocky Road to Real Transition.5 How can we talk about climate change and peak oil and not deal with politics or side with communities struggling against the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure? If we want to avoid catastrophic climate chaos we must leave the majority of remaining fossil fuels where they are – in the ground. Yes, finding ways of dramatically reducing our personal consumption and demand is one part of this, but it is only one side of the equation. It seems naïve to assume that companies such as Shell and Stat Oil, BP or Esso will easily give up and go home or fundamentally change what they do while it is still so enormously profitable.6

To the Trapese Collective, a ‘real’ transition will only be possible when we move away from an economic system (capitalism) that relies on endless growth. Transition, it is argued, needs to be understood as a politicized concept, with attendant histories, meanings and effects, and this means that there will be losers as well as winners. A cosy notion of ‘sustainable development’ that appears to benefit everyone is not, in this view, realistic. Another important version of transition is The Great Transition, a document produced by the New Economics Foundation (NEF) in the UK. The document was written in response to both the banking crisis of 2008 and the twin threats of post-peak oil and global heating. While forms of localization are key to its universal prescription for a saner economic system not based on endless growth, it is not a version of transition based only in one town or several small communities. In its account of what the world might look like if the transition actually happened, mobility issues play a prominent role. Rather than being technology focused, the transition envisaged by NEF is comprehensive, and thus mobility transitions are just part of a wider transition in which people work flexible and rewarding jobs,



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wealth is redistributed, people are generally happier, products are sustainable and ethically produced, and ‘those of us choosing the early morning run enjoy fresh air in our lungs and clear paths as dramatic reductions in traffic have transformed city air and streets – the result of a successful shift to mass transit systems and the new popularity of walking and cycling’ (Spratt and Murphy 2009: 9–10). This is just one of a series of visions for future mobilities that pepper the document showing the importance of ‘imaginaries’ for mobility transitions. They go on to note, Flexibility and technology have massively reduced our need to travel for work. The hours gained and stress lines postponed make us more effective and committed to the work we do, particularly as our successful organisation is likely to be one creating real social and environmental value. But these changes are about more than work. Social networking software has thrown us together with new people – our desktops give us a global network, but also connects us in new – live – human ways to the communities in which we live. (Spratt and Murphy 2009: 10) We can take some time out late morning to plan our summer trip. While the big increase in the cost of fossil fuels has seen international travel become a much rarer experience, it tends to be much better – and longer – when we do head off on our travels. With more leisure time and good cycle and public transport links, low-impact local excursions are a much-loved part of many people’s lives. But with our experience of both cities and countryside transformed by investment in really great public spaces – whether it’s the park or local recreation ground, the village hall, local pub or café, theatre or cinema – we feel less need to get away in order to unwind. (Spratt and Murphy 2009: 10–11) ... A journey to work? Problems are as big as we make them: it used to be said that we wouldn’t give up our cars. Cars were bought; roads were built; resources (including our own wallets) were burnt in pursuit of a very particular form of mobility that becomes less enjoyable and more polluting the more people take it up. But by raising revenue from polluting and inefficient fossil-fuel-run cars to invest in alternatives, governments were able to completely transform people’s experience of cities and towns. Owning and driving cars to meet most of our mobility needs has come to seem simply eccentric. Lifespan and quality of life have dramatically increased. Transport options range from trains, trams and quiet clean buses, to on-demand rural shared taxis and simple car-share schemes that meet the range of needs we have throughout a year. (Spratt and Murphy 2009: 11)

The Great Transition envisages transitions in a holistic way. These extended extracts show how mobilities play a key role in the transition, but it is much more than a mobility transition. The implication is that transition policies that just focus on mobility are unlikely to be satisfactory. If they are embedded in a wider range of transitions at scales ranging from the local square to the globe then, by implication, they are more likely to be successful.

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Sustainable mobility Finally, one of the most practically applicable notions of transition has emerged through the concept of sustainable mobility. The notion has found purchase not only in academia and fields such as transport geography but as a key framework for developing mobility transitions within urban and transport policy especially within developing world and Global South contexts. It has also propagated within wider networks of cities but also among consultants, think tanks and policy institutes. Banister has proposed a ‘sustainable mobility paradigm’ which appears partly an analytical model for investigating cities, as well as a conceptual frame through which urban planning, transport policy and more could be based on what he identifies as ‘actions to reduce the need to travel (less trips), to encourage modal shift, to reduce trip lengths and to encourage greater efficiency in the transport system. A sustainable transport system means that we will travel less’ (Banister 2011: 1541). Banister’s approach is partly informed by the assumption, often favoured by transport geographers, that mobility is a kind of ‘derived demand’ and that ‘accessibility’ should be favoured over, or even replace, mobility as a central conceit of a low-carbon future. Banister’s approach might be compared with Catherine Morency who put forward a definition of sustainable mobility, in a reference to the Winnipeg’s Centre for Sustainable Transport. According to her, an optimal system of sustainable mobility is one that ‘enables individuals and societies to satisfy their needs for access to activity areas in complete safety, in a way that is compatible with the health of mankind, and ecosystems, and which is also balanced fairly between different generations’. It is a system to be achieved with ‘reasonable costs, that will operate efficiently and that will offer all populations a choice between different transport alternatives’ (Morency 2013: npn). Again, in this context, mobility is a way to satisfy a particular demand for access to activities. Although Banister favours an approach which includes mobility as a ‘valued activity’ and argues that a ‘substantial amount of leisure travel is undertaken for its own sake and the activity of travelling is valued’ (2008: 74), it doesn’t necessarily move very far away from such an assumption which relegates mobility to an output as opposed to a social activity imbued with meaning and purpose in its own right. Furthermore, such an approach, which has a great degree of plurality across the field, could be compared to an approach known as ‘Avoid, Shift, Improve’ which beyond sustainable mobility has achieved vast policy circulation and impact especially in urban development and transport planning contexts within the Global South and associated with international development. One of the major emphases among these frameworks is to go beyond the fixation on the wider ‘systems’ Morency and Banister and alongside them MLP advocates have been interested in. Rather they try to find ways to encourage more optimum decisions by consumers who might be shifted or nudged into cleaner forms of mobility (see also Holden et al. 2020). In this context, transition is achieved by optimizing individual choices through behavioural approaches that try to shift and ‘nudge’ personal mobility.



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Conclusions In this chapter, we have explored the idea of transition, taking a journey through approaches to transition ranging from grand theories of epochal change through largely empirical accounts to arguments based on political urgency and logic. Zelinsky’s Mobility Transition Hypothesis provides a grand theory of mobility transition from circulation to international migration as it changes over long periods of time. Its primary focus is on the movement of people and transitions occur at large scales and across long sweeps of time. The drivers of transition in Zelinsky are large-scale (in terms of MLP transition literature, ‘landscape’) changes in things such as agricultural systems and land tenure. The body of research it is mainly centred on is migration theory and demography. Metz’s argument about a fourth era of travel is similarly sweeping – dividing human history into four eras. Rather than being centred on migration and demography the account is focused on the body of research we might call transport. The driver of transition is the declining utility of using an automobile. It is, in Metz’s argument, becoming less rational to increase car use. The writers drawing on the MLP on transition tradition centred technology in their initial arguments focusing on the relationship between changes at ‘niche’ levels and potential changes higher up, although they have later complicated these levels and the position of the technological in relation to the social considerably. The arguments of the Transition Town movement and the wider manifesto of the NEP are about broadly new ways of living that include less travel as part of their strategies of (re)localization. Technology is present but far removed from the centre of their arguments. It is quite clear in each case that simply transitioning to new technologies is insufficient and perhaps even unnecessary. It is often as much about moving back to traditional technologies as it is about forward to new ones. The understanding of transitions in grand theories such as the demographic transition or the postsocialist transitions focuses on deep-rooted structural forces at work. Critiques of both liberalization approaches to post-socialist transition and the demographic transition theory point to the dangers of thinking in only one way about transition when geographic variability and context-dependency need to be taken into account. Almost all of these point towards change at what MLP theorists might call the landscape level as the drivers for transition, but they also indicate what the MLP proponents have begun to call ‘alignment’ within a transition pathway – that is change is exceedingly difficult if movement towards positive transition is not complemented and is contradicted by different policies and practices towards transition across different levels, scales, spaces and actors. It is the argument of this book that ideas from the mobilities turn in the humanities and social sciences can complement existing approaches and illuminate mobility transitions in new ways. This is the topic of Chapter 3.

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CChapter 3 A MOBILITIES APPROACH TO MOBILITY TRANSITIONS

Introduction It is a core argument of this book that mobility transitions are about far more than adopting alternative forms of technology or low-carbon mobility practices. While these are often (but not always) necessary, they are seldom sufficient, nor are they sufficient to understand how and why mobility transition may or may not occur. Both conceptually and practically, mobility transitions will involve changes across whole mobility cultures – or constellations of mobility. Such change necessitates radical transformations in the ways we live and organize ourselves. Mobility transitions will involve changes in movement, meaning and practice in integrated ways. They also necessitate a focus on power and politics that has sometimes been missing from transition studies. In this chapter we outline an approach to mobility transition informed by the interdisciplinary perspective of mobility studies – an approach that insists that we start with a focus on mobility itself. The ‘mobility turn’ or ‘new mobilities paradigm’ emerged at the turn of the century as work in a number of disciplines including sociology (Urry 2000; Sheller and Urry 2006), geography (Cresswell 2001, 2006) and anthropology (Malkki 1992; Clifford 1997) coalesced around the centrality of the mobility of humans, non-humans and ideas to understanding culture and society. Central to this turn was the observation that while mobility had been studied in a diverse array of disciplines and sub-disciplines – ranging from transport geography to migration studies, diasporic literary studies to travelling theory – mobility itself had never been adequately accounted for. Instead, mobility was, at best, taken for granted and, at worst, held to be a kind of dysfunction in a system – described, for instance, as ‘dead time’ (Sheller and Urry 2006). Contrary to this view, work in the mobilities turn focuses on mobility as a form of spatiality that is productive of ‘society’, is filled with meaning and is crucial to the operations of power. Mobility is not a leftover from more important processes; it is central to a proper understanding of society in the twenty-first century. Over the last twenty years or so, the mobility turn has proven to be a robust field of study across the humanities and social sciences with several journals, textbooks and stateof-the-art collections (Urry 2007; Adey 2009; Adey et al. 2013). The recognition that mobility is a central facet of more-than-human life has led to its uptake in

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design (Jensen 2013), literary studies (Aguiar, Mathieson and Pearce 2019) and philosophy (Nail 2019) among other fields. It is not our intent here to survey the whole of this field and that has been done elsewhere (Cresswell 2011, 2012, 2014; Merriman 2015, 2016, 2017). Our focus here is on what such an approach might tell us about mobility transitions. Given the wide uptake of mobility studies across disciplines, it is strange that approaches to transitions have not engaged with the mobilities field more than they have. Certainly, mobility theorists have begun to enact such a conversation (Sheller 2011; Urry 2012; Nikolaeva et al. 2019). Transport geographers have also begun to link mobilities work to transition theory (Schwanen 2013). What has been less evident are scholars who advocate the multi-level perspective (MLP) on socio-technical transition engaging in an extended way with mobilities scholarship. One recent comprehensive survey of transition theory (with 360 references!) only mentions one recognizably mobilities-based paper (Kohler et al. 2019). To be sure, transition scholars are not only focused on mobility. Rather, they explore all kinds of transitions to sustainable futures. But given that the ways we move are becoming the leading cause of carbon emissions in advanced economies it is surprising that so little attention is paid to mobility scholarship. And there is another reason why MLP theorists might look to mobilities scholarship: it addresses head-on the main forms of critique that MLP has been subjected to – its lack of sufficient attention to meaning, practice, geography and power. One key insight of the mobilities turn that is worth underlining at the outset is that mobility is valued. It often represents a meaningful part of everyday life. While technocratic approaches to mobility (in traditional forms of transport geography and some streams of MLP for instance) see mobility as a measurable variable to be appropriately manipulated and engineered, mobility studies insists on recognizing that the ways in which we move, our mobile practices, are filled with significance and laden with power. Even a form of mobility as widely disparaged as commuting looks very different when we acknowledge that commuters may find their time on the train, or in a car, to be an important part of their day when they can decompress between work and home, daydream, make lists or plan the day ahead (Butcher 2011; Edensor 2011). Transport planners have long approached commute times and distances as things to be reduced – as inefficiencies in the spatial system. This was true well before environmental concerns had the prominence they do now. It would be folly to continue to make this mistake. While it is true that one of the most effective ways to move towards lower-carbon emissions from mobility is to move less, this simple observation overlooks the fact that travel is far more than a measurable variable. It is an important meaning-making activity that plays a central role in the constitution of social hierarchies in twenty-first-century life. Mobility theory is an approach that takes technology seriously but does not elevate it to a central position. Clearly, technology is part of the story of mobility transitions, but a theoretical focus on mobility is not only a story about technology. One aspect of mobility transition, as we have seen, is simply moving less. This, in itself, does not need to rely on new technology. Another aspect of mobility transition is to focus on so-called active transportation – a new term for walking and cycling. These do not



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involve new technologies – but rather the reversion to old technologies (the bicycle) or minimal technologies (walking for the able-bodied). Technology is only part of this story. Thinking about mobility transitions in the light of mobility theory means more than thinking about transformations in transport and associated technologies. It even means thinking with and beyond the technological systems that individual technologies are embedded in. It means considering all forms of movement, including corporeal movement, the movement of things, virtual mobilities, the mobilities of ideas and imaginative mobilities (Urry 2007). Transitions to low-carbon mobility futures will involve, and are perhaps best scrutinized through a perspective that examines, constellations of mobility. By constellations of mobility we mean perceived arrangements of forms and patterns of physical movement, meanings and narratives generated by and productive of these movements, and characteristic mobile practices (Cresswell 2010; Breen 2011; Vannini 2011; Ting 2018). The concept nods to the use of the term ‘constellations’ used by Walter Benjamin to describe the way we can impugn patterns to spatial arrangements of things such as stars without resorting to a rigid ‘system’ or ‘structure’. The concept recognizes the relational nature of both the arrangements of things and the position of the observer in relation to the observed. These relations are themselves liable to change – they are mobile (Benjamin 1977, 1999). The concept is also informed by Henri Lefebvre’s triadic approach to the production of space which he mobilizes to understand the politics of urban spatiality. Here we loosely follow the ways in which Lefebvre throws existing ‘concrete’ space, ideas and representations of space, and spatial practices into productive and relational tension (Lefebvre 1991; Soja 1996; Massey 2005). In each case, we are interested in the focus on relationality that the concepts give us. In addition, thinking of transition as a move from one constellation of movements, meanings and practices to another rests on the recognition that mobility, like space, is socially produced (Cresswell 2001). While many things are socially produced, and the idea of social constructionism is overused and often banal (Hacking 1999), mobility is a special kind of socially produced thing. It is a necessary social construct. What this means is that while any form of more-than-human mobility is socially produced, it remains the case that mobility itself is an essential component of what it is to be human on planet earth. Mobility is something we have to continually produce and reproduce and in this sense, it is necessary. Future mobility transitions are part of the social production of mobility and need to be understood as such. Addressing mobility transitions from mobility studies means a consideration of physical movement alongside meaning of movement and practices of movement (drawing on Cresswell 2006, 2010), and all in the context of power. In the remainder of this chapter we consider each of these in turn.

Movement The basic fact of physical movement is the starting point for thinking about mobility and about transitions to different mobilities. We are talking about

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people and/with things in motion. The focus here is not primarily on transitions to low-carbon transportation as such (for many, this is the default objective). By centring movement, we can explore its relationality. Not abstract, absolute motion through abstract, absolute physical space but rather relational movement where moving more-than-humans is always considered in relation to other moving and stationary things (see Massey 2005). A focus on quantifiable, abstract notions of movement has been central to many visions of sustainable mobilities. Movement comes with a number of characteristics which include route, speed, frequency of repetition and direction among others. Some of the most seemingly straightforward strategies for carbon reduction involve altering these basic dimensions of movement. We can follow different routes, move less fast, less frequently and in a different direction. The moral insistence on less flying is instructive here. Carbon emissions from flying are growing fast both in absolute terms and as a percentage of total emissions from transport. Taking fewer flights would undoubtedly result in lower emissions. Not moving at all is not the only option. Taking the train instead (different speed, different route and different frequency of travel) would be significantly less harmful to the environment.1 In absolute terms, then, transitions to sustainable mobility can be enacted by developing ways of moving less in clear and measureable ways. If people take fewer flights or live closer to work or work at home, then we will produce fewer carbon emissions.2 The same applies to the things we consume. The closer we are to the sites where commodities are produced, the lower the carbon emissions involved in consuming them. Localization projects – such as Transition Towns – are examples of holistic approaches to transition that advocate for less movement – mostly with regard to the movement of things (Pink 2009; Mayer and Knox 2010). There are other forms of transitions in movement. Moving more slowly is one of them. Cargo ships, for instance, have cut their carbon emissions by 40 per cent simply by cutting their cruising speed in half to twelve knots.3 Another movement-based transition is to change routes. Aircraft follow established routes in the sky through zones which are, in the main, regulated by nation states. This means that their routes from A to B are rarely direct. If they were free to take direct routes, it is estimated that carbon emissions could fall by 10 per cent in the EU under the Single European Sky initiative (Dray et al. 2010; Calleja Crespo and Leon 2011).4 All of these are examples of reductions in distances, routes and/or speeds of absolute movement that would result in lower-carbon emissions. Despite the beguiling simplicity of moving less (more slowly, less frequently, shorter distances, different routes), it is important to note that movement does not occur in abstract space. Movement occurs in a social landscape. Movement happens in spaces which have been made to encourage or discourage particular forms, speeds and frequencies of movement. Any consideration of movement has to take on board the socio-material assemblages of infrastructure which literally constrain mobilities into particular forms. Movement, even when in the air, does not take place in abstract space unmarked by social forces. Urban form in the contemporary world have become more dispersed in a way that both results



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from cultures of (auto)mobility and ensures their continuance. Dispersed cities are one form that has, historically, encouraged high-carbon and privatized forms of long-distance private commuting (Dobson 2015). For Bridge et al., ‘Spatial lock-in can be a major challenge to those seeking to achieve a low carbon transition via encouraging consumer-drivers to switch transport mode’ (2013: 339). Similarly, Bouzarovski and Haarstad find that, in some instances, the legacies of material infrastructural mobilities matter also (2019). Creaking large-scale infrastructures of centralized district heating inherited from socialism, while connecting cities together as a ‘connective tissue’ of sorts, work against the production of transitions towards energy efficiency or transformation because of their high upkeep and cost that push people into energy poverty. At the level of the individual street, we can see how street design works against the uptake of active transport such as walking and cycling. Even attempts to introduce cycle lanes often fail to separate them adequately from automobile traffic in such a way that they are, or appear to be, unsafe and uninviting to potential cyclists (Hull and O’Holleran 2014; Spotswood et al. 2015). In addition to recognizing that movement does not occur in abstract space, it is also important to recognize that movement is not undertaken by abstract people (defined as ‘PAX’ by transport planners (Budd 2011)) but by embodied and socially coded beings. Consider, for instance, the seemingly simple demand to fly less. While this demand makes sense in a general way – flying less will result in reduced carbon emissions – it takes no account of who is flying and why they are flying. Indeed, these demands are reaching peak volume at the point where more people than ever are flying – at least until the Covid-19 pandemic. Discount airlines have made it possible for relatively less well-off people in the developed and developing world to fly for the first time (Hirsh 2016). Until relatively recently flying was the preserve of the rich. In global terms it still is. Should those of us who have had the privilege of flying often demand of those who have not that they fly less? And what happens when we fill the miles travelled by PAX with content? What happens when we know that one journey is for a vacation while another is for a business meeting and yet another is for an academic conference? What if we know that one journey is the sixth such journey taken by an individual in a given year while another is the first? Similar questions could be (and should be) asked of any form of movement. Seeing movement as simply one component of mobility allows us to open up the discussion of transition to arenas of meaning and power that are a necessary part of any discussion of transition.

Meaning Mobility transitions are a cultural issue. It is necessary to centre how the ways in which we move are connected to meaning. Thinking of mobility purely or predominantly in terms of physical movement tends to obscure the significances we give to moving. It is surely no accident that the journey or voyage is central

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to the history of human storytelling – whether it is an epic voyage such as in the Odyssey or a day’s walk in the city, as in Joyce’s Ulysses. Mobility plays a key role in the origins of both poems and novels. While these observations seem to be a long way from contemporary concern with carbon emissions, it is our contention that the two are linked. In everyday life, as in literature, mobility is often experienced as a meaningful human endeavour. We can speak of ‘mobility cultures’ (Klinger, Kenworthy and Lanzendorf 2013) or ‘senses of mobility’ (a mobile equivalent of ‘sense of place’ (Jensen 2009; Beyazit 2013)). The ways that we move have been coded as cosmopolitanism, adventure, progress and a host of other important attributes and narratives. These meanings are historically and geographically variable. In earlier eras of comparatively low mobility it was frequently seen as suspicious and a sign of failure rather than as a sign of success. For some people, such as refugees or the homeless, this is still the case. If we return to the current discussions of ‘flight shaming’, and as we will see later, the shaming of the commuter who chooses the car at rush hour in the Netherlands, we can see the power inherent in meaning transitions in the world of mobility. The very idea of shame refers to deeply embodied senses of meaning – the kind of cultural resonances that can make us blush (Probyn 2005). Air travel historically comes freighted with positive cultural values of success, adventure, cosmopolitanism and romance, as has car travel. A quick look at the contents of an in-flight magazine will tell you a lot about the kind of life you are being interpolated into as a flyer. Car advertisements are perhaps as revealing. You do not need to be a trained semiotician. Flight shaming involves challenging these narratives and giving you, the flyer, a different set of semiotic baggage. While raising taxes on flying would certainly reduce the number of flights taken and thus the carbon emissions produced by aviation, it is also the case that the production of new meanings for flight is already having a similar effect. Comparing frequentflyer status at academic conferences has ceased to be a thing. In terms of a transition to sustainable mobilities, cultural meanings may be among the hardest things to transition. Mimi Sheller has argued for the importance of cultural inertia in how we conceptualize transition, requiring the activiation of ‘deep cultural structures’ (Sheller 2012: 181). Clearly, culture refers to more than meaning. The world of meaning is thoroughly entangled with the world of practice that is discussed in the following section. Sheller’s essay opens up the possibility that there might be such things as ‘cultural niches’, protected spaces where new meanings and/or practices might be allowed to emerge that may have the capacity to filter up to what MLP theorists call regime level. She considers the possibility of an MLP on ‘cultural transition’, which includes ‘cultural niches’, ‘cultural regimes’ and ‘cultural landscapes’. Sheller’s cultural niches can be thought of as ‘counter systemic spaces’ in which alternative mobility cultures are formed – cultures where forms of moving such as biking or walking emerge alongside anti-consumerist ideologies (the alternative to in-flight magazines). In these niches, alternative narratives about the automobile (as polluting, as wasteful, etc.) are generated. Examples include bicycle-friendly cities, Transition Towns, car-share schemes and a host of other



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small-scale developments not primarily focused on transitions to new technology. All of these occur within a dominant landscape of automobility that includes the car but also the networks of work and leisure that necessitate mobility, freedom and individuality discourses. For Sheller, Car use (or the use of alternative means of transport) is never simply about rational economic choices made by individual ‘consumers’, but is as much about irrational aesthetic, emotional and sensory responses to driving (or passengering or walking) at the niche level; locked-in, or at least relatively durable, dominant cultures and practices at the regime level; and the normalization of wider sets of cultural practices, networks and discourses which act as master frames and shape material cultures at the landscape level. (2012: 186)

Following Sheller, we argue that a transition away from carbon-intensive mobility needs to be a wider cultural transition. A move away from a cultural emphasis on individualism and autonomous mobilities, for instance, may be more important than any technological advances. These cultural forms of stability appear shockingly hard to change, however. It is much easier to imagine transitions percolating up from protected niches than it is to imagine more widespread change. A cultural transition must also mean the wide array of ways in which mobility transitions are represented, portrayed and given meaning. Whether through transition models, stories, narratives, policies, adverts, films or literature, mobility transitions are made significant and tied to potent symbols, metaphors and meanings – from portrayals of cleaner futures to much more dystopic imaginations. Such representations, we suggest, are crucial in a variety of ways to how mobility transitions might be communicated and conveyed, packaged up and consumed, and, significantly, to garnering, or even closing down, opinion and participation. Meaning, like movement, is relational. The cultural significance given to flying in airline magazines, the narrative of wealth, success and cosmopolitanism is given extra weight by the invisibility of its possible others. One possible alternative narrative is a life of immobility – of being stuck, static, stationary, which is even possible when living highly mobile lifestyles (Straughan and Bissell 2020). Such a person, we might assume, is not worldly wise, perhaps parochial and limited. Another alternative narrative is a life of mundane mobility, people not travelling as well as you are. Such relational meaning-making is encapsulated well by Zygmunt Bauman’s use of the figures of the ‘tourist’ and the ‘vagabond’ to explore the structured relations between movement, meaning and the ways such meaningful movements are embodied. The first travel at will, get much fun from their travel (particularly if travelling first class or using private aircraft), are cajoled or bribed to travel and welcomed with smiles and open arms when they do. The second travel surreptitiously, often illegally, sometimes paying more for the crowded steerage of a stinking unseaworthy boat than others pay for business-class gilded luxuries – and are

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Bauman’s relational construct of the tourist and the vagabond illustrates both movements that are relationally constituted (the vagabond travels to service the movements of the tourist) and meanings that are relationally mobilized (the meaning of tourism gets some of its glamour from the meaning of vagabondage). The meanings and movements are themselves related. While Bauman is not focused on transition, his work is suggestive of the role of meaning in a relational mobilities approach to transition. While the world of meaning plays a key role at the level of individual mobility choices in an everyday context, it is also the case that wider cultural narratives impact the way transitions are conceptualized at a wider scale. A post-colonial mobilities (Sheller 2003) critique of the developmental transition and modernization narratives mentioned in Chapter 2 could be applied here, revealing a highly westernized notion of ‘developmental time’ through what James Ferguson has called, in the context of Africa, the ‘magic of “transition”’ (Ferguson 2006, see also Green-Simms 2017). Mobility is central to these narratives. In dominant Western narratives, transportation and communications are commonly supposed to lead to political democracies, secularization, scientific rationalism, etc. These meanings (and the particular logic of transition that they entail) exist in friction with the meanings and narratives associated with sustainability. Indeed, the most common narrative that has to be dealt with in a transition to low-carbon futures is the narrative of economic growth and success – that is often reconfigured as ‘economic sustainability’ in order to muddy the waters. Indeed, when we first spoke to officials in Canada for this project, Stephen Harper was still prime minister and it was a conservative government. The only way that the word ‘sustainability’ entered into official discourse was as a reference to economic growth in a capitalist economy. References to environmental sustainability of global warming or climate change were more or less forbidden – and certainly written out of policy. The world of meaning is clearly entwined with the world of movement. At the level of individual journeys we freight our travels with significance that is tied to the routes we take or refuse, the modes of transport we choose and the ways in which we experience our travels. What expressive images pull at the heart strings to elicit the guilt of mobility’s excess; remind us of the thrill of travel as a sensory experience; shock us with what Urry has called elsewhere the ‘dark futures’ of mobility (2007); potentially immerse us in the atmospheres of progressive and new mobile lives; or inadvertently reproduce all kinds of inequalities and marginalizations along the axes of disability, gender, class, religion or race? Some of these different meanings and alternative imaginations of low-carbon mobility may surface through participatory, aesthetic and sensing practices that arouse particular awareness of moving and travelling differently (see Engelmann and McCormack 2018 on Studio Saraceno’s Aerosolar).



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Practice In addition to meaning, the other element of a cultural approach to transition is practice (Watson 2012). Practice refers to the often-routinized things people (with the help of various animate and inanimate non-humans) do and the ways in which they do them. To many social scientists it is in practice that society and culture are produced, reproduced, resisted and transformed (de Certeau 1984; Bourdieu 1990; Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina and Savigny 2001). Mobility clearly involves a set of practices that are fundamental to the conduct of everyday life – itself a key conceptual domain of contemporary social and cultural enquiry. Walking, running, cycling, driving and passengering are all kinds of mobile practice. They all implicate our bodies in important and different ways, and they are all experienced in both conscious and unconscious ways. We do mobility. Given that mobility is embodied and experienced differently in different places and at different times, it should not come as a surprise that accounts of transition need to take practice seriously. It is instructive to consider the difference practice makes for mobility transition when compared to energy transition. The energy sector has experienced a relatively quick transition to more sustainable forms of production. This is one of the reasons that the transport sector is now the largest emitter of carbon in many advanced economies. For most of us, practising energy means turning lights, ovens, central heating or air conditioning on and off. These practices are more or less the same regardless of how the energy is produced. We flick a switch and the light comes on whether or not the energy is produced by a wind turbine or a coal-fired power station. Our practice is identical. Moving, on the other hand, is almost entirely bound up in how we experience it. Being alone in a car is experienced in radically different ways from walking, cycling or taking a bus. Practice is at once more central to mobility transition and more intractable. Regardless of what sector we are thinking about, it is of little surprise that one important strand of transition theory has come from researchers interested in practice and everyday life (Shove and Walker 2007, 2010; Hargreaves, Longhurst and Seyfang 2013). Theorists of practice believe that the focus on niche technology development and socio-technical systems (in MLP) on the one hand or policy development on the other are limited approaches and that the time is now ‘for exploring other social scientific, but also systematic theories of change’ (Shove and Walker 2007: 768). Elizabeth Shove and Gordon Walker argue that a focus on practice in work on transition reorients our attention to one that is thoroughly social. The space where electric vehicles are being produced is likely to be the wrong place to look for transitions to sustainability. Rather, they suggest, we should look to everyday life. Practices to Shove and Walker are the ‘sites in which systems and behaviours interact’ which are ‘ordering and orchestrating entities in their own right’ (2010: 471). Shove and Walker use the practice of the twice-daily shower replacing the weekly bath in the UK and argue that this did not happen in some kind of ‘niche’ – but instead involved the space of an assemblage of actors including

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bathroom technologies (material elements), repertoires of meaning (hygiene) and conventions of bodily knowledge (what they also call competences). The transition occurred because of a confluence of practice and meanings. They see transition as the horizontal circulation of elements of practice that, at some point, cohere into a recognizable new element of everyday life. This transition was not in any way planned but happened nonetheless. They make a similar case for the management of traffic in London’s ‘congestion zone’ (Shove and Walker 2010). Reduced congestion and pollution, increased cycling and a decrease in accidents are all associated with the Congestion Zone that was introduced in London in 2003. These, the authors argue, were the result of an accumulation of a multitude of practices in and around the area within which the policy – the cordon, the charge, the information about the scheme – mingled within a living system of practices. These transformations were as much about the ‘consumers’ (those undertaking their everyday lives) as they were about the producers (the policymakers). The problem with managing transitions, for Shove and Walker, is not enrolling more actors in the process but enabling meaningful recognition that consumers and others are already involved in reproducing and transforming systems. For Shove and Walker, it ‘requires an understanding both of mobility (and hence of practices and relations between practices) in London and of the governance and self-governance of systems that are themselves perpetually in transition’ (2010: 474). Focusing on practice depends on processes of reiteration – of doing things repeatedly – rather than on some form of system closure. Sustainable mobilities, therefore, will be an emergent outcome of the sum of practices rather than practices as produced. Another way of thinking about practices, especially repetitive ones – even they do not imply permanency but repetitious practices which develop and evolve – is through habit. Our understanding of habits tends to imply the opposite of transition. Habits can suppose the obstinacy of routinized practices of mobility, such as car use. The same commute to work might be another. Transport and mobility researchers have explored habits in order to try to understand the possibility of movement or transition away from established patterns, for example, of driving cessation, although these have tended to focus on elders in the more medical social sciences (Harrison and Ragland 2003; Mansvelt 2013). In existing work on transition, habit tends to be blackboxed from serious exploration and treated as something that is ‘ingrained’ or ‘entrenched’ (Nykvist and Whitmarsh 2008). Other approaches have assumed habits as simply a rational decisional response to some external change or stimuli. Mindful of these problems, others have sought to develop a fuller understanding of habit itself as deeply embodied and nonrepresentational. For Plyushteva (2014: 4), mobility habits need to be understood as assemblies including a variation of mobile practices – in other words combinations of technologies, objects, bodily activities, purposes and sensations. In pluralizing habits we also find that they are far more unstable, ‘habits can follow much more complex patterns, varying in a cyclical fashion between seasons or weekdays,



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slight adaptations instead of before-and-after transformations, or spontaneous and temporary changes which have no obvious “rational” antecedent’, writes Plyushteva. Low-carbon mobility habits, and the transition from others, may therefore involve the consideration of a much wider terrain of practices and things. Bissell (2014) understands habits as more than static repetitions of mobility through permanent pathways or routes. Instead, habits can be understood as slow-creep ‘transformations’ of the changing powers or capacities of bodies to act through repetitious practices. Similarly, Schwanen et al. suggest that contrary to reason, ‘habit opens up the possibility of gradual change of actions from within’ (Schwanen, Banister and Anable 2012: 525). Over time a mobile habit shifts the intensity of experience so that a practice becomes a skill or learnt, and it may even become less fatiguing or tiresome. For Bissell, ‘the repetitions involved in commuting might be expected to generate easier movements whilst at the same time gradually anaesthetising sensation associated with the movement’ (2014: 198). Habits develop in strength and can equally wax and wane in ways that occur below the level of notice of institutions and even cognition. Such conceptualizations could matter a great deal for transitions to lowcarbon mobilities. For instance, Schwanen, Banister and Anable focus attention on the learning of more carbon-neutral habits within children and advocate for a more modest ‘strategy of incremental change built around spontaneity in habits’, wherein low-carbon mobility should become a ‘triviality requiring little or no reflective thought’ (2012: 529) for an eventual transition to be successful. For the authors, the ‘supporting infrastructures must sink into the wider assemblage of background infrastructures that support everyday life as quickly as possible’ (2012: 529). Cass and Faulconbridge address this conceit directly in their critique of choice and nudge-based behaviouralistic approaches to transitions in high-carbon forms of commuting (Cass and Faulconbridge 2016). Drawing similarly on practice theory, following Shove et al. (Shove, Pantzar and Watson 2012), and their focus on ‘material-competence-meaning’, they draw attention to the materials and infrastructures necessary to support low-carbon mobility as well as the relationship between commuting practices and other ‘sequences of practice’ (Cass and Faulconbridge 2016: 8). If mobilities are bundled together into sets of practices contingent on other pressures and demands (see also Aldred and Jungnickel 2014), they suggest that the school-run, for instance, is a ‘mobility form affected and given rhythm by temporal fixities and sequencing pressures, in turn affecting and giving rhythm to other practices such as commuting’ to the extent that the ‘the car is the least time-consuming mode for traveling from one site of practice to another’ (8–9). Their advice for policies intended to reshape commuting practices towards low-carbon mobility is to focus attention onto a kind of ecology of practice (see Figure 3.1 ), requiring the re-sequencing, spatializing and temporalizing of our other practices as well as the ways transport policy is able to cater for those mobility demands, the ‘organization, timing, and spacing of societal services and institutions’ (10).

Least radical

Most radical

Cycle storage and changing facilitiesmaterials

Planning systems that locate sites of work in proximity to sites of other practices- spatial

Reduce ‘core hours’ for business and reliance on pay by the hour - temporal

Collectivised works but transport - materials

WORK

Mandate cycle proficiency and training in effective cycle commuting - competence

EDUCATION

‘Cycle to school’ funds to encourage experiencing cycle-commuting - meaning

HEALTH

Late arrival accepted for low-carbon commuters - temporal

Introduce where absent, and enforce when present, right to flexible working - temporal

Flexible start/end time for low carbon parents with no cost implications temporal Demand responsive school transport - materials

Maintain local health provision spatial

Provide free demand responsive patient transport - material

GP provision outside of 9-5, Monday-Friday - temporal

Mandate local school attendance and ensure provision in line with local demand - spatial Carbon footprint of school run and low carbon infrastructure provision responsibilities shifts to school - material

Remove ‘patient choice’ of treatment site - spatial

RECREATION AND LEISURE

Halt sales of local facilities (school fields, recreation grounds etc) and localize high quality public leisure provision - spatial

Late night gym/class discounts temporal

SHOPPING

Encourage provision of retail in proximity to sites of other practice (including but limited to residential sites) - spatial

Mandate provision for cyclists (e.g. cycle storage) and bus route servicing of retail - material

Figure 3.1  Reshaping commuting practices through the material elements and timing and spacing of societal services and institutions (after Cass and Faulconbridge 2016).



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Power Movement, meaning and practice do not happen in a vacuum. Mobility, as a combination of these three factors, is a product of, and implicated in the production of, power. Some of the most basic definitions of power are based on the capacity to make things (including people) move. Thinking of mobility transitions in technocratic ways, or even socio-technical ways, often avoids asking difficult questions about who, exactly, forms of mobility are best serving. Who and what is moving, and who and what is being moved? Without asking the fundamental questions of power, we are unlikely to arrive at solutions that truly transition to a just and sustainable future. How likely is it that future mobilities will be sustainable if the relations of power that produced the current state of affairs are not addressed? Questions about power have been central to debates around the MLP approach to transition. As it was originally conceived, the MLP had almost nothing to say about power. The centrality of technology, technology regimes and trajectories appeared to operate in a power vacuum. Genus and Coles, for instance, argue that the largely retrospective focus on the ‘“needs” of technology (as “artefact”) in terms of adaptation to technological determinants’ leads to linear trajectories and an absence of attention to issues of power and agency (Genus and Coles 2008: 1440). Adrian Smith and Andy Stirling also bring issues of power and politics to bear on MLP (Smith and Stirling 2010). They ask who governs transitions noting that ‘Deliberations over structural transformations of socio-technical regimes affecting the lives of millions of people are seen as led by an elite group of visionary forerunners’ (Smith and Stirling 2010: 11). Civil society and social movements are often excluded from the process, and yet the ‘basis for authority, legitimacy, and accountability in transition governance will ultimately rest on the way it engages with other political processes and institutions’ (Smith and Stirling 2010: 11). The absence of power in discussions of transition within the MLP framework has recently been acknowledged by Geels (2011, 2014). He recognizes that while ‘policy’ has always been a part of the niche/regime/landscape heuristic, it has never paid much attention to the wider world of politics that policy is part of. One reason he gives for this is the influence of structuration theory which, in turn, gives scant attention to the power of collective actors. Geels attempts to correct this by including collective actors (corporations, the state, social action groups, etc.) within the socio-technical regime. In the regime, he argues, alliances are formed to ensure the stability of the status quo. ‘In sum, one way to introduce power and politics into the MLP is to conceptualize relations between policymakers and incumbent firms as a core regime level alliance, which often resists fundamental change’ (Geels 2014: 27). Geels illustrates this ‘resistance’ (an interesting reversal of the way resistance is normally conceptualized as power which is arrayed against ‘domination’ (Scott 1985; Pile and Keith 1997)) with reference to the energy industry in the UK and the ways in which business and government aligned to promote large power schemes such as nuclear power and make other alternative forms of power generation less visible within dominant discourses. Importantly, Geels recognizes the needs to stop focusing so much on niche developments in

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technology and, instead, to turn attention to the need to think through ways to destabilize the existing fossil fuel burning regime so that carbon can be kept in the ground. Geels self-reflective critique is certainly welcome, but its theorization of power is still quite limited. It does not pay attention, for instance, to the ways in which transitions to sustainability might conflict with other necessary transitions – particularly issues of social justice – or indeed produce particular social exclusions (Tyfield 2014). Indeed, it is perfectly possible, even likely, that a transition to sustainability in the environmental sense may serve to disempower groups of people worldwide who are already relatively marginalized. Moves to sustainability, for instance, frequently have negative impacts on women compared to men (Hanson 2010). An approach to transition through mobility justice requires drawing on notions of differential mobility at the heart of thinking within mobility studies, an attention to the power-geometries which unevenly position different people across intersections of class and wealth, race, gender, sexuality and bodily capacities in relation to mobility transitions. Mobility perspectives bring power into the reckoning of transition. Work within the mobilities paradigm has always seen power and politics as central to any understanding of mobilities. Affolderbach and Schultz open up a dialogue between transitions and the field of ‘policy mobilities’ to suggest that the attunement of policy mobilities to individual actors, actor groups and the sociospatial conditionality of policy formations – ‘while similarly prone to prioritising certain actors – is more sensitive to power imbalances between agents of change revealing localised practices, hybrids and failed attempts’ (2016: 1952). In a different way Tyfield has called for a more expansive notion of power as equally transitioning and becoming in socio-technical transitions to low-carbon mobility, focusing especially on China and other liberal regimes (2014). Tyfield notes that for many approaches, transition is either a pure policy question or a socio-technical question where the world of power and politics is essentially exogenous – defined by MLP, for instance, as ‘landscape’ issues. What such approaches fail to deal with, according to Tyfield, is the actual political reality of automobility (policy) in China; namely that the present is a singular opportunity for China to be (home to) the ‘next Detroit’ and where this is explicitly conceived, by government, business and arguably a widely nationalist citizenry, as a crucial part of a broader project of restoring the Middle Kingdom to its rightful place at the centre of the geopolitical order. From the perspective of a Chinese mobility transition, therefore, it is not just apparent but fundamental that everything – the ‘world’ – is in play, as it were. By excluding such considerations from analysis of mobility transition, therefore, the MLP leaves out a key aspect of its dynamics and prospects. (2015: 587)

Tyfield draws on a Foucauldian conception of power as productive and normatively neutral. We all need power in everyday life just as objects need power to move. Power constructs the ground on which other things (including kinds of truth) are



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possible. In the case of a Chinese mobility transition the particular kind of power arrangement is liberalism. Not liberalism as a form of political philosophy but liberalism as a regime that derives its coherence and stability from encouraging and rewarding forms of individual freedom such that people effectively govern themselves. Such a conception of power rests on the production and reiteration of common sense and the taken-for-granted, and a strong state. Significantly, for Tyfield, the common sense rests on actual forms of circulation and ‘unfettered and accelerating personal mobility’ (2014: 589) best represented by automobility. Automobility, he argues, trains liberal mobile subjects. Liberal automobility ‘presupposes’ a common sense which puts particular forms of practice into the status of a rational threat and must be weeded out. Liberal forms of transition inevitably involve the construction of included social identities and practices which are identified in contrast to excluded groups ‘where this distinction may be (and increasingly widely) understood as rationally [. . .] and morally justified’. He goes further: new social distinctions, exclusions and (violent) disciplinary techniques, both state and corporate, are almost inevitably going to be part of this process. And acknowledging this places a moral responsibility on researchers to analyse, identify, present and, where possible, intervene in (e.g. through participatory research) such emergent inequalities and injustices. (Tyfield 2014: 590)

For Tyfield, social and technological innovations such as the Chinese E2W electric two wheeler, while transformative and disruptive to the dominant automobility system within China, and potentially an important part of a low-carbon mobility transition, are nevertheless resisted as a form of mobility that is construed by the state as both dangerous, somehow uncontrollable, and punitively governed in the name of ‘public security’. It is a technology that does not conform to the liberal distribution of power. None of this can be understood without recourse to the field of power and politics that is not somehow distant from the specific spaces in which electric vehicles are made but, rather, thoroughly infuse them. In the case of China, Tyfield argues, we need to look to ‘the international division of labour of innovation and distribution of its super-rents, the neoliberal global regulatory architecture, corporate forms and state–market relations and the multiple crises associated with these and responses to them’ (2014: 592) in order to properly assess mobility transition. It is here, at what MLP theorists call the ‘landscape’ level, that we locate the impetus for innovation policy around mobility in China. Perhaps the most important lesson from Tyfield’s study is that we should be suspicious of apolitical accounts of transition in which there are no winners or losers. While the present system of mobility has winners and losers, so will any future one, and we need to be attentive to who (and what) they will be. Analysis of the workings of power in mobility transitions is necessarily contextual. Different large-scale approaches to transition bring with them different configurations of power. Transition as envisaged by the EU is very different from that envisaged with the ‘Green New Deal’ in the United States. Each suggests

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different negotiations of power, politics and policy around sustainable mobility transitions. The Green New Deal envisages a sustainable transition that is also a ‘just transition’. To its framers, transition is as much about power as it is about carbon – issues around climate change and issues around economic inequality go hand in hand. So, one of the ten principles in the US version of the Green New Deal calls for ‘Overhauling transportation systems in the United States to eliminate pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector as much as is technologically feasible, including through investment in – (i) zeroemission vehicle infrastructure and manufacturing; (ii) clean, affordable, and accessible public transportation; and (iii) high-speed rail’. To some degree, this is a technological approach focusing on new infrastructure and technology. But this aim sits alongside other aims such as ‘Guaranteeing a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States’ and ‘Providing resources, training, and highquality education, including higher education, to all people of the United States’.5 Clearly, the framers of the Green New Deal are linking mobility transitions to an interconnected set of other transitions that will, collectively, produce a future that is both sustainable and more just. Even the Green New Deal stops short of radical transformation of society in a revolutionary way. It is notable how the Green New Deal, as an idea, has itself become mobile, being taken up well beyond the United States. The Labour Party in the UK, for instance, called for a Green New Deal in the 2019 election. Their version included nationalization of key industries – a move that would probably be too socialist for American appetites.6 The Green New Deal for Europe, on the other hand, does not specifically address mobility technology at all but, instead, focuses on the distribution of action and benefits including insisting on a community-led (bottom-up transition) combatting financialization, abandoning the fixation on GDP growth and recognizing that ‘the supply chains that power Europe’s green transition must be grounded in principles of justice’.7

Justice In a review of work on socio-technical transition, Mary Lawhon and James Murphy suggested that an approach that was adequate to its task would be ‘less elite and technologically focused, more sensitive to the role of spatial and geographical factors, and better able to account for the role that power plays in guiding or preventing transitions toward more sustainable outcomes’ (Lawhon and Murphy 2012: 355). Perhaps, in order to attend to these dimensions of transition, we need a more radical way of envisaging transition – one that centres on the importance of mobility justice (Sheller 2018). Socio-technical approaches to transition appear to pay little or no attention to the question of whose interests are being served by sociotechnical transitions. Justice does not arise as a question and the considerations of specific transitions often appear to be politics-free. South African scholars Mark Swilling and Eve Annecke come at this from a completely different perspective. While they find much to agree with in the work of transition theorists in the MLP



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transition, they do not see the MLP as being a model they can utilize in relation to achieving sustainability in the South African context. They focus on a series of transitions (not just technological) occurring in different time-space frames. These transitions are epochal, industrial, urban, agro-ecological and cultural. All of these transitions occur at different speeds and at different scales. Thinking about these side by side can, according to the authors, help produce a focus on justice (Swilling and Annecke 2012). There is mounting evidence that an unjust transition would involve massive private sector investments to build low-carbon, resource-efficient economies with reduced environmental impacts, while leaving intact existing inequalities. [. . .] A divided, poverty-stricken, conflictual and socially unsustainable low carbon world would then be the outcome of an unjust transition. (Swilling and Annecke 2012: xviii–xix)

In a similar vein, Sheller has suggested that attention must be drawn to the twin concerns of transitions towards environmentally sustainable mobility and mobility justice. Mobility justice should be at the heart of any attempt to transition mobility systems, as Sheller argues, her work building on and reflecting the struggle of social movements such as the Untokening Collective, a social movement that has developed several principles of ‘mobility justice’ given the paradoxical entanglement of mobility with racial inequality and environmental sustainability. The organization noted that ‘car-dependent systems were created at the expense of communities of color. They pollute and divide communities of color. Communities of color depend on them for survival’.8 As Sheller summarizes, ‘the problems of failed sustainability and transport equity share a common origin’ but also then a ‘common solution’ (2011: 294). She identifies a series of transit, pedestrian and cycling infrastructure developments which have emphasized both transport equity and environmental sustainability in order to be successful. Sheller’s work on ‘mobility justice’ asks us to massively widen the scope of who and what we account for in order to move towards low-carbon mobilities (2018). She draws, for instance, on the work of geographer Matthew Huber to trace the contours of a constellation of mobility based on oil that includes the geographies of movement it produces, the cultures of ‘freedom’ and ‘individualization’ it undergirds and the particular forms of socio-spatial everyday life that are based on it (see Huber 2013). She argues further that oil-based forms of mobility – particularly automobility but we should add aeromobility – have produced the spatial basis of our everyday life. And that everyday life extends endlessly beyond the scale at which it appears to be lived. This is true both spatially and temporally. Spatially, a focus on mobility justice asks us to consider the winners and losers in the production of our current constellation of mobility. We must acknowledge our responsibility as ‘high emitters of carbon dioxide’, she writes, ‘We must acknowledge our role in the splintered provision of unequal mobilities, the associated deficits in urban accessibility, and the exposure of the mobility poor to greater climate risk and vulnerability’ (Sheller 2018: 141). Temporally, we need to

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recognize our locatedness in ‘deep time’ and how the oil we are extracting and the elements necessary to produce our mobilities (including information mobilities) extend back billions of years into the depths of the earth. Likewise, the effects of our mobilities extend forward into the deep future. Global mobility justice, therefore, demands so much more than reducing carbon emissions by socio-technical means. At a minimum, Sheller insists on accounting for the externalization of waste and pollution to other regions and developing a transparent and deliberative process for agreeing such externalization, the provision of reparative justice to places and communities negatively impacted by the actions of industries and countries, the redirection of subsidies from extractive and polluting industries to those that develop cleaner forms of energy, the prioritizing of the natural environment (planetary commons) over global free trade and private profit making and the planetary agreement of carbon budgets that multinational corporations can be held responsible for (Sheller 2018: 157). Sheller’s conception of mobility justice asks us to keep making connections that are frequently glossed over as we consider the development of particular technology in a particular niche. We need, in other words, to imagine a future with different movements, meanings and practices where justice is central, not marginal. Taking mobility justice seriously in accounts of transition allows us to address each of the points raised by Lawhon and Murphy at the top of this section (2012). First, they argue that accounts of transition be less ‘elite and technologically focused’. This means shifting the focus away from technologies and their spaces (labs, etc.) and away from a focus on corporations and policymakers and towards grassroots organizations. It means less technocratic and more transparent and participatory decision making. It recognizes that mobility transitions are more likely to be just transitions if they emerge from the bottom-up, rather than from the top-down. It is not surprising that approaches which do not take justice seriously tend to focus on technology. A transition that is based on technology may do nothing to address power and its affects. Indeed, it is possible to create new technologies that are less carbon intensive without any challenge to existing alignments of power. Technological transitions are also more likely to be elite in nature given the resources and knowledge involved in enacting such transitions. Transitions that emerge from participatory spaces, on the other hand, may be less resource dependent and more inclusive in their benefits. We can see this in the activities of the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union, which linked carbon emissions to pollution, class, gender, disability and ethnicity in their challenge to the more elite and technologically minded Metropolitan Transit Authority that sought to develop light rail capacity in the city in a way that would overly benefit already privileged, disproportionately white, commuters at the expense of women, Korean, Latinx and African American people, and the working poor. The same could be said of the Untokening Collective that points out that Social movements oriented toward streets and mobility professionalized into planning and design trends that today have increasing political and financial support. They tend to prioritize government-level change, such as



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planning models and political advocacy, without addressing our communities’ disillusionment with and distrust of government systems. In setting this reality aside, these movements continue the legacy of planning without us, sometimes even acting as the city’s partner as a faux grassroots without actually bringing oppressed groups into the process. In a culture where racial exclusion is normal, it’s easier to champion designs from respected but faraway places than to respond to our local community needs.9

The Untokening Collective, originating from a conference in Atlanta in 2016, have developed principles of safe, sustainable and equitable mobility based on their own framing of mobility justice. Rather than being an elite group of professionals, they are a multiracial collective insisting on community-based decision making around matters of mobility. Like the Bus Riders Union, they tend to look at mobilities holistically and from a justice-focused perspective where environmental issues are indivisible from issues of social equity – issues which are rarely even hinted at in accounts of socio-technical transition. Lawhon and Murphy’s second point is that accounts of transition should be ‘more sensitive to the role of spatial and geographic factors’. While we recognize that climate change does not neatly follow jurisdictional boundaries and that its effects will be felt differently in different places, our responses to climate change have tended to ignore the importance of geography and the ways in which our actions have geographically variable impacts. Norway is well known for leading the world in the uptake of electric vehicles. It is also a leader in sustainable energy, thanks to hydroelectric power. At the same time, it funds many of its developments through revenue derived from North Sea oil extraction which it exports globally. So the cost of transition is paid for elsewhere. Similarly, any single policy change designed to reduce carbon emissions is likely to have geographically variable impacts. Carbon taxes, for instance, reduce carbon emissions globally but have particularly negative consequences for people living in remote rural areas who have no other option but to use private vehicles and are often in already disadvantaged communities. Even the site from which transition is being theorized changes the equation of transition. In their account of ‘just transition’, for instance, Swilling and Annecke note that writing from and about Africa makes a difference: ‘Whereas the European discussion is largely about low-carbon transition as an alternative to preserving the status quo, in many other parts of the world that are exploited for their resources the alternative to transition may well be collapse’ (2012: xvii). Sheller’s account of mobility justice also makes the geographical dimensions of transition clear. One of her ‘principles of mobility justice’ is ‘Those displaced by climate change shall have a right to resettlement in other countries, and especially in those countries that contributed most to climate change.’ Another reads, ‘Principals of climate justice and environmental justice suggest that mobility consumers in one place should not externalize waste or pollution on other regions without legitimately agreed upon deliberation, transparency, and reparations’ (Sheller 2018: 174). Powerfully introduced in their edited collection on Low Carbon Mobility Transitions, Hopkins and Higham (2016: 7) are equally suggestive of the importance of the spaces and

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geographies of transition, so as to contextualize the culturally ‘determined ways of practicing mobility norms and values, policies and regulations and funding regimes’. Lawhon and Murphy’s final point is that we need an approach that is ‘better able to account for the role that power plays’ (2012). This returns us to our previous discussion of power. It matters where transition practices arise. A focus on niches, as in MLP approaches, tends to ignore the need for change in movements, meanings and practices at a societal level. Many spaces defined as niches are by definition ‘protected’ by the structures of the status quo defined by markets in contemporary capitalism. The logic of power that created and ‘protects’ such spaces is never open to question and is not the object of transition. The persistent hegemonic logic of the market remains as the arbiter of what counts as transition (Bulkeley, Broto and Maassen 2011).

Conclusion Work in the mobilities turn has consistently advocated for a full consideration of mobility across scales as a fully social activity. The work was derived from a recognition that mobility had either been taken-for-granted or ignored, or alternatively, reduced to a largely statistical or technical account of movement. Recognizing mobility as a producer of and produced by the social means seeing the ways we move as inextricably linked to both meaning and power. Seeing mobility as movement, meaning and practice in the context of power entails thinking differently about mobility transition.

CChapter 4 MECHANISMS, AGENTS AND STRUCTURES

Introduction: Entanglements of transition Mobility transitions do not occur in a political vacuum. Any policy or change in practice aimed at reducing the GHG emissions associated with mobility happens in the context of international efforts to address climate change, national government initiatives (or the lack of them) and local pressure by citizens and activists. While an ideal situation might see all actors seeking to address carbon emissions from mobility in similar and coordinated ways, in actuality, they often have very different priorities and ways of addressing the issue. In this chapter, we provide an overview of the three major (and entangled) trajectories through which mobility transitions operate in relation to current forms of government structure: interventions by intergovernmental, international agencies; top-down, state-led efforts; and bottom-up grassroots movements, which range from entrepreneurial solutions to social movements. We outline the varied scales of governance that impact on mobility transition policies, as well as the differing roles of the State and civil society in comparative context focusing on different levels of authority and authoritarianism as well as accountability. Global heating, in Timothy Morton’s terms, is a ‘hyperobject’ (Morton 2013). As such, it extends well beyond our ability to comprehend it in its totality or, indeed, to imagine a singular solution. Even at a lower level of abstraction, it is clear that the normal scales of organized human action are not well matched to the scale of the problem. Global heating exists at a more-than-global scale and across time scales that transcend the temporalities of action that can be formulated as policy. Human action makes the most sense of people when it is local in extent and immediate in impact. Anthropologist Anna Tsing’s conceptualization of friction is useful here (Tsing 2005). Tsing argues that things we conceptualize as universal (truth, science, capital, etc.) only make sense, only really exist, when they touch the ground and become local. It is only through place-specific action that anything can become global or universal. A similar process is evident when we think about global heating. We notice and act on its local instantiations. We see the flowers blooming a month too early in the botanic garden, we despair at the one in fivehundred-year flood that is happening for the second year in a row, we weep at the sight of polar bears on diminishing chunks of ice. In contrast to the sometimes

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oversimplified, or the difficult-to-grasp models and visualizations of climate change, we do not experience global heating as a totality but in its particulars. It is, therefore, not surprising that policy directed at dealing with global heating by changing the ways that we move has a scale problem (Adger 2001, Bulkeley and Betsill 2005, Juhola and Westerhoff 2011). Within mobility studies, efforts at engaging the issues of multi-scale, and multicited, agency in the context of transition are relatively limited. To some extent, the study of mobility has tended towards either micro-scaled approaches attentive to the lived experience of mobilities, embedded in social structures, or synthetic work examining macro-scale systems and structures – from work exploring the embodied perspectives of individuals and communities on the move, to social movements, towards analysis of state and governmental actors determining ways in which mobilities are regulated and governed. These perspectives are also often mobilized in particular contexts and lack multi-sited, multi-scalar or comparative analysis. At first glance, it appears that global heating is a more-than-global problem that therefore demands global solutions that are enacted at a supranational level by institutions such as the UN and EU. At another level, it is clear that the impacts of global heating are experienced as local problems that demand local solutions. It is also the case that global heating only exists because of a multitude of actions taken at local levels that have accumulated into a crisis of global magnitude – a logic that suggests a need to look to local policy and action for solutions (Betsill and Bulkeley 2006). Policies of environmental sustainability and adaptation in general, and mobility transitions in particular, always exist in a landscape where policy and action need to happen across and between sites and therefore appear to demand multi-level governance (Bulkeley 2005, Gustavsson, Elander and Lundmark 2009, Amundsen, Berglund and Westskog 2010). One challenge, then, from a mobilities transition perspective is finding an optic which crosses the conventions of single site and single-level understandings of governance. One particularly challenging aspect of climate change mitigation processes is the necessity of coordinated global action underpinned by some consensus, strategy or vision. Global heating is experienced differently in different places, and it is only through changes at the immediate, local scale that change can happen. Simultaneously, it is the case that no country alone can make a decisive contribution to the accumulation of GHG emissions in the atmosphere, and no country can potentially escape the consequences of global heating. While the news media focuses on the effects of GHG emissions in the United States and Europe, countries in the Global South are rapidly growing their emissions outputs. Indeed, this has become evident to the point that in a 2013 report, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) ascribed equal responsibility for cumulative GHG emissions since 1850 to the developed and developing worlds. Relative contributions to global emissions from developing and developed countries changed little from 1990 to 1999. However, the balance changed significantly between 2000 and 2010 – the developed country share decreased



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from 51.8 percent to 40.9 percent, whereas developing country emissions increased from 48.2 percent to 59.1 percent. Today developing and developed countries are responsible for roughly equal shares of cumulative greenhouse gas emissions for the period 1850-2010.1

The complexity and diversity of issues surrounding mobility across countries globally makes it difficult to reach consensus or shared visions of how to tackle transport emissions reductions at an international and even at a national scale. There is a disjuncture between the scale of the problem and the scale of our imagination, institutional structures and ability to deal with it. Equally, despite the concerns of migration studies for the analysis of diasporas, translocal relations and particularly their study and critique of supranational organizations and institutions, mobility studies has poorly addressed the role of international institutions in governing mobility and mobility infrastructures (see Jensen and Richardson 2004) and could even be accused of a form of methodological nationalism. The 2019 United Nations Climate Talks (COP 25) are a clear example of the limitations to our institutional structures. The co-founder of Earth Uprising and US Climate Strike, fourteen-year-old activist Alexandria Villaseñor, dubbed the talks ‘another year of failure’.2 Indeed, the only achievement at these talks was the agreement that countries needed more ambitious GHG reductions targets, but what those reductions are remains to be quantified. And yet, intergovernmental organizations such as the UN and the EU, by their very nature, can exercise impact that nation states alone cannot. The UN steers the international negotiations process and enables the legitimization of presumptions upon which policymaking processes are based (e.g. the idea of the human-induced climate change and the necessity of climate mitigation measures). And the EU, while limited by the subsidiarity principle, can impose binding directives on standards in transportation that may have a big impact on GHG emissions. Furthermore, both organizations function as facilitators of transnational knowledge exchange and cooperation by encouraging local authorities and private parties to set up cross-border networks. Thus, both the UN and the EU are involved in orchestrating international action and the processes of replicating and upscaling particular mobility solutions. An important feature of UN policymaking is its prioritizing of sustainable development, whereas one of the unique features of the EU is the fundamental role of mobility in its core narratives – most clearly its constitution – as well as its functioning through mundane mobilities (Nóvoa 2019) and its ability to foster a wider sense of European identity (Jensen and Richardson 2004). These specific features, or priorities, have a huge impact on the way transitions to low-carbon mobilities are envisioned and rationalized. Yet, such large-scale organizations are also limited in their capacity to enact and enforce substantial and meaningful change at national levels. In many respects, the role of intergovernmental organizations within GHG reductions remains as superficial as they did in 1987 when the Brundtland Report was first published,3 with objectives and policy directives around taking action, without set specifics towards action on GHG

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reductions or the ability to enforce them. The same can be said for many nation states. Policy on climate change and mobility is not always linked up within national policy agendas either. For example, in the countries we studied, the majority of mobility-related emissions came from land transport and in particular road traffic; however, many climate policies and discourse on emissions reductions focus on the aviation sector. The importance of GHG reductions across the board notwithstanding, the lack of consolidated efforts on altering road emissions in many states has led to a policy gap at the national level. Interestingly this has in turn led to the obfuscation of the increasingly local state responses to GHG reductions. The media focus on how cities and regions can lead the way on climate change has spurred interest and investment in locally created solutions. As can be seen throughout this volume, the focus on locally produced, and specifically urban GHG reductions, often provides a policy paradox at a global scale. There comes a point when all solutions must be local. Specificities of place – the site and situation of cities and towns, existing infrastructure and the resources to amend and expand them, and local culture, politics and everyday practices – all coalesce to form unique mobility regimes which require bespoke adaptations in order to provide emissions reductions while also serving mobility needs in an equitable and just way. Such a ‘patchwork’ of ‘context specific’ responses are also strongly represented in Hopkins and Higham’s (2016) edited collection on the topic. Furthermore, many dynamic solutions to GHG reductions within the mobility sector, such as Bus Rapid Transit and the removal of modernist highways within cities, happen at the local scale. Yet other technological and policy innovations such as electric vehicles and cycle-share schemes have been shown not to provide the quick fix solution to changing travel behaviour and thus reducing GHG outputs (Holtsmark and Skonhoft 2014, Nikolaeva et al. 2019), thereby exposing the paradox of the local fix. Innovation and change are hampered by a lack of policy cohesion and a lower and unequal threshold to commandeer resources to effect change. Geographical and scalar unevenness makes accounting for effectual policy change difficult and further compounds an already complex issue. There have been a plethora of laws, policies and programmes enacted in the name of emissions reduction at local governance levels since the late 1980s. Many establish local governance strategies that involve concrete commitments to emissions reductions and transportation reform. These policies and programmes add up. They can be seen to be ‘transition-by-stealth’, falling under the radar of potentially hostile national governments. Local solutions however often lack the policy appeal of best-practice gurus looking for a one-size-fits-all approach to environmental problem solving. Yes, policy boosters search for and promote ‘the one’, a local solution that can be scaled up; however, it is often the case that widespread adaptation is difficult and little more than a discursive rather than material change (Temenos and McCann 2012, Martin et al. 2019, Moodley 2019). They are collectively also a drop in the bucket of emissions reductions that a broader level policy on emissions targets for road transport could potentially



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achieve. Despite a seeming deadlock on mobility transition at global and national levels, there are local and regional policies that do demonstrate it is possible to make state and non-state interventions that are effective motivators of behaviour change and emissions reductions. Many of these are punitive financial instruments, for example, carbon taxes have been shown to be highly effective in reducing automobile travel (Kettner and Kletzan-Slamanig 2017), yet if the revenue is not redistributed into effective public transport across a region, the effect, while environmentally positive, serves to further entrench social inequality across income levels. Therefore, a mobility transition that is both environmentally beneficial and socially just is dependent not only on which policies are enacted where but also on who is involved in developing and implementing policy, as well as system change, what institutions and organizations, what mechanisms of change they might draw on and how they act together and through each together. National and local responses can range from technocratic perspectives to the formation of discourses on what we might call environmental nationalism, nationalistic pride in being green and having ecologically friendly policies such as in Norway (and not to be confused with right-wing eco-nationalism). Meanwhile, grassroots responses range from crowd-funding initiatives to lobbying. There are a number of ways in which translation across sites and between scales happens including through both formal and informal networks and institutions (Juhola and Westerhoff 2011, MaKinnon and Derekson 2013, Temenos 2017). One way of contextualizing this multiplicity is through Mimi Sheller’s concern for the ‘entanglement’ of mobility justice, even if our emphasis is slightly different. Sheller’s concern is with the issues of injustice which go with the system and technology of the automobile, even if the character of those injustices is ‘complex, ambiguous and contradictory’ and their nature multi-scalar and transnational. The automobile, Sheller argues, embodies ‘patterns of class resentment, racial supremacy military power, and global inequalities that support racialised white ethnonationalism-on-wheels, as well the needs of the American fossil fuel industry’ (2018: 84). What Sheller demands is an attention to the ‘multi-scalar entanglement of cascading effects that helps explain’ something like the dominance of the automobile system. This means an approach which can look across the dispersions of agencies and mechanisms which seek to govern mobility and its transition. And it means taking seriously the ‘entrenched repertoires’ embodied within those agents and organizations that might lead them in particular directions (Sheller 2018: 87). It is with this in mind that this chapter explores top-down, bottom-up and thirdway routes (and impasses) to transition. We outline the varied roles of the state and civil society, focusing on different levels of authority and authoritarianism as well as accountability. We explore mobility transitions in relation to wider political transitions, different scales of governance, the existence of non-state actors and the embeddedness of national governments within international organizations.

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Intergovernmental institutions In some senses, all transition policies exist in the context of work done by intergovernmental organizations such as the UN. Discussions about global heating are inevitably informed by the work of the Intergovernmental Panel in Climate Change (IPCC) and its various reports, by agreements such as that signed in Paris or by initiatives such as the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs). Beyond the setting of broad goals, an organization such as the UN offers countless more specific approaches to mobility transition. Some of the most recurrent solutions include UN programmes such as (1) support for Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) – there are over 400 BRT systems worldwide in 171 cities, serving more than 33 million people daily, and there are more coming online yearly4 – (2) transportation demand management (TDM), (3) mon-motorized transportation (NMT), (4) clean fuels and (5) pricing, which is normally seen as best-practice policy, yet difficult to implement as pricing is ultimately a decision of the nation state, as much as it is linked with the demand of worldwide markets. However, the future is uncertain as it is yet unclear what decisions policymakers will take and what accumulative effect that will have (the divergence between possible scenarios is huge (IPCC 2014)). The futures of mobilities remain multiple, open and contested. One exciting question is whether the decoupling of economic growth and emissions is possible (as it has briefly become during the Covid-19 crisis, although international cooperation seems to have conversely retreated into national positions) and whether that will bring about a new way of thinking on individual mobility or a set of technocratic solutions will enable a smooth transition to leading guilt-free mobile lives. If more pessimistic scenarios turn into reality, adaptation strategies might cast an entirely new light onto current policies and mobility behaviours. But as our research demonstrates, the attention to adaptation remains largely a national and local prerogative (see also Juhola, Keskitalo and Westerhoff 2011, Juhola and Westerhoff 2011). Regardless of the efforts of intergovernmental institutions such as the UN to orchestrate global action and create global awareness, different parts of the world are facing strikingly different dilemmas and anticipating very different futures. Intergovernmental institutions can exercise impact that nation states alone cannot. The UN has the ability to launch and steer the international negotiations process and enable legitimization of presumptions upon which policymaking processes will be based (e.g. the idea of the human-induced climate change and the necessity of climate mitigation measures). Local policy initiatives, and even the actions of social movements, are often framed by the legitimizing narrative of international endeavours such as the work of the IPCC or the outcomes of the Paris Accords. If we think of movement, meaning and practice as the three elements of mobility transition as outlined in Chapter 3 then it may be in the realm of meaning that international organizations have the biggest impact. Organizations such as the UN and EU create narratives that legitimize actions at national and local scales. While the very idea that global heating is caused by human action is derived from the situated work of scientists and others, it is international organizations



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that translate such an idea into a global narrative that can guide policy. Thus, intergovernmental institutions are involved in the production of moral narratives as well as orchestrating international action and the processes of replicating and upscaling particular mobility solutions. An important feature of UN policymaking is the prioritization of sustainable development. This priority has a huge impact on the way transitions to low-carbon mobilities are envisioned and rationalized on a global scale. For example, the UN and associated bodies have been involved in setting the agenda for climate change response by creating public awareness and steering diplomatic processes. While mobility has not been a key working area for the UN, particular agencies promote cuts to GHG emissions through transport policy while simultaneously working towards broad sustainable development goals. The attention is directed for the most part at developing countries as they are expected to be major contributors to GHG emissions in the coming decades, and thus the question of decoupling economic growth from emissions has become paramount for the institution. As we discuss further, UN associate bodies are primarily concerned with global heating and therefore emissions reductions through mobility are embedded in a number of policies and institutional initiatives. On the one hand, this can help to promote systems thinking, where emissions reductions are part and parcel of policymaking. On the other hand, no centralized mobility strategy means that emissions reductions are not uniformly accounted for nor assessed within a myriad of policies. Mobility within the UN is dispersed across diverse policy areas and can be found throughout various bodies and actors within the organization. Mobility and transport are almost exclusively tied to development and sustainability policy as they are identified as major contributors to GHG emissions worldwide. Mobility and sustainability are therefore interlocked in the same policy areas and debates. To discuss mobility and transport within the UN means (almost universally) to be talking about sustainability and, to a certain extent, low-carbon transitions. This is a particularity of the UN, in comparison with other international bodies, such as the EU. Transition, in the UN context, is often understood through the Avoid-ShiftImprove (ASI) paradigm (Bakker et al. 2014). Initially developed by the German Technical Corporation (GIZ), the ASI model has become the most widespread approach for creating policy packages, programmes and initiatives in the international arena. Key stakeholders reference it. In an interview, Secretary General of the International Transport Forum (ITF-OECD) José Manuel Viegas noted: ‘the Avoid, Shift and Improve paradigm has become the key framework for approaches in sustainable transport for ITF, and I believe that it dominates policymaking internationally.’5 Avoidance refers to a reduction of travel needs, increasing ‘system efficiency’ through reductions in lengths and/or number of trips while simultaneously promoting better land use. Within urban planning, for instance, the policy works by reducing cars in cities, increasing telework and promoting transportation demand management (TDM) strategies. Shifting instruments seek to improve ‘trip efficiency’, namely through the implementation of environmentally

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friendly and collective modes of travel – for example, public, active and NMT. Finally, improvement seeks to increase vehicle efficiency, including fuel and motor efficiency among other technological advances.6 The three aspects, stakeholders insist, have to be seen as interrelated and present together in many mobility solutions.7 ASI is a good illustration of the way scale works in mobility transitions. It is not a policy that emerged fully formed at some global scale. Rather, as with all ideas and policies, it comes from a particular place. In this case, the place was Germany. ASI was formulated in Germany in the 1990s as an alternative to the hegemonic formulation of PPM – or predict, provide, manage – a formulation based on predicting growth in transport demand and then providing for it – an approach blamed for endless growth in demand for roads (see Vigar 2002 in the context of the UK and the ‘predict and provide’ approach). ASI was quickly taken up by international NGOs and then by the UN. It is promoted by the Sustainable Urban Transport Project of the GIZ on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development and travels from there. With the ASI framework underpinning UN mobility transitions, the UN Climate Summit made ambitious commitments in 2014 regarding sustainable mobility, announcing four major initiatives, which serve as an illustration of the generic thinking of the UN.8 These included increasing the number of electric vehicles in cities by 2030 (UEMI)9; a low-Carbon Sustainable Rail Transport Challenge10 to encourage rail usage and a cut in emissions for both passenger traffic and freight; the Declaration on Climate Leadership to bind 100 public transport entities to double their market share of public transport by 2025; and the Air Transport Action Group (ATAG) commitment, wherein the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and the aviation industry have committed to cut their emissions by 50 per cent by 2050 (base year of 2005). These are the most generic and internationally applicable UN programmes focusing on mobility transitions. All tend to focus on implementation within developing countries, putting them somewhat out of balance with the seventeen SDGs which are intended to move countries regardless of development status towards sustainable development. This could be explained, in part, by the trajectory of UN development, social and economic bodies, whose official mission has been to shorten the development gaps between nations and regions.11 Within the UN there are key bodies active in conceptualizing and/or steering mobility transitions in varying capacities. While an exhaustive review of UN-related organizations is beyond the scope of this chapter, we highlight UNEP here to demonstrate how such a far-reaching intergovernmental organization might make inroads towards achieving mobility transition. United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) was established by the UN General Assembly in 1972 and has since been the main UN body in the sphere of environmental policy coordinating its environmental activities.12 Climate change



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mitigation is a key area, with the UNEP recognizing it as ‘the defining challenge of our generation’.13 Closely linked in a number of partnerships with other UN bodies such as the IPCC Secretariat, UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), it collaborates with governments and a variety of public and private partners. Projects related to transport and mobility are developed through the Transport Programme and focus on ‘Mitigation: Moving towards Low Carbon Societies’.14 The programme’s goal is a ‘paradigm shift’ to be implemented using the ASI approach. It is meant to: Help users avoid or reduce trips – without restricting mobility – through smarter city planning and land use options. Shift passengers away from private vehicles to public and non-motorized transport, and freight users from trucks to rail or water transport. Finally, make vehicles cleaner, through both efficiency improvements and cleaner fuels.15

The three policies in the transport sector that the UNEP ‘Emissions Gap Report’ mentions correspond to the three-pillar ASI approach: transit-oriented development, BRT and introducing vehicle performance standards.16 Initiatives within the Transport Programme include the Partnership for Clean Fuels and Vehicles (PCFV).1718 The Global Fuel Economy Initiative (GFEI), pursued in partnership by the International Energy Agency (IEA), the UNEP, the International Transport Forum of the OECD (ITF), the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), the Institute for Transportation Studies at UC Davis and the FIA Foundation for the Automobile and Society (FIA), works to promote greater fuel economy by supporting national and regional policymakers in the processes of in-country capacity-building and outreach and awareness campaigns.19 ‘Share the Road’ is implemented in partnership with the FIA and UN-HABITAT, in order ‘to catalyse policies in government and donor agencies for systematic investments in walking and cycling road infrastructure, linked with public transport systems’.20 The philosophy behind share the road asserts that through prioritizing NMT in planning and designing cities using an ‘integrated, multi-modal transport system’, African countries can ‘leapfrog’ traditional development trajectories and avoid the problems that car-centric societies have recently found themselves facing.21 The UNEP vision of a transition associated with ‘leapfrogging’ to low-carbon mobility considers mobility as a malleable resource that should be developed as environmentally clean, safe and able to provide equitable access for all. It envisions the possibility for ‘developing’ countries to undergo a transformation that elides the negative environmental and social consequences put on previously ‘developed’ countries. While there is some evidence that focusing on consumptive practices may lead to avoidance of some of the worst environmental externalities, the possibility of the development of ‘green economies’ appears to be an optimistic scenario which does little to acknowledge that the negative environmental externalities of development have been geographically uneven, with developing

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countries bearing the brunt of environmental degradation (Spaiser et al. 2018). They are not expected to go through the same era of careless prosperity coupled with automobility that some of the developed countries have gone through, either transition to a resilient low-carbon economy or potentially face unprepared multiple crises that climate change may bring about. The European Union The EU is the second largest intergovernmental agency that we have analysed. Much like the UN, the EU provides a framework that legitimizes presumptions towards which policymaking processes will be steered. The EU has set climate action high on its agenda, envisioning a transition to a resilient low-carbon economy that would break away with the dependency on oil imports and enable growth without high environmental costs and without curbing mobility. The efforts of the European Commission in the area of mobility and transport are therefore concentrated on facilitating the entrance of innovations to the market (e.g. through Horizon 2020), improving the efficiency of transport systems and integrating national mobility systems into a European Single Transport Area, where a European citizen would be able to make smart and environment-friendly choices switching freely between different modes of transport across the whole EU. In this way, the EU functions as a facilitator of transnational knowledge exchange and cooperation by encouraging local authorities and private parties to set up cross-border networks. While limited by the subsidiarity principle (whereby the EU will not take action unless it is more effective than the action taken at national scale), the EU can impose binding directives on standards in transportation that may have a big impact on the amount of GHG emissions. The EU is able to create legislation – unlike the UN – that the various member-states must implement nationally. This has, of course, its challenges. Legislation in the Union is always initiated by the Commission. It is the Commission which outlines the areas of intervention and produces the first documents. The legal acts, in the form of both regulations and directives, are then evaluated, through several rounds and stages, by the European Parliament and the Council of the EU, which conjointly come to produce the final version of the documents. Many times it is impossible to reach a consensus which means that the document initiated by the Commission is indefinitely declined. The final versions are then ratified and come into force. A regulation has an immediate, general application in all member-states, while a directive undergoes a process of transposition to national law in all member-states, which results in different interpretations and, consequently, in slight variations on the final documents. The in-betweens of these processes create unique conditions in policymaking. Because the Council is underpinned by different national interests (as well as a part of the Parliament’s intervention), many documents are modified on the basis of political negotiation. Frequently, a particular member-state, represented in the Council, is not against a specific legal act but nevertheless stalls it to force one other member-state to vote in accordance to its wishes, in some other document. This creates a unique dynamics in terms of bottom-up response policy. Policy



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is not adopted solely based on ideological agendas (or, even, lobbying), but it is also the aftermath of pure political speculation. The outcome of regulations and directives in the EU undergoes a process of political trade-off. In this sense, more than in any other context, politics bends policy in the EU. This naturally affects the green agenda and transport policy. State actors and top-down approaches to transition While intergovernmental organizations such as the UN and EU are able to construct powerful narratives and guidelines that help to direct national and local policies, it remains the case that national governments are distinctive in their ability to create policy, law and forms of regulation that materially directs the ways we move. One of the most common mechanisms of transition within our case studies is the top-down approaches of national governments. These can assume diverse forms, both in substance and in methodology, involving a diverse array of actors and stakeholders. We have observed a number of top-down approaches that include the procurement of legislation, the codification of national guidelines, the provision of new services or the building of new mobility infrastructures. Often, the state acts in a way that distributes responsibility from itself to others, including lower levels of government, business and individuals. State institutions are complex structures constantly adapting to emerging circumstances. The interplay between state and non-state actors is equally reactive and emergent. In terms of mobility transition, these relationships are characterized by ongoing negotiations over how to best plan, implement and regulate mobility futures. Transition involves moving from the present to a future state that is different (in this case a state in which mobilities produce less greenhouse gas and use less oil/fossil fuels). It is important to think of transition in terms of bridging. This concept of transition is very much in line with mobilities thinking in the sense that it involves an understanding of what happens between points A and B (Cresswell 2006). As we note in Chapter 2, we conceptualize transition as involving mobilities futures, pairing transition with understandings of ‘prediction’, ‘anticipation’ and ‘rendering’. It is a productive concept. In bridging mobilities, transition is linked to questions of process and governance. Mobility futures are also wrapped up with notions of modernity and progress, as we noted earlier. While modernization narratives have been thoroughly critiqued within critical social sciences literatures, they remain entrenched in everyday and state visions of the future. This is clear from looking at the UN SDGs. Progress and development are key ideologies for such an institution. Most of the cases that we encountered within this project have envisioned mobility transition through liberal and neoliberal capitalist logics. If we are to take historical precedent seriously, then such mobility futures are bound to be inherently unjust. Therefore, we argue that it is imperative to break down and interrogate modernization visions in order to make room for alternative visions of mobility. Increasingly precarious work enables and encourages mobility that is both voluntary and involuntary. Certain lifestyle transition policies, such as teleworking, also have the potential to recast the focus of people and planners towards different

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ways of moving and indeed paying attention to the opposite of mobility in ‘stillness’ (Bissell 2011). We might ask then not only what does a future mobile life look like? But we must also ask ‘what does a future life of stillness and stability entail?’, and moreover, ‘how possible or palatable is such a future for governments to embrace?’ There are a number of other challenges for national-level mobility transition. Primarily, growth often remains fixated around an automobility agenda with advocates for increasing roads and constant growth (Dennis and Urry 2009). Such an agenda continues to drive national and local government development action in places such as Canada, Norway, Brazil and Chile. The private sector often has a central role in development and transportation transitions at the national level, and its well-resourced agenda can prove difficult to breach. This reach spans diverse government structures including centralized rule in Singapore, social welfarist models in Norway and explicitly neoliberal governments such as Chile. Here we give examples from two contrasting State approaches to mobility: Portugal and Norway. Following the economic panic of 2008 in Portugal, new legislation enacted a shift from mobility-as-a-right to mobility-as-a-service – with the government promoting the flexibilization of ‘transport operators’ towards the inclusion of new mobility services (carpooling and car-sharing, new taxi services, etc.). This type of approach involves a number of actors, from the State as a regulator to the entrepreneurial sector as providers for whom citizens are conceptualized as clients. Some of our interviewees were disappointed by the lack of an integrated vision for mobility during the economic crisis that followed 2008 and which had appeared, paradoxically, as an opportunity to revolutionize the Portuguese transport sector and mobility – via a strong reinforcement of public transport, the implementation of cycling and walking solutions and the promotion of new forms of travel, such as electric mobility. Instead, the government promoted a very different paradigm for mobility. One of the persons behind this new paradigm for urban mobility was Rosário Macário, an influential academic in both Portugal and Brazil, where she co-authored the Brazilian ‘law of mobility’. According to her, ‘the grand change in the paradigm has been the channeling of individual mobility towards shared mobility.’22 The shift to shared mobility, rather than public transport, was underpinned by what she considered to be the intolerable accumulation of debt by public companies. When asked about the biggest challenges to mobility transitions, Macário expressed that ‘the obstacles to mobility transitions have one face: public companies’.23 Macário then explained: Portugal has followed what I called the ‘Napoleonic approach’ of public service to transport. That is, we deemed public service as a translation for the State-as-aprovider. This has been responsible for the accumulation of unbearable deficits of public companies. The crisis represented an unrivalled opportunity to alter this paradigm completely, namely with the intervention of the troika. So, finally last year, Portugal was able to alter legislation, produce serious reforms in transport, namely the liberalisation of the sector, and regulate services that will become



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mainstream from now on. This legislation is finally directed towards accessibility, integration, and inclusive mobility. Shared-mobility is one of its main features.24

To a certain extent, this was put in motion. In Portugal, during the crisis, it was possible to observe a shift from mobility as a right to mobility as a service (Heitanen 2016, Matyas and Kamargianni 2019). This can be contrasted with the longstanding formulation of mobility as a right of citizenship in Portugal. Right from its foundation, the Portuguese Constitution postulated the universal right of access to justice, housing, health care and education. Due to this, mobility was codified as a citizen’s right, especially to anticipate and correct situations of social and territorial exclusion. The State was conceived of as a provider of citizens’ mobility to prevent discriminatory access to basic and fundamental rights. Following the collapse of 2008 and the imposition of austerity on Portugal by the so-called ‘troika’ of the EU, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and European Central Bank (ECB), a change of paradigm slowly occurred, with new legislation gradually shifting from this core view of mobility (as a right) to mobility as a service. This was visible, for instance, in two fundamental state actions: the 2015 Portuguese law of mobility and the attempt to privatize major public companies. The new Juridical Regime of Public Service of Passenger Transport (RJSPTP), also known as the ‘law of mobility’ (2015), reinforced the role of concessionary services and opened the door to new mobility services, especially via the flexibilization of the definition of ‘transport operator’. The law reads that ‘the authorities of transport should adopt transport modes and organisation/ exploration models that best suit demand, whilst being economically sustainable and rational, (. . .) namely those exploration models based on inter-modality and flexibility’.25 Flexible transport is defined by the ‘flexibility of stops, itineraries, frequencies and timetables, (. . .) the flexibility of vehicle capacity and characteristics, (. . .) the existence of solicitation systems, (. . .) and a special tariff regime’.26 This regime adopted a new perspective on public transport, one that focuses on entrepreneurial solutions, labelled as flexible and based on new technology, new door-to-door services. To further implement this change, the government supported an attack on public companies (through the reduction of services and increase in prices), giving way to a complete privatization of major public, collective transport owned by State companies. The idea was clearly to shift the onus of transportation away from public companies to private businesses, entrepreneurial projects and the like. The main problem with this approach seems to be twofold. In the first place, mobility was never an axial or central right. Secondly, it is questionable whether the private sector will secure the adequate responses. Consider Nunes da Silva, professor at the Instituto Superior Técnico and former councilmen in Lisbon, and João Vieira’s words: In Portugal, there has been a derivation from mobility as a right to mobility as a service. But it’s interesting, because mobility was never, let’s say, a ‘noble right’. It was never placed side by side education, health or justice.27

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Moving Towards Transition In Portugal, mobility has never been conceptualised as a constitutional right in the lines of public education and health.28

In other words, mobility has never been thought of as a core right, in the Portuguese context. Justice, health and education have always featured as central Ministries since the Carnation Revolution of 1974, which means that there has been, to some extent, a continuation of policy in these governmental areas for over forty years. Mobility has never had any direct ministry or secretary of state. This means that mobility policy has always been subordinated to a vision of infrastructural improvement. It has never been an autonomous and integrated policy. Differently from health care or education, mobility was never central to the government mandate of service provision. This continues to be the case: today, the Instituto Da Moilidade e Dos Transportes (Institute of Mobility and Transport) (IMT), the administrative body central to the coordination of transport in Portugal, reports to four Ministries in Portugal (Economy, Environment, Sea and Infrastructures, Planning). It is difficult to predict the success of a transition from mobility as a (peripheral) right to mobility as a service or when transition is framed primarily as a technological one, as Mário Alves explained, Futurism in Portugal stands for gadgets. Think about the great innovation in ATMS, for example. Or, in the mobility sector, the via verde or the electric car. In technological terms, there is always a sexy vision of the future. The problem is that not everything is solved through technology. More: not even the grand majority of the problems is solved through technology.29

This may explain why the newly elected government of November 2015, a left coalition led by the Labour Party (PS) with the support of the Left Bloc (BE) and the Communist Party (PCP), adopted a more cautious perspective, immediately suspending all the concessionary processes of State-owned public transport companies. Leading transport academics in Portugal have seen this was a political gesture, meant to signal a softening of the transition, which was seen by the new government as too radical, sudden and ideological. Nunes da Silva emphasizes this, claiming that ‘during the crisis, the government’s position was the following: a strong belief that the State should abandon the transport sector and leave it to the market – this was the overall transport policy during the crisis’.30 João Vieira, too, said that we are talking about ‘a cultural alteration: liberalising is a cultural alteration’, adding that he too sees ‘more benefits in liberalising the transport sector rather than having transport in the public sphere’,31 but also that we need to walk more gently. In short, an overarching conceptualization of mobility as a right is shifting to an understanding of mobility as a service. The main conflict, between the former and present governments, seems to be the pace or rhythm of the transition. We can see from the case of Portugal that top-down, state-led effort at mobility transition are paradoxical. As with many cases in our research, the approach of the Portuguese national government is broadly neoliberal (see Chapter 6). This puts



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the state in the position of divesting itself of responsibility but equally control over fulfilling the carbon emissions targets generated by mobility. The paradox here is that the state is the main player in the process – particularly in the transition in the realm of meaning from mobility as a right to mobility as a service. Yet, the emphasis on national and global efforts to reduce the burden of mobility on high carbon energy is diminished. Other top-down approaches include the framing of the State as a driver of transitions. In South Korea, for instance, the Smart Work Centre programme was a State initiative that allowed governmental employees to work closer to their homes in new Smart Work Centre office spaces built closer to residential area. The programme’s plan is to expand this logic to other stakeholders, specifically the private sector. Such top-down approaches attempt to portray the State as a role model to be followed. However, in other cases, the State does not look to be a model but rather carries out its transition programmes through more traditional forms of social welfare service provision. One example of this is Norway. Norway is widely seen as a leader in top-down, State-led mobility transitions. Despite its commitment to action on climate change and its significant policy and financial instruments intended to facilitate low-carbon transition, Norway still exhibits contradictions and room for change. Norway’s mobility transition is exemplified by government initiatives such as subsidies for electric vehicle (EV) purchase and usage, and its ongoing investment in public transportation. Its EV incentives are strong and as a result, Norway remains the leading country for EV ownership in the world. Despite a strong policy, however, it has not led to a decrease in automobility but rather led to an increase of two-car households, while most EVs have been sold to households with more than one car.32 Therefore, while making strides towards a low-carbon transition, questions remain about whether it is achieving a mobility transition. Norway is particularly active in carbon trading and views it as a key means through which to meet its reductions targets. It views carbon trading as a cost-effective and equalizing initiative based on market logics and risk reduction principles. Taxation based on the ‘polluter pays’ principle is a key policy instrument for domestic climate policy. It supports and enforces taxation and other forms of financial levies to manage GHG emissions. Additionally, Norway has focused on the promotion of technological fixes to reduce emissions such as smart city upgrades of transportation systems. Norway’s mobility transition is actively pursued at the national, regional and local levels through direct policy intervention. It has one of the most comprehensive planning frameworks accounting for climate change mitigation and adaptation in the world. Norway’s March 2015 Nationally Determined Contributions submission to the UN COP in Paris set its target for reducing GHG emissions by 40 per cent below 1990 industrial GHG levels by 2030. This is in line with EU country targets. It also set itself the goal of becoming a carbon-neutral country by 2050. Norway ratified the UNFCCC in July 1993 and the Kyoto Protocol in May 2002. It became a party to the agreements when the Kyoto Protocol entered into force in February 2005. While not a member of the EU, Norway works closely with EU member countries through various agencies and agreements. Norway

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began policy interventions on climate change and GHG emissions in the late 1980s, and as mentioned earlier, its policy portfolio has grown to incorporate a comprehensive planning framework concerning emissions. In 2012 the Storting, Norway’s parliament, adopted a new national domestic policy framework to comprehensively engage government action on reaching its emissions targets.33 The 2011–12 White Paper which recommended this upgrade refers back to the country’s long-standing role setting national and international environmental and sustainability agendas since the 1970s.34 Notably, prior to the 2011–12 White Paper the sustainability agenda was set out in Norway’s budget reports, highlighting and helping to explain Norway’s focus on market-based solutions such as emissions trading schemes and other forms of carbon taxation. A commitment to low-carbon fuels is also set out. The 2011–12 White Paper sought to increase the modal share of sea and rail (as opposed to road and air) cargo transport. However, this comprehensive policy framework was not without contradictions. For example, the 2014–23 National Transport Plan’s road expansion targets contradicts this objective. The 2011–12 White Paper also notes the importance of local government in integrated spatial planning to reduce the need for transportation. Unlike other countries, this devolution of responsibility has been accompanied by various lines of funding in Norway, helping to provide capacity for local government initiatives. It is noted explicitly that funding agreements emphasize public transport, active travel, and reducing car use.35 Carbon taxation was introduced in 1991, and the structure of the tax has remained relatively unchanged for the past thirty years. The national tax covers roughly 60 per cent of total carbon emissions, its rate dependent on the type of product and/or use.36 Higher rates apply to petroleum products and activities. In 2008, Norway joined the EU emissions trading scheme (EU ETS). This covers almost 40 per cent of GHG emissions. In 2009, Norway included nitrous oxide emissions from the production of nitric acid in this scheme, which was voluntary and unilateral. As of 2013, roughly 50 per cent of domestic GHG emissions are covered by the EU ETS, and 80 per cent are covered under either the EU ETS or the national carbon tax.37 The vehicle purchase tax is another successful financial instrument on a national scale in Norway; it is a system rewarding the sales of low emissions vehicles through the form of subsidies on low and no emissions vehicles, and an additional tax on vehicles with above average emissions. This has led to reduced emissions from new vehicles.38 Even environmental advocacy groups are enthusiastic about its outcomes. As one interviewee noted: But this tax on buying a car has been used to change the car’s emissions. And that has been a quite good strategy from the government. It started in 2007 where they changed the tax system on buying cars. So they [taxes] are now dependent on CO2 emissions. Not the total tax, but a part of the tax is demanded on the CO2 emissions. And that means that if you buy a car with lower emissions, it’s quite more cheaper [sic] than buying another car.39



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The very high tax rates on carbon-based cars and petroleum have also been directly attributed to Norway’s position as a leader in EV sales and ownership. In this instance, Keynesian market logics apply. The elephant in the room of course is the way in which Norway, a leader in national policy and action on low-carbon mobility transition, is able to establish and maintain its strong funding for low-carbon transition and how its citizens are able to pay the taxes asked of them: through oil and gas. While in 2019 Norway announced that it was going to divest fossil fuel productions from its Sovereign Wealth Fund, it does not intend to stop oil and gas explorations. Norway is, in essence, betting on both sides of the same coin. In January 2020, Norway produced 1,963,000 barrels of oil a day and 300,000 barrels of natural gas.40 The vast majority of this is exported mainly to European markets. It supplies 25 per cent of Europe’s petroleum and in 2017 Norway surpassed Qatar to become the world’s second largest producer of natural gas behind Russia. Oil and gas exports make up 50 per cent of Norway’s exports and 12 per cent of its GDP.41 While Norway’s reported GHG emissions are low, they do not include emissions from the petroleum products it exports. Including these ‘exported’ emissions within the calculations, estimates have put Norway as the seventh largest producer of GHG emissions.42 Given the population of Norway is only five million people, this is an exceptionally large figure. Despite calls for and steps taken by Norway to further limit its emissions at home, it intends to continue drilling for oil and gas until at least 2066 or until reserves run out. Bente Nyland, director general of the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate, told Reuters News Agency that by 2022 oil and gas production could reach its highest levels recorded and she stated: ‘This is very good news, because everybody is talking about a phasing out of the Norwegian petroleum activity and, at least in the next 10 years, we don’t see that.’43 There is clearly then a disconnect between government rhetoric and action, which shows no signs of managed decline, a process to halt new petroleum exploration and extraction projects called for by climate change action watchdogs such as Oil Change International.44 Increasingly, global carbon debates are linking energy and transportation sectors emissions discussions. Looking at Norway’s national commitments, its paradox of mobility transition – underwriting its success and leadership at home by enabling high carbon emissions elsewhere through its sales of oil and gas – is a prime example of the need to couple these sectors. The current climate moment cannot allow for national leaders such as Norway to elide its successes and responsibilities by shifting emissions to other places. States everywhere are key in regulating production and consumption, yet even more progressive states cannot be guaranteed to act in the best interests of global place and environment while capitalist logics such as the reliance on carbon trading markets persists. In order to realize a low-carbon transition situated in socially as well as environmentally just terms, states are being pushed from below by grassroots initiative and community momentum. The struggles between state and non-state actors remain crucial spaces to understand low-carbon mobility transitions.

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The central governments of Portugal and Norway are clearly taking different paths towards mobility transition, and this difference illustrates just some of the wide range of approaches that top-down, state-led transition efforts can take. In regards to the methodology of top-bottom mechanisms, there are several trends and tendencies in evidence, from more authoritative typologies of governance, such as the Singaporean model or the Emirates overall national context, to more participatory movements, such as the ones registered in Norway or New Zealand. These depend upon a number of variables, from the model of government in question to the size and scale of the country, the strength of its social and civic movements or the influence of the private sector. In Singapore, for example, the government was able to create conditions to ultimately require the usage of public transportation by the majority of its population through a strict system of road pricing, a vehicle quota system and high taxation of automobile ownership. These practices have been met with criticism for not being equitable; however, the policies, coupled with the country’s ability to provide reasonably comprehensive and reliable public transportation services, have eased congestion and reduced air pollution and emissions. In this case, the private sector is only called upon after the processes of policy construction, with its action limited to the implementation or execution stages. Top-down approaches to mobility transitions have in many cases been the most effective at simply reducing GHG emissions and shifting people to increased low- and zero-carbon modal shares of transportation. However, in all cases of top-down transition, the question of mobility justice remains central. Wealthy individuals have generally not been affected by policy changes as they can afford the higher costs of carbon levies and are able to negotiate expensive and complex systems such as Singapore’s vehicle quota system. Poorer individuals and communities are disadvantaged. Non-state actors and bottom-up movements As Sheller (2018) has shown, progressive approaches to transition have come from communities, activism and advocacy. Throughout our research, we encountered a diverse array of grassroots and entrepreneurial movements, which could be categorized under bottomup mechanisms. As with State actors, these have very diverse typologies and approaches, ranging from start-ups and small companies to activist movements. On the one hand, there can be a clear intention to mainstream (or upscale) a certain technology or service, whereas, on the other hand, certain movements appear to be designed for the local level without ever being transferred, or even transferable, to other contexts. Naturally, this adds up to the complexity of mechanisms and socio-economic contexts that we came across in our case studies. Here we consider some examples that illustrate the variety of bottom-up transition. Generation Zero is an example of an activist movement that rapidly became important for its capacity to raise awareness and civic participation, among the Auckland community in New Zealand. It advocates the redesign of a number of mobility policies towards sustainability and low-carbon transport. It has won a number of local campaigns and made a significant contribution to the politics around transportation and the environment in New Zealand and Auckland in



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particular. The narratives of Generation Zero45 (Gen Z) emerged in part on the Transportation Blog (T Blog)46 – a blog that’s well known among New Zealanders for insightful commentary on Auckland transportation issues. Generation Zero was formed after the ‘New Zealand Youth Delegation’47 came back from the UN Climate Negotiation in Copenhagen in 2010 inspired by youth movements happening around the world. Generation Zero was formed in 2011 with the central purpose of ‘providing solutions for New Zealand to cut carbon pollution through smarter transport, liveable cities & independence from fossil fuels’.48 Its activities around GHG emissions are mainly focused on transportation as this is something that ‘makes sense to young people’. Gen Z gives voice to the young people who simply want to ‘get from A to B’ and be mobile without being dependent on cars – and at the same time, make their cities zero carbon. It is a national organization led by young adults (aged between seventeen and thirty) and has small groups working in Wellington, Auckland, Hamilton, Dunedin and Christchurch. The group has been highly active since it began and organized over twenty events including campaigns, workshops, stunts and petitions throughout the country, ranging across issues from higher investment in public transport to a separate bike line and walk-and-cycleway ‘Skypath’ over the Harbour Bridge in Auckland. Generation Zero has been successful in its local campaigns, especially in Auckland, but less successful in the national campaign. For instance, it gained significant public interest for its campaign against the Auckland Unitary Plan in 2013, where it clearly sent out the message that Aucklanders do not want more roads and housing in the suburbs, but they want a better public transportation system and live closer to the city. This was taken up by the local council and the public because Auckland has always been seen as a liveable city with long sunny beaches and a tranquil lifestyle in the suburbs. The media publicized Gen Z’s campaign in a positive way. In the end, the city received 1300 Council submissions favouring a ‘quality compact Auckland City’. Following the publicity of Gen Z, they won a number of other local campaigns to build better public transport infrastructure such as building the K-road cycle lane, and the Skypath, where they helped to get 12,000 people to sign up to support improved infrastructure. They were successful in these campaigns for a number of reasons: (1) Gen Z is the first youth-led climate organization in New Zealand and gained positive feedback from the public by shining light on those issues that are not talked about, (2) they make their online submission forms and other means of communication attractive with a colourful and simple design, and made complicated information easy to follow,49 (3) their committee members worked closely with each other and made strategic actions and ‘strategic conversations’ occur and (4) local campaigns are easier to win because often the solution to the problem is immediate and it affects the local resident’s health and everyday life. Another reason for Generation Zero’s success in gaining the local government’s support in Auckland is its collaborative work with T Blog. T Blog is an influential blog in New Zealand, with thousands of daily readers, and their commentaries

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about the politics of transportation plans in Auckland are often publicized in news articles and media. The blog was formed in 2008 and is hosted by Campaign for Better Transport (CBT).50 In 2013, Gen Z and T Blog worked as a collaborative team to propose the ‘Congestion Free Network’ (CNF) to the Auckland city council (Figure 4.1). In short, the CFN plan proposes to spend less money ($10 billion instead of the $34 billion proposed by the local government) and free up congestion by making simple connections between the already existing infrastructures of buses, rail and roads and increase the quality of these services by making them more frequent, building more separated lanes, and provide highquality free Wi-fi and better seats. Instead of building a lavish and expensive rail network system such as a proposed City Rail Link, which would take years to build with the insufficient funding commitment from the state, the CFN plan proposed that all routes on a network fulfil two conditions which are ‘to have its own separated lane’ and ‘offer a high frequency service’. The CFN plan was publicized through the most watched national TV show ‘Campbell Live’ in July 2013 and received positive feedback from the local council and the public. In August 2014, the CFN policy proposal received over 3000 public signatures in favour and the plan was modelled as part of Auckland’s second review of their transport budget. At the same time, both the Labour and Green Parties adopted the CFN as their Auckland transport policy. Local and national authorities adopted policies derived from the work of a nongovernmental organization in their transportation plans. Bottom-up transition mechanisms involve a significant number of actors, from local residents and activists to government officials and transport operators. It involves negotiation between pressure groups and local authorities towards establishing and achieving common goals. In Kazakhstan, for instance, in the context of a strong state and the lack of the national sustainable mobility policy, environmental activists and cycling communities attract attention to the negative effects of car-centric lifestyles and interact with national and local authorities in order to make cycling safer and more attractive. In Almaty the development of

Figure 4.1  Congestion Free Network – a quick summary (Generation Zero 2013).



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cycling infrastructure is pushed by an active community in the context of a UNDP project ‘The City of Almaty Sustainable Transport’. The group Velo-Almaty was created in 2007 and consists of people who lobby for better conditions for cycling in the city in their free time. They communicate with national and local governmental bodies, publish brochures on cycling safety and road traffic regulations, organize events in the context of international events such as Earth Day, Day without Cars, etc. Nobody earns money with these activities; it is characterized by the participants as ‘your [own] personal civic initiative’. As they have been lobbying for cycling infrastructure, during the years of existence of the group 24.23 kilometres of cycling lanes have been laid in the city. Many of those lanes, however, according to the group are not safe to cycle on (e.g. they are slippery) or are not convenient because of fragmentation – twitter users have posted images of an Almaty cycle lane being crossed by a metal road safety barrier. The group pays a lot of attention to safety, believing that is it best not to promote cycling widely ‘before there are conditions (for safe cycling)’: You want to share it [the experience of cycling] with others. (. . .) We want [cycling] to be safe, for ourselves, first of all. . . . For ourselves, for our near and dear ones. (. . .) If people get hit [when they cycle] you feel you need to change this, you cannot just sit and watch.51

Another motivation to persevere, it appears, has to do with the feeling of being part of the city in a different way, being part of some community but also entering into contact with other communities. Thus, they describe an event when they distributed leaflets including information about amended road traffic regulations among car drivers who were waiting in a traffic jam: ‘It’s fun, actually. People get united even on such occasions . . . it’s interesting for them. . . . It’s urban culture.’52 In addition to the arguments about the health impacts and convenience of cycling, a related motivation was articulated in Nur-Sultan (formerly Astana) by the representative of Samruk Kazyna – a Kazakhstan sovereign wealth fund – who says the main reason to develop cycling for her is ‘community’: ‘Astana is a very young city. . . . The average age is 30. . . . It is managers, top managers or office workers . . . they are sitting at the office and do their paperwork. These people need something more.’53 As with the case of Generation Z, a group of non-state actors have been able to bring about action, however limited, by applying pressure to bodies with the ability to enact change through legislation and other means. Such successes are achieved not without a series of connections being made across bodies and scales. In the case of Velo-Almaty their actions were framed within the promotion of sustainability by the UN through the UNDP in Nur-Sultan. Bottom-up movements do not have to be local, or even national, in scale. Some have become international almost instantly. Consider Critical Mass or the recent rise of Extinction Rebellion. Under the pressures of fast-paced climate politics, acceleration of extreme weather events and other signs of the climate emergency, it is no surprise that groups such as Extinction Rebellion, a non-hierarchical and intensely localized voice in climate change debates, have emerged as a force to

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contend with. Seen at first as a radical and inspiring hope that might work towards forcing the hand of politicians in the fight against global heating, they quickly drew controversy. On 17 October 2019 a grandfather, an ex-Buddhist teacher, a vicar and a former GP, all members of XR London, participated in the disruption of commuter trains and the London Underground during rush hour. They climbed on top of trains and glued their hands to the side of rail cars to stop the trains, headed to London’s financial district. Eight people were arrested. At one point at the Canning Street Tube Station, commuters tried to drag the protesters down from their perch atop the trains. The actions were divisive. Targeting public transport, including electric trains, worked to confuse allies (is taking public transport environmentally ‘good’ or not?). And it gave XR London’s opponents fodder to condemn them for disrupting seemingly innocent commuters. Sadiq Kahn, London’s progressive mayor, condemned the group, calling on them to protest ‘peacefully and within the boundaries of the law’.54 XR London later posted an apology on their Facebook page, noting that the disruption of public transit was a disputed tactic even within the movement. While XR has grabbed global media attention, with local chapters springing up all over the world, it has also been critiqued for making similar mistakes to the Occupy Movement – it’s seen as predominantly white, middle class and male, excluding broader voices and people and groups who have had longstanding histories in environmental justice and climate movements.55 According to Marc Hudson, a long-time climate activist based in the UK, Protest without disruption is not protest. So, blocking bridges, gluing yourself to things, all that is entirely normal – though we might come back to the wisdom of the tube train action! . . . the rhetoric of urgency on environment and climate has been with us, intermittently, since the early 1970s (check out The Limits to Growth and Blueprint for Survival). We have been here before, many times. And this brings me to my questions: What about the people who can’t afford these intense periods of activity – financially, practically, emotionally? . . . What is XR doing to make it more likely that people are able to sustain their activism for years, not months, and make it easier for others to be ‘peripherally involved’, week in, month out? What do you think an ‘average’ BME [Black Minority Ethnic] person thinks about the flowers being sent to Brixton police station? . . . And don’t you worry that XR’s rhetoric of ‘no blame’ means the fossil-fuel incumbents can continue to get away with trashing the planet?56

Increasingly, the role of non-state actors including the general public, businesses and activist groups such as XR, has been focusing on two important themes picked up here. The link between climate change and mobility, and mobility transitions which are also socially just transitions. Climate groups such as XR have focused their actions on disrupting commuters going to work via public transport and privately on roadways. The threat of shutting down airport runways led to the arrest of nineteen XR activists, leading them to call off the actual action (flying drones in London Heathrow’s ‘no fly



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zone’).57 This was in protest of Heathrow’s expansion to a third runway. Despite critiques of XR tactics, the focus on mobility has had real-world state-sponsored results. The expansion of Heathrow was ruled illegal by the court of appeal because its approval was inconsistent with the Paris Agreement commitments from the UK. Popular action and anger over the expansion plans contributed to the public awareness around the link to expand flights in the London area and the overall judgement based on the necessity to consider both the law and the public good. This increasing link between climate and mobility can also be seen in the popular media which has focused on air quality and pollution levels and reduced the mobility of people and goods in the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic.58 This link can in turn be coupled with degrowth (Kallis 2011) agendas which include slowing mobility of people and goods in an effort to engage a more socially just economy. Mobility transitions based on social and environmental justice need to take into account the diversity of people and places and the myriad ways in which they will be affected. For example, as Weiqiang Lin (2020) notes, ‘the world is not quite ready for an alternative mobility future. Sure, we can adopt teleconferencing practices, travel less and consume locally; but, significant segments of the global workforce – some 65.5 million jobs – are not currently equipped to transit out of the aviation industry.’59 He goes on to note that the speed of mobility transition is important when accounting for low-carbon mobility justice while acknowledging that a transition which champions degrowth, for example, also implies a lifestyle transition which limits certain forms of mobility, such as flying. Interrogating mobility assumptions is critical to ensuring that mobility transitions are just, and it is non-state actors who have ultimately held governments to account by insisting that discussions of low-carbon mobility justice focus on how power operates through laws, practices and economies. Thus, XR’s focus on modes of mobility, including targeting Tube riders on their way to work, is as much an insistence that transition needs to critique capitalism, and act on it, as it is to reducing carbon emissions.

The entangled mechanisms of transition So far, in this chapter, we have explored the roles of intergovernmental organi­ zations, State governments and non-State actors in the evolution of transition policies. In reality any instance of transition policy or action exists within contexts where all three play a role. To follow Sheller, we assume that these actors work – and that transition policies form – at scales which are ‘not neatly nested but simultaneous and entangled’ (2018: 126). Any transition policy exists within the context of global agreements and guidance provided by the UN and its various related bodies. Politics and actions suggested by social movements need to be enacted by the local and national State. Sometimes the local State acts in line with the global agreements but against the priorities of the national State government. Vancouver’s Greenest City programme was being enacted when the

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Federal Government of Canada was effectively denying global heating. The BRT innovations in Curitiba were being exported to other cities globally, while the national government of Brazil was ignoring them. In addition, there are the cases of new policies, initiatives or programmes that have been planned, right from their design phases, as collaborations between the private and the public sectors, demanding equal efforts of policy design and implementation by State and non-State actors. This meso-level of transitions mechanisms refers to what many have labelled as ‘third way’ governance or politics: ‘third-way’ public-private partnerships, or P3 developments that have come to characterize many national and local government service provision. Even when policy and action are not specifically formulated as a public-private partnership this is often effectively the case such as when the transport sector is a privatized service, with the State being responsible for the regulation alone. This is apparent, for instance, in Brazil, where the transport sector is conceived of as a fundamentally privatized entity, although regulated by the State. Excluding some rail services – mostly because these raise questions in regard to the constitution of private monopolies, as there is no direct competition for rail or metro lines – all of the Brazilian transport sector could be seen as a public-private partnership: the State regulates the services first and, then, the private sector operates them. A similar logic is at play in Norway, for example, where the state owns the national railway, and regional governments own public transportation systems, yet they contract operations and maintenance to private firms. This contrasts with the Portuguese case where the State still owns and runs many public transport companies. This meso-level is often more localized than this though. In South Korea, G-Valley is an example of an initiative planned as a collaboration between the State and the private sector (see Chapter 7). The redevelopment of the bus system in Chile’s capital city Santiago is a widely known example of policy implementation ‘failure’ that was ‘fixed’ by engaging in a P3 partnership; however, it remains to be seen if satisfactory and accessible services will be implemented in the long run. Public-private collaboration is a particularly important tool for advancing policy and practice in the Netherlands as well. The national anti-congestion policy ‘Beter Benutten’ is an example of such collaboration (see Chapter 6). Yet, according to a number of interviewees, the climate of uncertainty and unwillingness to take long-term risks on behalf of the Dutch government and the correlation of shortterm measures with the electoral cycles may hamper the realization of ambitions verbalized in the Energy Agreement and other documents that are based on established co-responsibility of the public and private sector for transitions. The diversity of approaches we have tackled across our case studies shows the complexity and variety of mechanisms at play. The distinctions we have made are never really that clear. Even within the same category of mechanisms, there are a variety of methodologies and power relations that do not add up to a totally consistent classification. A State-led transition policy in Kazakhstan means something quite different from one in New Zealand or in Singapore. But it remains important nevertheless as it provides an account of how variable transitions can



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be. Transitions are mobilized across a significant number of actors in different contexts, with different agendas and diverse relations of power, often with no particular low-carbon reasoning in mind. Low-carbon mobility transition policies may reflect, reinforce and reproduce structural relations between the state and society. Many, of course, have sought to reinvent new relations in the backdrop of an already transitioning society, for instance from one political system to another. Singapore’s transitions are set in the context of a centralized and hierarchical state, leaving little room for activist or civil society-led transitions. Movement from a modernizing post-colonial state to an emphasis on entrepreneurialism led by market-based policy initiatives, combined with strong state leadership, is clearly expressed in its policies. Meanwhile transport planning in Kazakhstan represents dealing with the residues of postsocialist transition in the context of a modernization agenda while struggling with an ongoing financial crisis. We might then include broader transitions to democracy; political and economic modernization; post-socialist transition; from austerity to recovery in both social and economic policy, and even transitions to a low-carbon energy and industrial base as part of the context within which lowcarbon transitions need to be understood. The state as an institution has long-standing regulatory power that does not dramatically alter course easily (Giddens 1984). Governments are generally set up to persist in a manner so as to dictate the overall running of a jurisdiction, encompassing economic and social reproduction which together, we argue, extends to the ways in which people move (Jessop 2002). Despite states’ relative obduracy, alterations in governance processes are not without precedent and are increasingly common in contemporary governance and policymaking processes. Sometimes this change is voluntarily incorporated and at other times there is struggle over how to best govern. Democratic governance structures can make space for grassroots activist interventions in policymaking. Bottom-up grassroots mechanisms provide a necessary friction for discussing and debating the optimal ways of engaging in mobility transition. This is often accomplished by highlighting the relational aspects of governance by drawing together global, regional, national and local interests. Grassroots activist networks in this sense often forge an ‘associational politics’ which is constituted by diverse coalitions of actors operating in multiple registers to achieve a common goal. Such activism is globally diverse and has in several cases been successful. However, it is not the only means through which mobility transition has been achieved. Elsewhere, the relationship between a country’s legal and political system has been exposed as a potential conduit for stimulating low-carbon mobility policies or at least holding a government to account for not providing them. In the Netherlands, we see how the courts have enabled a first legal check on the disregarding of climate change warnings and for the establishment of inadequate carbon reduction plans. In this instance, a local court decision demanded the Netherlands’ government cut emissions by 25 per cent in five years. More recently, the courts have oscillated over the construction of a third runway at London’s

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Heathrow airport based on the fact that it did not comply with the Paris Agreement that the UK signed up to, before a halt on the scheme was overturned at the UK’s supreme court in late 2020. Judicial activism in this manner pits different arms of the same government against each other and has the potential to make visible tensions between conflicting levels of governance and the fragility of the social contract that it has made. It is often a radical democracy (as opposed to radically altering the form of governance) that is being practised through judicial activism, holding governments to account for their own actions under their own rules. The various scales of governance in each country also tend to produce friction between policies that can mitigate against low-carbon mobility transitions. There are a number of other challenges for national-level mobility transition. Primarily, growth often remains fixated around an automobility agenda with advocates for increasing roads and constant growth. Such an agenda continues to drive national and local government development action in places such as Canada, Norway, Brazil, Turkey and Chile. The private sector often has a central role in development and transportation transitions at the national level, and its wellresourced agenda can prove difficult to breach. State institutions are always complex structures that are constantly adapting to emerging circumstances. The interplay between state and non-state actors is equally reactive and emergent. In terms of mobility transition, these relationships are characterized by ongoing negotiations over how to best plan, implement and regulate mobility futures.

CChapter 5 POLICY ASSEMBLAGES MULTIPLICITY, TEMPORALITY AND ACTORS IN A TIME OF ‘CRISIS’

Introduction On 22 February 2011, the city of Christchurch, on New Zealand’s South Island, was hit by an earthquake measuring 6.2 on the Richter scale, leaving thousands of people homeless and making it impossible for its inhabitants to commute to work in the CBD. One business that had to continue despite the natural disaster was the Inland Revenue – a governmental agency that looks after tax and social welfare. The offices of the Inland Revenue became disconnected from its 800+ staff members.1 One solution to this problem was telework. At the time, the Inland Revenue had never had an official teleworking programme, and hence policies and resources had to be developed quickly. One of the people that they sought help from was Belvis England who runs Telework New Zealand – a private organization that helps companies and businesses to set up teleworking programmes. Belvis is a climate change activist, who firmly believes that if enough people telework on a continual basis, it will save tonnes of emissions, helping save the environment and prevent traffic jams at the same time.2 While Belvis had long been involved in the business and had tried to make telework an official policy via state support, city governments only showed a minor interest in his ideas during election periods, and telework took the forms of soft policies hidden in various agendas. It was a major crisis that called him up to the main stage to run workshops and seminars to help many organizations set up their remote working practices.3 It was an assemblage of unforeseen natural disaster, past and current networks, and the teaching of new norms and culture that resulted in the fast mobilization of telework programmes within the city. Low-carbon mobility policies are often only assembled in a time of ‘crisis’. Without a ‘crisis’, problems that we see all the time such as climate change, environmental degradation, social inequality and unreliable mobility remain long-term target policies. It is during a time of financial crisis, natural disaster and political or social instabilities that various actors are urged to take action quickly and collectively. As we write, the Covid-19 crisis has led not only to significant reductions in personal mobility across the world but also to a momentum for low-

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carbon mobility initiatives.4 In other words, mobility transition policies do not exist in isolation from other policies or other narratives existing in complicated ‘policy assemblages’. In this chapter, we explore the multiple and temporal ways that mobility transition policies are linked to other agendas, events and transitions. Some of these are environmentally focused such as discourses on air quality, pollution, land scarcity and congestion. Others are broadly economic in nature and often act to directly contradict mobility transition efforts. While other chapters in this book also consider the paradoxes and the oftencontradictory impulses of low-carbon mobility policies and the related issues of social justice, in this chapter, we focus particularly on how they actually become policy assemblages in multiple and temporal ways via various actors. It is comparatively rare to find policies that are entirely framed as low-carbon transition policies. In contrast, assemblage describes the drawing together of people, technologies, culture, practices, policies and the unforeseen ‘human and non-human factors’ to create national and local level responses to problems of mobility and of lowcarbon transition. Policy responses are interconnected and rarely straightforward. Despite overarching international climate debates, treaties and emissions reductions targets, there is no dominant model of low-carbon mobility transition. By taking assemblage thinking into these contradicting narratives, we especially focus on the processes behind policy and attempt to understand how various ideas and factors are ‘awkwardly’ assembled as patchworks of ‘low-carbon’ mobility policies. This chapter is divided into five sections. First, we provide a theoretical overview of assemblage and the importance of taking an assemblage approach to understanding low-carbon mobility transitions. The following three sections on multiplicity, temporality and actors illustrate key lessons of assemblage thinking for mobility transitions by drawing on a number of different processes to discuss how policy assemblages are produced in multiple and temporal ways via multiple actors. By setting and discussing these three themes, we discuss how there are both opportunities (multiplicity) and challenges (temporality) in assembling low-carbon mobility policies and the central importance of people (actors) in the mobilization of low-carbon mobility policies. In the concluding section, we discuss how policies are often only assembled in unintended ways and ‘by chance’ during a time of ‘crisis’ and are dependent on the hands of the willed actors that shape and assemble those policies. In doing so, we question and discuss the importance of scale, place and space in actualizing policy assemblages and low-carbon mobility transitions.

Low-carbon mobility policy assemblages Assemblages are composed of heterogeneous elements that may be human and non-human, organic and inorganic, technical and natural. In broad terms, assemblage is, then, part of a more general reconstitution of the social that seeks to blur divisions of social-material, near-far and structure-agency. (Anderson and McFarlane 2011: 124)



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Assemblage thinking is rooted in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and has been developed by Manuel DeLanda, Ben Anderson and Colin McFarlane among others (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; DeLanda 2006; Anderson and McFarlane 2011; Baker and McGuirk 2017). It emphasizes uncertainty, non-linearity, complexity, heterogeneity and contingency of the geographies that we study. Geographers have increasingly become engaged with the concept of assemblage to ‘emphasise emergence, multiplicity, and indeterminacy, and [to redefine] the socio-spatial in terms of the composition of diverse elements into some form of provisional socio-spatial formation’ (Anderson and McFarlane 2011: 124). Such explorative work is not new in critical thinking, yet assemblage takes a step further to blur the logical divisions of social-material, near-far and structure-agency, and the assumptions that already existing theories make, to seek for the certainties emerging from the uncertainties. Assemblage is a process. Specifically, it is a process ‘in which divergent political motivations are aligned, translations are effected, and new policy forms are created, resulting in the co-constitution of the policy object as a global form and the associated policy programmes as a global assemblage’ (Prince 2010: 172). Indeed, an assemblage framework has often formed a way of looking at urban spaces as ‘politically meaningful spatial entities’ because they are seen as spaces assembled with various actors, power relations, and practices through a process of mobilizing certain ideas (Allen and Cochrane 2007; Prince 2010). As a theoretical tool, assemblage attempts to untangle the assembling and disassembling processes behind the socio-spatial forms and search for the politics behind the assemblage as a contingent invention. Hence, there has been much discussion concerning ‘how’ to study the processes of urban and policy assemblages (McCann and Ward 2012; Baker and McGuirk 2017). As McCann and Ward have argued, ‘our writing of the policy world – the world of mobilities and selective gatherings of exemplars, models, and best practices – is, in itself, an assemblage’ (2012: 49); hence, we must be reflexive of our own thinking and writing as its own kind of assemblages. Assemblage thinking has been particularly influential among policy scholars. It is seen as an approach that avoids thinking of policy formation in overly linear and simplistic ways as the outcomes of rational actors or as a process that is unmarked by the particular geographies in which policies are formed. By recognizing the heterogeneity of elements that go into policy formation it refuses the notions that, for instance, policy can simply be ‘transferred’ from one place to another or, alternatively, emerge fully formed from the internal workings of the national or local state (Peck 2011; Cook 2015; Savage 2020). A focus on co-constitution and subjectivity also underpins our conceptualization of policy assemblages. While the analytical frame of an assemblage enables the co-constitutions of orthodox and heterodox ideas, culture and place-making are both positions of subjectivity that are informed by the assemblage from which they stem. Policy assemblage occurs through ‘policy actors’ purposive gathering and fixing’ (McCann and Ward 2012: 43) of various elements. Our application of

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assemblage reflects the need to explore in more detail compound relationships within the social sciences, which would encourage more blended, inclusive ways of thinking about mobility transition policies. In order to do so, we employ the notion of policy assemblage here in the descriptive sense. For us, assemblage demonstrates the labour of policy actors and actants in bringing about specific configurations of policy and discourse that contribute to mobility transitions in each place we examined and also the mobile policies and mobile places which they stem from. This entanglement complicates mobility transition as a process, and we argue that geographies of space, place, scale and temporality are essential to understanding this. As we saw in Chapter 4, transition policies, however local, exist within the frameworks of national and international policy frameworks. Thus, the microworkings of a bike-sharing scheme in Singapore or a ‘green’ credit card in Seoul, for instance, exist within the context of the Paris Agreement or the UN Sustainable Development Goals. At the same time, international agreements on sustainable futures are nothing if they are not practices and stories that happen locally – somewhere (Tsing 2005). The policy assemblage is the local, territorialized gathering together of elements of policy (people, ideas, technologies, resources, etc.) in order to create the ‘policy object’, a specific set of guidelines, governing a political jurisdiction. Some broad models, such as Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) and bicycle sharing schemes, travel and adapt as they are institutionalized in particular places that are geographically dispersed and are not necessarily politically connected. Policymakers, embedded in place, draw on ideas and models from elsewhere as a way of managing issues of governance (McCann and Ward 2011). Policy assemblages contribute to local as well as global mobility transitions and are thus relational. They are relational in the sense that specific policies and policy frameworks are situated in a broader global context of climate change and low-carbon transition, as well as in relation to other local instances of policy formation. Consider Brazil’s BRT system, for instance. The BRT inaugurated in 1974 in Curitiba is one of the most appraised and celebrated services in mobility transitions history. In the 1970s, Brazil was not thinking about transitions at all, yet with almost no intervention from the national government, the authorities in the provincial city of Curitiba invented the BRT system and implemented it in the city, positively transforming the urban façade. Without enough funding for a metropolitan system, which was being built in São Paulo in roughly the same time frame, the city transformed the urban grid into a bus-friendly network, with segregated lanes and integrated tariffs. The success of the endeavour has been widely acclaimed and much discussed (Rabinovitch 1996; Lindau, Hidalgo and Facchini 2010; Miranda and Rodrigues da Silva 2012). In fact, Curitiba, with its integrated transport system, is normally viewed as one of the greatest examples of a successful transit-oriented development (TOD), ‘which implies that residential, business and recreational areas should be built in high density areas and close to public transport stations’.5 In 1996, the innovation in transport achieved by the city led UN Habitat to coin Curitiba as the ‘most innovative city in the world’.6



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This illustrates how mobility transitions are frequently bottom-up initiatives of local governments, detached from a wider national framework. It also illustrates how some central government initiatives become reworked regionally or locally through a politics of place. Interestingly, despite Curitiba’s leadership in BRT policy and implementation globally, and the successful export of BRT elsewhere to places such as Bogotá, Colombia (Wood 2015), the city has started to struggle over the past decade over issues of capacity, the accompanying decline in the quality of service and the reluctance of local authorities to see an underground service built in the city. Curitiba seems to have blindly trusted the BRT capacity and neglected other modes of transportation such as the metropolitan train service. Equally, other municipalities in Brazil have lagged behind Curitiba’s example since the 1970s. The story shows that policy assemblages can be fragile and temporal. Policy assemblages, when transformed into urban assemblages, are socio-spatial, temporal and fragmented, intertwined with people’s old and new imaginations of cities and malleable unforeseen circumstances. Policy responses are interconnected and rarely straightforward. It is comparatively rare to find policies that are entirely framed as low-carbon transition policies. Throughout the fourteen countries examined for this book, it is clear that despite overarching international climate debates, treaties and emissions reductions targets, there is no predominant model of low-carbon mobility transition. In the following sections, we further discuss each of these processes of policy assemblage using case studies from places we researched. There are three major processes of policy assemblage that we encountered. Firstly, we emphasize the multiplicity of policy assemblages. It has become abundantly clear that the mobility transition policies we have encountered are almost impossible to disentangle from other agendas, intentions, purposes or effects, such as scarcity, liberal logics or the persistence of automobility, within which they are embedded. While this interconnectivity and multiplicity created opportunities for low-carbon mobility transitions to happen heterogeneously as patchworks of transitions, they were also temporal. Hence secondly, we discuss the temporality of policy assemblages. We convey that mobility transition policies are temporal and they may easily be dismissed when other new ideas come in or new technologies interfere. Thirdly, we tell stories of different actors who draw and pull together the policy assemblages and explain how they happen consecutively and collectively in multiple ways via mobile people, mobile policies and mobile places (McCann and Ward 2012).

Multiplicity and patchwork transitions Policy assemblages, like all assemblages, are marked by multiplicity and heterogeneity. They are formed from a multitude of prompts, purposes, people, ideas, things and trajectories that are arranged through a combination of intention and accident to reach some specific end or ends. They are, as Ureta has argued, marked by particular ‘modes of ordering’ that while heterogeneous in constitution

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are nevertheless directed strategically (2015). They are arranged, and the arrangement requires effort. Assemblage is not simply the end result of deliberate planning interventions. Policies sometimes have unintended externalities and, sometimes, low-carbon transition may be as much an externality as an intention. Low-carbon branding can be an important hook despite a quite different agenda (Temenos and McCann 2012). Low-carbon transitions are sometimes an unintended or lesser by-product of the central purpose of a policy or plan. Consider, for instance, the case of Seoul’s G-Valley. G-Valley7 is the first high-tech industry sector in South Korea located in the heart of Seoul. On 3 June 2015, G-Valley announced to the public that it would create the sector to be a mecca for electric vehicles and become the first national ‘eco-friendly electric vehicle district’. While G-Valley was formed in the context of national government attempts to decrease carbon emissions and encourage electric vehicles, it was not, primarily, designed for these purposes. G-Valley is home to over 10,000 different high-tech corporations and start-up companies. The area started to grow from the 1970s, and it covers two towns of ‘Ga-san’ and ‘Guro’ and gradually coined its name ‘G-Valley’ to resemble Silicon Valley. The different industries are scattered around the two different towns into three different sectors (that reaches over 1,922,000 square metres), and the transportation within G-Valley has been limited with the current shuttle services and industry-owned cars. This was a long-term issue for G-Valley because without solving the internal transportation issue, workers had to drive their own cars to work, causing traffic congestion in and around the valley. Hence, the G-Valley Organization committee members saw political support from the local government for electric vehicles as an opportunity to solve the problem in an ecologically beneficial way through the EV sharing system. In mid-2014, the G-Valley Organization committee members contacted the Seoul government to come up with a private-public funded project to install an EV sharing system. This was seen as an excellent opportunity for Seoul’s local government because they have been attempting to come up with an innovative way to popularize the usage of electric vehicles within Seoul – hence, it was a ‘truly win-win situation’ (Interview, Seoul Metropolitan Government). After numerous meetings and forums, the Seoul government came up with the ‘G-Valley’s EV Sharing Master Plan’ to announce to the public. The plan involves eight different stakeholders including the G-Valley Organization committee, the local government of Seoul, ‘Woori’ Bank, building industries and an NGO for green buildings that all signed the mutual agreement on 2 June 2015 to work collectively by supporting each other and build an effective electric car-sharing system within G-Valley. This public-private partnership has been seen as a success, and the existing car-sharing companies in Seoul were keen to be involved. Workers who commute to G-Valley are encouraged to sign up for the ‘G-Car’ sharing system, and ideally, commute by public transportation (instead of with their private car) and switch to G-Cars for their internal transportation within G-Valley. It is believed that with agreement between different stakeholders coming from policy and industry



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sectors along with other specialists, a support system will be created in order to reduce any negative effects or losses due to the project. The use of electric cars in G-Valley certainly has the potential to reduce GHG emissions in Seoul as, on any given day, there are over 170,000 workers in the area. This positive environmental benefit is not, however, the main reason for the programme. Rather, the EV carsharing investment in Seoul’s G-Valley is a stimulus for promoting a high-tech image similar to Silicon Valley, more than an advancement of a clearly low-carbon agenda. This is made clear in one of our interviews. We really hope that by building EVs in G-Valley, G-Valley will become the center for EVs. So, if people want to purchase electric cars, they may immediately go to G-Valley and check it out. Currently there are thousands of visitors to G-Valley each day other than the workers because there are shopping malls and good restaurants and interesting technological attractions. If we can get those people to also become interested in electric cars, that would triple the benefits of this project.8

Electric vehicle policy, in this case, has wrapped up a process of high-tech place branding to make G-Valley into an Asian version of Silicon Valley. Furthermore, G-Valley’s long-term position as a Special Economic Zone has already prepared the ground for such an assemblage to occur. As Doucette and Park have noted, G-Valley acts as a ‘space of exception’ (2018). G-Valley’s high-tech branding and economic activity, together with a specific suite of economic policies designed to favour innovation, has contributed to the region’s uptake of new technology and transport policy. Many initiatives that contribute to reductions in GHG emissions do not start out primarily as GHG reduction efforts. Slow cities (Cittaslow) and Transition Towns, for instance, are never primarily about reducing carbon footprints but about boosting localism and improving the lifestyle of the local inhabitants. In the UAE, investment in renewable energy is about economic diversification due to oil scarcity and is more clearly aligned with a green growth agenda than with emission reduction per se. Perhaps the best way of understanding what makes mobility transition policies possible is when an alignment is found between lowcarbon objectives and other interests and imperatives that are, more often than not, economic in nature. Therefore, an assemblage approach to understanding the complexities and interrelated logics of how low-carbon transitions are effected through policy work is useful by ‘qualifying, but not denying, structural explanations by pointing out that structures are intimately linked to, and emergent from, particular assemblages that have come together in complex ways’ (Prince 2010: 172). This entanglement with other agendas within which they are embedded creates opportunities (yet also constraints) for low-carbon mobility transitions to materialize as ‘patchwork transitions’. We use the term ‘patchwork’ to reflect the work of transition that happens at multiple scales in ways that are often not joined up or cohesive within broader policy regimes. The ad hoc nature of patchwork transitions parallels the notion

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of assemblage, the bringing together of policies and programmes that ‘work’ in order to address persistent problems. In his writing on the concept of patchwork in infrastructural repair, Alejandro De Coss-Corzo notes that it involves ‘a calculation of probabilities and the deployment of ways of knowing and doing based on previous practices and experiences. These do not aim to offer definitive solutions, and neither can ensure that decay is definitely fended off ’ (2020: 11). David Chandler and John Pugh briefly note the ontological work that patchwork does in their examination of islands as harbingers of climate change within the Anthropocene (Chandler and Pugh 2020). They imply that islands are a microcosm of larger climactic shifts that can be observed in situ. Therefore, if we think of patchwork being read through assemblage, then examples such as the G-Valley EV sharing system or the Cittaslow/Transition Town movement can be read together as ways of engaging the systems, infrastructures, policies, politics and practices of low-carbon mobility transition from the multiplicity of angles that exist to shift mobile lifestyles and outcomes. Furthermore, as De Coss-Corzo (2020) notes, the labour involved in patchwork as a practice not only highlights multiplicity in engineering a workable system (in our case, a workable policy) but also extends the analysis to reveal uneven power relations along multiple pathways towards transition, which we discuss later. The case of ‘Vancouver’s Greenest City’ is an example of a low-carbon policy assemblage that came together through intimate, yet contradicting multiplicities. Towards the end of Harper’s Conservative government (2006–15) the pursuit of low-carbon transition policies within Canada’s Federal government was almost non-existent at the national scale where mobility policies were entirely focused on economic development. The use of the word ‘sustainability’ was used strategically to refer to economic growth and the term ‘global warming’ was more or less forbidden. At the same time the City of Vancouver had been attempting to become the ‘world’s greenest city’. In Vancouver we saw a collection of municipal, regional and provincial policies being assembled under a municipal policy framework that included everything from public health, transportation and sanitation policies in working through a low-carbon transition at a local scale. Yet such a policy assemblage extended only to the metro region and has little impact across British Columbia. The Greenest City Action Plan, Vancouver’s municipal sustainability framework, drew on its long history as an environmentally friendly city and its model of ‘Vancouverism’ – a particular set of planning ideals and practices such as designing walkable neighbourhoods, constructing podium-and-tower in the downtown core, and extracting community amenity benefits from private real estate development, such as Coal Harbour Seawall for which the city is so famous. Vancouverism is known particularly for its attention to the environment. As such, this model of development has been drawn on by cities as diverse as Austin, Texas and Dubai, United Arab Emirates (Lowry and McCann 2011). Thus Vancouver’s ambition to become the world’s greenest city draws upon the global assemblage of the Vancouver Model for urban development. The relational linkage between Vancouver’s goal to places as far as Dubai is one which helps to reinforce its legitimacy as a local policy



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regime almost entirely divorced from policy at a national scale but well connected globally. Even when mobility policies do have an explicit environmental rationale, the language is often confused. There does not appear to be a common vocabulary to deal with climate change. In addition to the word ‘transition’ we encounter the words ‘sustainability’, ‘adaptation’ and ‘resilience’, none of which have consistent definitions (Temenos and McCann 2012; MacKinnon and Derickson 2013; Derickson 2016). The ways that transitions are planned for are thus further complicated when the terms of the debate are unclear and ambiguous. While it is well acknowledged that such designations are in and of themselves multiplicities (Anderson 2015; Schwanen 2016), they run the risk of acting as ‘empty signifiers’ (Davidson 2010; Temenos and McCann 2012). Indeed as Kate Derickson argues, such ambiguity eclipses the ability of grassroots social movements to engage in resistance to dominant liberal logics and effect meaningful opposition and resultant change (Derickson 2016). In order to overcome such divisions and establish a more common vocabulary, concepts such as ‘transition’, ‘sustainability’ or ‘resilience’ need to be rethought through longer spatio-temporal axes (Schwanen 2016). It is also the case that other environmental concerns such as congestion and pollution often trump climate change issues due to their immediacy and tangibility. Unlike climate change, they can be experienced in an immediate embodied way. This logic has been particularly notable in the global response to Covid-19 where the threat of death among normally privileged populations has led to massive changes in mobility regimes in a very short period of time. The particular constellations of policy, places and actors, whether within a nation state, regional district or a single municipality, intersect with other such policy assemblages. The resultant tensions between diverse policy concerns have revealed non-linear paths through which policy decisions are arrived at. The consequences of a seemingly successful policy also need to be evaluated long term, attempting to account for unexpected and unintended consequences that may emerge. For example, in the Netherlands, a country one might expect to demonstrate some of the characteristics of an ‘ideal transition policy’, we encountered the ‘Beter Benutten’ programme in Rotterdam, which aimed to reduce congestion and was seemingly not opposed to environmental objectives. Beter Benutten (‘Optimizing Use’) began in 2011 as a four-year national programme implemented in collaboration between the national government (represented by the Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment), provincial governments, municipalities, transport companies and businesses. The state and the participating regions invested 1.4 billion euros in the programme. The official goal of Beter Benutten was to ‘reduce congestion at the busiest points by 20% and implement improvement of 10% of door-to-door travel time in rush hour in the busiest areas’.9 This was supposed to be achieved through behaviour change and minor infrastructural fixes. The programme emphasized that while car users were the target audience, it was not an ‘anti-car’ but an ‘anti-congestion’ programme. According to the latest count 48,000 rush-hour avoidances per day have been realized since 2011.10 In the promotional video of the programme, congestion is presented as a problem that leads to loss of working time by employees and

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economic losses for individual employers and the country. The solution the video announces is easy: if at the busiest points of the road in the rush hour the number of cars drops by a small percentage, that will have a considerable impact on congestion.11 To achieve that, behaviour change combined with some smallscale infrastructural, organizational or ICT solutions tailored to specific regional situations is needed. The individual is not asked to give up a car but to select one of the many available mobility solutions. Each of the twelve participating regions takes their own measures to reach the goals, which include promoting cycling, free lease of e-bikes to employees, stimulating travelling outside of rush hour (financially and otherwise), stimulating working from home or from another location outside of the congestion zone, constructing park-and-ride facilities, organizing shuttles for employees in collaboration with public transport companies, behaviour-changing campaigns, mobile applications monitoring one’s driving behaviour, etc. At the moment of writing the website reports 400 projects implemented as part of Beter Benutten. Although it did not include environmental goals, the reduction in emissions was presented as an important side effect of the programme.12 The ministry also commissioned research on the effect of Beter Benutten on emissions which identified a reduction of 1 per cent in CO2 emissions from road traffic in participating regions.13 Yet, some of the interviewed experts on sustainable mobility have been critical of it for being a very short-term and results-oriented programme lacking long-term vision, for paying too little attention to environmental aspects of mobility and for leading to the growth of traffic (while congestion problems during rush hours may become smaller, traffic throughout the day grows). The impact on the air quality and CO2 emissions appeared not to be central for Beter Benutten in Rotterdam. They did not collaborate with the city climate initiative, although the projects in their competitions that offered benefits for the environment may have received extra subsidy (the subsidy comes from the municipality of Rotterdam). Verkeeronderneming, a public-private collaboration working on accessibility issues that led Beter Benutten in Rotterdam, claimed that the air quality had improved in Rotterdam as the result of Beter Benutten Rotterdam, but they acknowledge that the overall traffic in the Rotterdam area has grown as the result of their anti-congestion focus. In the case of Beter Benutten then, the policy assemblage resulted in fixing a specific issue (traffic congestion) over a short period of time while the long-term environmental impact may not have been positive due to the rearrangement of the traffic flow throughout the day and the growth of overall road traffic. Beter Benutten’s case indicates that while multiplicities of interests and interconnected agendas stimulate a starting point for a low-carbon mobility transition to occur, the effects are also diverse, resulting in multiple consequences that may even contradict each other. Even when a policy is shown to have been a success – as with Singapore’s Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) – in reducing urban congestion, it shifts traffic to other times of the day, helping with congestion but making very little impact on overall carbon emissions. A key objective of Singapore’s integrated transportation



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planning is to reduce the need for automobile use and thus land given to extensive roadways, congestion and the subsequent air pollution that plagues neighbouring cities in Malaysia and Indonesia. Thus, Singapore instituted one of the world’s strictest car ownership and driving regimes that includes a quota system (VQS) and road pricing scheme. The VQS has been effective in controlling the number of vehicles in Singapore. The 1990s saw the VQS successfully reduce the annual growth rate of vehicles to 3 per cent, more than halving the 6.8 per cent rate of the pre-1990 policy. And it has done so in tandem with the ERP Scheme that it accompanies. ERP manages vehicle usage by charging them based on levels of traffic congestion. Its aim is to influence drivers to use alternative routes, adjust their travel schedules – most significantly employment start times – and/or to switch to using its extensive public transportation system. ERP was successful in alleviating traffic congestion during peak hours, which helped to reduce concentrated GHG emissions, thereby improving air quality. However, this did not alleviate the cultural consumer demand for car ownership. With the problem of air quality under control, the Government of Singapore allowed an overall increase in COEs (Certificate of Entitlement) and car ownership (Sharp 2005; Han 2010). The Land Transport Authority (LTA), which manages transportation planning in Singapore, has indicated that it will lean towards ERP to help manage traffic congestion and in the process lower the overall user costs of vehicle ownership. This has implications for low-carbon mobility transitions in Singapore, as it signifies reliance on market mechanisms as part of the policy assemblage to alleviate environmental and social needs and demands. In cases such as Vancouver’s Greenest City, Beter Benutten in the Netherlands and ERP in Singapore we encounter policy as complicated multiplicity. It is not a linear process of imagining a lower-carbon mobility future and institutionalizing a policy to bring that future about. Rather, it is about patchwork transitions – and not always low-carbon transitions. Policies are, more often than not, marked by a multiplicity of motives and inputs where low-carbon futures, or reductions in GHG emissions, are only one part of the equation. In all three assemblages of mobility policy, their ‘success’ nor their ‘failures’ are ever complete or always intentional (Temenos and Lauermann 2020). As we will see in Chapter 6, the overriding logic within which many of these policies are constructed is economic growth within a market-based economy. Yet even when the primary drivers for policy construction are environmental ones, it is not always global heating that is front and centre. Often it is simply road congestion, at other times it might be the more immediate health anxieties about air pollution. Policies to promote active transport (walking and cycling) emphasize calorie counts, weight loss and heart health. Mobility transition imaginaries are often a heady mix of all of these concerns.

Crisis temporalities One theme that emerges from recognizing the assemblage nature of transition policies is temporality. At the heart of this recognition is the fundamental

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disjuncture between the long-term nature of the problem being addressed and the relative immediacy of the actions needed to address it. Thinking about and imagining global heating means engaging with centuries of change since the advent of the industrial revolution. Even that is relatively immediate when we consider the geological timescales denoted by the term ‘Anthropocene’. Thinking and imagining policy responses to global heating should also think in the medium term at least as any reduction in GHG emissions will take a very long time to factor into global average temperatures. Most policymakers, on the other hand, are looking for short-term paybacks from their efforts. The layered temporalities of policy and global heating are additionally intertwined with other temporalities, including those of economic growth, political time frames of elections and the seemingly more immediate environmental challenges such as air pollution and road congestion. Policy assemblages are thus also temporal assemblages. Assemblages come and go. Some are fashionable, like using bamboo toothbrushes, colourful tumblers and everyday products made from ‘100% renewable’ materials. Great ideas attract followers and may create a lifestyle transition of ‘going completely green’ for future generations. Yet, assemblages are fragile and contingent. They tend to exist as temporary fads and phases while the hype lasts. The same goes for policies. For instance, Korea’s Smart Work Centre’s policy was assembled with differing agendas during presidential elections, changing from one framed by environmental concerns to one that’s aligned with family life/work balance needs. Transition policies may easily be dismissed when other new ideas come in or new technologies interfere, or once the ‘crisis’ is over. Vehicular moments, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, the 2008 financial crisis or the above-mentioned earthquake in Christchurch, serve as flashpoints or nodes through which policies are mediated (such as austerity in the case of the crisis) or emerge (such as with telework in the case of the earthquake and Covid-19). These events act as moments of mobilization that enable transition policies within local policy assemblages and in wider global ones through their catalysing effects.14 The geographies of temporality of those policy assemblages have variegated effects and implications. Assemblage is an alignment of unforeseen circumstances and multiple human and non-human factors into ‘some form of provisional socio-spatial formation’ (McFarlane and Anderson 2011: 124). Bike Share Toronto was an assemblage of such multiplicities and temporalities of human and non-human factors. Toronto has accumulated a vibrant bike community over the past two decades and planners within the city’s municipality have been lobbying to build a bike share programme since 2005, but they have failed to receive funding every year due to lack of governmental interest. It wasn’t until 2009, when the city had unspent snow removal money after an unusually warm winter season, that the funding was finally allocated.15 While this unforeseen circumstance had kick-started the programme, the city also had to secure 1,000 paid subscribers to secure further funding from the government to prove that they had the demand. Eventually, the number of supporters were met, and the city received 5 million Canadian dollars in funding. By 2020 they had 465 stations around the city with 5,000 bikes installed.



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This is a dramatic increase from just eighty stations and 1,000 bikes when it was first launched in 2010. Bike Share Toronto is now a tourist attraction, part of its growing active transportation infrastructure, and contributes to the identity of the city dwellers. Such speedy development entails a number of temporality narratives. Firstly, Bike Share Toronto is increasingly becoming privatized, recently securing up to 11.2 million dollars in funding (Zaichkowski 2020). This means that the bike share programme will most likely be tailored towards short-term riders, aiming for speedy revenue turnarounds, and the long-term sustainability of the programme becoming part of the general public transportation is hard to envision. Secondly, there is limited integration of the bike share programme with the existing public infrastructure. As a key informant stated, because ‘there is almost no policy’16 around cycling in the city at this stage, the growth will be slow. Without the monetary support from the federal and provincial governments, Bike Share Toronto still finds it difficult to build more stations with bikes, maintain the infrastructure and construct more separated cycle lanes – all of which are immediate concerns. The related unresolved issues are economic cost-benefit, land-use conflict and road safety. Integration with other public transportation is another critical issue as it is hard for cyclists to take bikes onto trains and buses, so the bikes are less likely to be used for commuters travelling further or outside of the city. The notion of moving away from automobility and increasing public and active transportation models is reflective of the urban turn in policymaking and planning. Yet, cities like Toronto that may be seen as successful from the outside still experience austerity urbanism (Peck 2012), and must rely on grassroots funding, local community organizations and advocacy groups or rely on the non-human factors (such as another warm winter) to sustain the mobility transition. The temporality of urban assemblage is hard to predict or bypass, especially when it involves uptake of a new technology. Technological innovations for reducing carbon emissions such as electrification and clean fuel are incapable of reducing industry-wide carbon emissions without securing the basis of individual initiatives disrupting the existing consumption and production patterns within the industry (Schaltegger and Wagner 2011). Uncertainty over energy prices and high projected cost of transition to low-carbon technologies that are unaccompanied by readily available public grants pose huge challenges resulting in poor industrial uptake. While the temporality of new technologies can be explained with the innovations and transitions studies that emphasize the structural uptake of institutional entrepreneurship, assemblage thinking strives further to disentangle the unexpected externalities and explore the very process of policy failure. The case of building a completely zero-carbon Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates, for instance, was fuelled with technological interests that were bound to stagnate due to unforeseen circumstances. The Masdar City project began in 2006 as part of the UAE’s long-term economic diversification plan ‘transforming oil wealth into renewable energy leadership’ (Reiche 2010: 379). The six-squarekilometre brownfield, situated 17 kilometres from downtown Abu Dhabi, was designed by Norman Foster’s architecture firm and had a $22 billion price initially

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entirely coming from the Abu Dhabi’s own funding. In the original ‘Masdar Initiative’ plan, the vision was for a completely carbon-free mixed-use community and to attract foreign investors in high-tech industry. All of the buildings in the city were to produce zero waste and zero carbon emissions. Mobility within the entire city would be car-free and be connected via PRT (Personal Rapid Transit). The PRT is an electric-powered, automated, single-cabin vehicle that runs along PRT-only corridors that are located under the street level of the Masdar City. The cars are controlled by computers and use sensors to help navigate the vehicles. A couple of years into construction, Masdar City realized that the original plan had to be significantly amended. The economic crisis of 2008 negatively affected the country, and with the housing market sinking, the city was not attracting enough interest from business investors and buyers of any properties in the city. Most of the money that the government had originally invested went into the first couple of buildings and the first PRT station, which were beautifully designed but were all ‘too expensive’.17 Further, while the PRT was being constructed, further technological advances were introduced such as electric vehicles and electric buses, which were much cheaper and accessible within the city compared to building the entire mobility system with PRT (Nader 2009; Reiche 2010). Currently, there is just one PRT station that is being used more as a tourist attraction than for everyday mobility within the city, and the rest are run by electric buses and cars that must be parked outside the city. It is unclear how much longer it would take for the city to be fully built. It is currently about 40 per cent constructed. It is clear that wider forces are at play which block transition and which contribute to specific policy assemblages as well (Wiig 2015; Cugurullo 2018). Notably in several of our case studies, the relationship between economic and political crisis either deterred or set back mobility transitions.18 However, the case of Masdar City illustrates that it is not always the lack of state intervention which characterizes transition failure. Sometimes it is too much political will such as that which emerges from Arabic boosterism (Reiche 2010). Some visions may be too futuristic – too dependent on a technological ‘wow’ factor – to be viable. Even seemingly dramatic innovations with full state support clearly cannot always or easily achieve mobility transition as assemblages are constantly fluid and provisional – they are assembled through time and space.

Actors: Subjectivity and place-making The policymaking process includes people, ideas and objects which travel and intermingle. Thinking of policies and policymaking through the lens of assemblage theory means recognizing a relationship between particular policies in particular places and their relations of exteriority. Policymaking gathers people, ideas and things in the process of producing policies that are specific to place. The whole is formed from parts that together produce a uniquely emergent policy or set of policies that cannot simply be reduced to the parts; this process, particularly focusing on the labour that goes into it, can also be considered patchwork. Mobile



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actors play a key role in this emergence. Studying mobile policies sometimes requires an ethnographic approach, moving with transfer agents who ‘produce, circulate, mediate, modify, and consume policies in their daily work practices’ (McCann and Ward 2012: 46). Understanding policy assemblages is never a straightforward task and our research was certainly not ethnographic in the traditional sense of ‘living them out’ (Cook and Crang 1995). We follow what Baker and McGuirk have usefully emphasized as one of their assemblage thinking commitments, which is to have an ‘ethnographic sensibility’ throughout the research process (2017). This refers to having a ‘sensibility’ of critical thinking towards the study participants’ subjectivities and positionalities, and to ‘actively probe the contingent sociomaterial alignments and taken-for-granted labours of the policy-making process’ (Baker and McGuirk 2017: 434). Indeed, policymakers – those who are directly and indirectly involved – are human beings with differing social backgrounds, political views towards climate change and urban landscape, emotions and divergent commitments. Those actors play differentiating roles shaping and reshaping policies and places through their affective channels. By utilizing an ethnographic sensibility, we can start to understand the culturally, socially and politically ‘selective mobilizations’ of transition policies. Assemblage demonstrates the labour of policy actors in bringing about specific configurations of policy. A focus on the labour of actors allows deeper understanding of where the policy model originates from and how they become place-specific via multiple subjectivities (Larner and Laurie 2010). Patchwork transitions are enabled through ‘embodied expertise’ or pragmatic knowledge of how systems work and what options are available in a moment of crisis (De CossCorza 2020). For instance, the founder of Telework New Zealand was first exposed to the concept of telework as a business model at a conference in the United States. His own company that he founded more closely resembled an NGO characterized by a strong concern for the environment and general education of the public. Among the factors influencing policy assemblage are much more complex factors such as personal beliefs, norms and career trajectories. A ‘chance’ meeting at a conference by an entrepreneur can lead to national policy change. But of course, we know ‘chance’, while seemingly a good plot hook to a creation story, is not really ‘chance’. There are various factors and processes at play that led to attendance at an international conference, an event deliberately organized to facilitate the flow and transfer of ideas (Cook and Ward 2012; Temenos 2016). Policy assemblage, then, is a way of understanding how complex networks and flows come together across specific geographies of mobility and how those geographies of mobility in turn shape the flow of people, resources and ideas across different policy landscapes. Consider the city of Guelph’s Cycling Master Plan which was initiated by a grassroots movement. Guelph is a city in Ontario, Canada, in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) region with a population of just over 100,000. Being a small and relatively isolated town that was not included in GTHA growth plans made it harder for Guelph to initiate a bike scheme and secure funding from the local and regional government. Yet, the city’s cycling scheme was assembled via a network of bike advocacy groups such as Guelph Coalition for

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Active Transportation, Share the Road Coalition, Transition Town Guelph and various other organizations that provided spaces for engendering the public voice. The public interest in bike infrastructure was taken up by a councillor in the transportation sector who shared the vision of a Guelph as a bike-friendly city. The councillor’s knowledge about and passion for bike-friendly cities grew during her previous years spent in Europe where she saw and experienced bike paths off the road and more mixed pedestrian cycling paths for the first time. Yet to bring this knowledge from Europe into practical reality brought everyday challenges for her, where she needed to ‘shift people’s minds’ around maintenance, the need for different equipment and in working with the existing road infrastructures. In 2013, the Cycling Master Plan was finally approved and implemented by the city council, and the city began adding more cycle lanes. Although still searching for more funding and experiencing slow progress, the city began transitioning into a bike-friendly city for the first time in its history, and it may not have happened if it wasn’t for the actions of the councillor urged on by the collective actions of bike advocacy groups. Low-carbon policy mobilities are globalized through various elite actors such as international bodies, sustainable experts and travelling technocrats. Yet, the process of policy actors, middling actors and activists forming policy assemblages differently in particular places and contexts must be understood and considered within the context of wider power relations (Cresswell 2010). In this realm, scholars have often problematized the globalization processes of transition ideas as ‘models in circulation’ linking particular problems with supposed solutions (Peck 2011), or more particularly a process whereby North American firms are leading the ‘Westernization’ and ‘conjuring’ actions in Southern and Eastern cities with a standardized – one size fits all – model of sustainable urbanism (Roy 2011; Rapoport 2015). Commentators also acknowledge that those travelling technocrats’ skills and effects must be carefully considered as embodied knowledge if we were to understand the nuances of the politics and practices involved in policymaking (Larner and Laurie 2010). In other words, and to meet the assemblage thinking commitment of ‘ethnographic sensibility’, we must think outside the assumptions about the ‘elites’, ‘Westernization’ and those mobilization processes of global policy models characterized by repetition and placelessness (Rapoport 2015). Furthermore, the embodied knowledge and subsequent labour of everyday actors attend to such assemblages through the practices of patchwork transitions (De Coss-Corzo 2020). Specific best-practice policy models that are advocated for through a variety of people involved in planning, implementation and everyday life are learned, as are the strategies used in order to enable a variety of individuals and communities to engage in the ‘everyday proper politics’ of statecraft, of developing and implementing policy change through embodied actions in specific places (Temenos 2017). It is through this embodiment that patchwork transitions are assembled and produced in place-specific ways. International transportation planners play important roles in building certain discourses about what is (un)sustainable transportation planning, especially in a country that is still newly exposed to mobility transition ideas. The model



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of Vancouverism discussed earlier in this chapter has not evolved without the actual labour of people. The concept of low-carbon mobility transition is still relatively new in Abu Dhabi, and their mobility needs are dominantly met by private vehicles, with buses that run occasionally and no train system installed. Significant investment into public transportation has only just begun, arguably after Dubai had ‘revolutionized’ the way people move around the city. The Abu Dhabi Department of Transport was formed in 2006, and in the following year, the Emirate of Abu Dhabi hired Larry Beasly, a Canadian city planner, who played a key role in forming the Urban Planning Council (UPC) that looks after the city’s transportation and the urban land use. Following Larry Beasly, a large number of Canadian transportation planners and sustainable experts also moved to the UAE seeing the job opportunities.19 Unlike Beasly who came to Abu Dhabi on a shortterm visit, others lived on, and most of the expat key informants that we spoke with have lived in the UAE for over a decade. In 2010, the Abu Dhabi Department of Transport and the UPC jointly developed the Surface Transport Masterplan (STMP). STMP is a comprehensive and ambitious plan to make Abu Dhabi into a transit-oriented city by 2030. Currently, the specific transportation plans include building an 1,150-kilometrelong metro system, 160-kilometre-route LRT and 200-kilometre long rail mostly for freight, but also for tourism – all of which would be connected to each other and to the current bus system. Interviews with the transport authorities indicated that although there is currently only a bus system available in Abu Dhabi, the government authorities have become more aware of the need to increase the public transport ridership over recent years, and that they are taking the STMP plans seriously and some of the facilities such as the LRT are already under construction. Following STMP, the UPC also came up with the Transport Mobility Management (TMM) initiative aimed at encouraging modal shift to more sustainable forms of transport such as walking, cycling, flexible working hours, teleworking and car sharing to promote healthy lifestyles for the local population and to bring positive environmental impact. This is one of the few comprehensive active transportation policy initiatives in the UAE. Certainly, Abu Dhabi’s urban planning map which used to be highly car-centric has changed into a public-transit-oriented one that resembles many of the other modern urban planning concepts around the world. Arguably, the Canadian transportation experts have played a key role in this. Yet, the policy assembling processes required a long time to build trust, commitment and understanding between different actors to take the policies into the implantation stage. Unlike the cases whereby such Masterplans become modified and mutated once the ‘workshop’ is over, the foreign workers in the UAE showed commitment towards the process of place-making. This was due to their emplaced connections in the UAE, residing there for a long time. They gained tacit knowledge of local politics, the ‘unwritten rules’ of the local culture and the understanding of the social context in which they all shaped and reshaped their policymaking, and gradually they gained trust from the local Emirates. As one informant indicated, it was quite difficult to enrol local Emirate proponents in developing walking and cycling paths as they firmly believed that ‘you’ll never

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get the locals out of their cars’. Yet, by working closely with the local population, constantly engaging in public education, and using survey data results, the foreign workers proved the demand for active transportation and demonstrated that a healthy lifestyle is indeed a pressing need in the community. Further, as there are a large number of foreign workers in the UAE, they were able to network among themselves and work collectively by sharing information and building joint projects between different sectors. Such commitment in collective and individual actions among the foreign workers in the UAE shows that the skilled expats are also passionate about the outcome of their policies because eventually they are also part of the community they are building: I live in the downtown. I work just on the edge of the downtown. Taking a bus here is a pain, to be honest. It’s cheap, but I need to walk quite a distance to get to the bus that comes to the UPC office, which is unfortunate, because if I could ride a bike, it’s only about three kilometers to my house. But now it’s really dangerous. In Toronto I used to ride my bike to work every day, which was a much longer distance.20

Our research indicates that sustainable policies are mobilized and transformed through local and transnational linkages of skilled migrants. In assessing the policy assembling processes by sustainability experts, there is a need to go beyond seeing it as ‘just another policy replication’, but to see the real potential of the ‘long-term’ resident policymakers’ policymaking as ‘lived’ and ‘experienced’, calling for a need to redefine the mobile subjects and mobile places we are studying. Furthermore, the movement of international planners contributes to the assembling of patchwork transitions – policies and programmes that might not otherwise have seen successful in particular places.

Conclusion: Policy assemblage in the time of ‘crisis’ In this chapter, we have engaged with assemblage thinking to illustrate mobility transition as a process by providing the conditions of possibility for the implementation of transition policies, as well as their extensiveness, success and, of course, failure. Transitions are not linear. They are a co-evolutionary process that involves multiple agendas, ideas, actors and technologies. Moreover, policies can be and are often only assembled in unintended ways and ‘by chance’ during times of ‘crisis’ and are dependent on the hands of the willed actors that shape and assemble those policies. Taking an explorative approach is not new in critical thinking, yet assemblage takes a step further to blur the logical divisions of socialmaterial, near-far and structure-agency, and the assumptions that already existing theories make (McCann 2011). Sometimes, taking an assemblage approach meant going beyond a focus on the policy at hand and focusing on certain events of crisis and carefully following the steps taken by individual actors to understand what has really been gone through to produce potential low-carbon policy assemblages.



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We emphasized the elements of multiplicities, temporalities and actors within the policy assemblages that we engaged with to show the non-linear paths many of these transition policies take. Such an approach required acknowledging the structure within already embedded agendas which transitions stem from. In this light, we might do better to conceive of mobility transitions through the notion of patchwork, as emerging around sometimes quite contradictory and heterogeneous assemblages of politics, policies, actors and their material goals. Despite these differences, and the fact that various policies may appear to be working against one another, policy assemblages appear to be sustained and held together by a combination of factors, such as direct or weak and tenuous relationships and alliances; political expediency, especially crisis; a lack of sustained interrogation, their distribution across different places, locations and scales through various actors or alternative temporalities and different time horizons. We emphasized the importance of thinking about the actual labour of assembling policies and the need to go beyond the current stereotypes of certain actors within the society. Such practices of assemblage thinking would require a holistic approach that combines an anthropological questioning, as well as an understanding that the socio-spatial assemblages are inherently political. In this chapter we have demonstrated the importance of labour in the practice of mobilizing policy. By introducing the notion of patchwork transitions to the assemblage of mobility policies, we argue that whether planned or ad hoc, mobilizing low-carbon mobility transitions need to be understood as embodied through unique constellations of practices. Foregrounding these embodied practices of low-carbon mobility transitions shows the precarity of such transitions can rest on individuals or specific networks of knowledge, power and resources. Success and failure of low-carbon mobility transitions, particularly within the context of global heating and a planetary climate crisis, need to also look at the actors and governance processes around transition in order to ensure that the policy patchworks enacted and embodied through various assemblages sustain and enable just transitions while also opening space for more transformative lowcarbon mobility futures. Responses to the climate crisis, compared and in tandem with the parallel crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic, demonstrate that temporality and notions of immediacy play an important role in the myriad of ways that policies are mobilized. As Covid-19 has run on, governments have rolled out various mobility policies and what has become clear is that ‘best-practice’ is in fact highly contentious when viewed on a global scale. Certain countries, such as Taiwan, New Zealand, Senegal, South Korea and Greece, were quick to implement strong (im)mobility policies of lockdown, the closure of national borders and severely restricted movement within its borders. They coupled this with a ‘follow the science’ approach to swiftly set up crisis infrastructures based on public health data. Many countries, however, did not follow this approach, opting for various other policies and programmes. As a result, an unchecked global pandemic is ongoing at its almost one-year anniversary. Climate scientists have experienced similar frustrations for many years. Scholars of the Anthropocene, used to looking at much longer timescales, have been almost

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unanimous that a coordinated approach, policy cohesion, along with sufficient resources and political will on a global scale is needed to address the climate crisis. Equity and justice also have played prominent roles in international advocacy for climate policy change. The climate crisis has already begun to produce new forms of governance, yet there’s a danger that the rapid responses to the exponentially increasing climate crisis will further entrench existing inequalities (Millington and Scheba 2020). In Chapter 7 we explore more transformative governance practices that have the potential to move beyond patchwork transitions that, for the time being, remain the standard policy approach in many places.

CChapter 6 LIBERAL LOGICS AND LIFESTYLE

In our explorations of mobility transition policies and practices across the world one  recurring theme was unavoidable. Everywhere we looked there was an underlying emphasis on (neo)liberal trends or logics to endorse, sponsor and enable mobility transitions. Neoliberalism has become something of a catch-all statement of critique for any number of perceived injustices in contemporary society, so we want to be as specific as possible about what we mean by the term and why it is important to consider in our analysis of mobility transition policies and practices. Neoliberalism refers to a set of ideologies and practices associated with free-market capitalism. It is generally seen as emerging in Chile under Augusto Pinochet in the 1980s and being advocated by the governments of Margaret Thatcher (in the United Kingdom) and Ronald Reagan (in the United States) among others. Generally, governments pursuing agendas that involve privatization, deregulation and austerity are thought of as neoliberal. As with any set of policies and practices it is very much an assemblage and appears differently in different places (Peck 2010). Neoliberalism, like mobility transition, has its geographies. We have isolated three persistent themes within transition policy and practice that can be broadly identified as neoliberal: individualism, calculability and commodification. Naturally, there may be other trends to which we paid less attention or that did not surface during our analysis (but are still relevant). But these three, we believe, offer a good overview of how transitions are being (neo) liberalized across various scales and contexts. These logics capture a somewhat inconsistent relationship of the state and local government to transition policy, regulation and investment but a consistent emphasis upon market-based solutions to transition policy. These are best expressed through an underlying trend for mobility transitions based on economic rationales, which tend to marginalize environmental gains or, at the very least, position them in the peripheries of decision making. This was visible almost everywhere we looked, from localized schemes in Seoul to the actions of the Brazilian government to the policymaking of the EU, to name but a few. This is a trend that cuts across the many national policy scans undertaken and the more localized embodiments of policy and context-specific initiatives.

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The first, which is perhaps the most important and to which we will pay the most attention, is about individual choice, mobile lifestyles and the primacy of the individual. Mobility transitions policies are often positioned at the level of self-governance, instantiating the individual as the primary actor in transition, such as the idea of promoting a low-carbon lifestyle by NGOs and governments. The second is how mobility is systematically measured and made calculable, before being turned into policy. This relationship is often mediated through the materialization of mobility into accountable or measurable units, into concrete numbers and statistics. It is unusual that policy planning departs from anywhere else other than here, transforming decisions into ‘technical’ procedures that are more easily justifiable and sociopolitically acceptable. Finally, the third is focused on the commodification of mobility. Successful policy implementation is increasingly viewed as a potential source of competitive advantage for places. This is achieved by the stimulation of particular models of transition practice and expertise, such as the idea of the ‘Curitiba Model of BRT’ and Singapore’s national consultancy through the Land Transport Authority (LTA). By commoditizing mobility and transition policies into tangible, saleable and potentially exportable products, places have the opportunity to increase revenues in ways similar to the private sector, as well as to engage in ‘extrospective’ boosterism (McCann 2013), increasing their global brand as a ‘green city’ in the case of Vancouver, for example, or as a leader in carbon-neutral technology as in the case of Norway. We consider each related move in turn.

Mobile lifestyles and primacy of the individual (Neo)liberalism is an overarching and self-fulfilling ideology that takes the shape of a ‘theory of everything’ (Mirowski 2013). It places the individual at the heart of governance – self-governance in its ideal form – in what was described by Michel Foucault, and later Nikolas Rose, as dispositions and instances of biopower (Rose 1990; Foucault 2008). This logic is frequently encountered in transition policies and practices in which a wider set of government and local policies address the individual as the best resource for mobility transition, potentially ‘responsibilizing’ or ‘downloading’ responsibility for transition away from the state. At stake is what we might call a deresponsibilization of the state in achieving certain targets and objectives, replaced by a delegation of duty towards the individual. In tune with wider understandings of financialization, including the subjectification of individuals to economic forces within their everyday lives, this has seen a variety of governments encouraging education, awareness raising and other incentives to push individuals to choose low-carbon alternatives to the current carbon-intensive forms of mobility and lifestyle. The focus on individual lifestyles is strange if we consider where GHG emissions actually come from. In the EU in 2017 transport in total accounted for 27 per cent of GHG emissions. Of this, 72 per cent came from road transport and of this, 44 per cent came from passenger cars. In other words, around 8.5 per



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cent of GHG emissions came from passenger cars (including taxis, Ubers, etc., as well as private cars).1 Even smaller numbers emerge from individual decisions to fly (the current focus of ‘flight shaming’). The global share of GHG emissions in 2014 for transport was 14 per cent. The largest contributors were electricity and heat production (25 per cent) and agriculture, forestry and other land uses (24 per cent). Industry still produced 21 per cent of GHG emissions.2 Consider also that according to the Carbon Majors Database, 100 fossil fuels companies have been responsible for 52 per cent of global industrial GHG emissions since the industrial revolution and 71 per cent of global emissions since 1988.3 In this context, it seems curious that there is so much focus on individual decisions when action at either government or corporate level (or both) might reasonably be seen to be more effective. Nevertheless, transition policies that focus on the action of individuals in the field of ‘lifestyle’ are ubiquitous. In Auckland, New Zealand, in 2014, for instance, the council sent a ‘behaviour change team’ door to door in the early evening in a residential area to ask residents how they currently commuted and gave them information about their commuting options of buses, cycle and walking. When needed, the council also supported them with trial public transport passes and cycling equipment. The result of this action plan was successful as out of the 1,431 people spoken to, 601 people changed to bus, carpooling and the ferry, and around 10 people changed their commuting option to walking and cycling. This so-called Personalized Journey Planning Project became a widely known project and the city council plans to deliver similar projects across Auckland and help raise awareness and shift people’s daily commuting behaviour away from car-dependency. This project formed part of a wider ‘Low Carbon Auckland Plan’ (2014) the main aim of which was to reduce GHG emissions. In the case of the Personalized Journey Planning Project the GHG reduction aim was joined to a desire to reduce congestion during rush hours. The ‘Korea Climate & Environment Network’ (KCEN) is the biggest NGO in South Korea consisting of over fifty networks including other NGOs, industries and governmental agencies. The group was formed in October 2008 as a national NGO to exclusively focus on ‘non-industrial ways’ of reducing GHG emissions and helping to reach the national target of 30 per cent reduction of ‘business as usual’ (BAU) level by 2020. This ‘non-industrial’ approach refers to the ways that individuals can contribute to reducing GHG emissions by changing their everyday lifestyles. The rationale for the focus on everyday life was made very clear during an interview: The national green growth strategy received a lot of criticism for using too much money under the name of ‘green’. Anything that happens at the large industry scale involves money . . . whatever it is; it takes money and time to make a technological transition. On the other hand, if you are working on an individual level, there can be no money involved, and we can simply make changes at a faster speed. For instance, if everyone in the country uses a tumbler cup instead of a paper cup and make less waste; if everyone can reduce the time of their

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shower to 8 minutes instead of 10; and use public transportation instead of driving; we can reduce huge amount of GHG emissions – simply by changing our lifestyle little by little.4

The KCEN further noted that in order for South Korea to meet its 2020 emissions level each person should reduce their personal GHG emissions by one tonne a year. This idea turned into their ‘Reducing one ton of greenhouse gas per person’ campaign. The idea that individuals can work towards reducing GHG emissions was sold to the Ministry of Environment, and the KCEN received partial funding from the central government from the outset (Figure 6.1). The ‘Reducing one ton of GHG per person’5 campaign is the KCEN’s major project aimed at moving people towards low-carbon lifestyles. These are broadly divided into four themes of transportation, energy usage for heating and cooling, energy usage for electronics and waste. This low-carbon lifestyle movement is managed and supported through their point system called ‘Green-Card’. Once an individual decides to adopt the low-carbon lifestyle, they must sign up on

Figure 6.1  Reducing one tonne of greenhouse gas per day (Korea Climate & Environment Network 2015).



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the KCEN website. During the sign-up process, individuals are asked which part of the seventeen different lifestyle changes that they would like to adopt, and if clicking all, the website tells you that you will save 1233.4 kilograms of CO2 during one year. Individuals can choose any number of lifestyle changes that they would like to adopt. Once signing up and agreeing the terms and conditions, individuals can track their CO2 savings and earn their ‘eco-mileage’. Once they earn certain number of miles, the points become ‘eco-money’6 and can be loaded to their ‘Green-Card’. In 2015, there were 269,682 people who signed up for the low-carbon lifestyle movement and 230,983 tonnes of GHG were saved.7 The KCEN’s lowcarbon lifestyle campaign takes a top-down approach and works with the already existing groups such as local governments and agencies to collectively promote a low-carbon lifestyle to the citizens through advertisement and education. It is hard to predict whether the computerized system of earning points for acquiring low-carbon lifestyle can be adopted by all citizens as it may exclude the elderly and those who do not have access to computers and smart phones. There is a lot of information to be learnt from the KCEN’s website including different ways to calculate the eco-mileage points and reloading the points to their Green Card before using the points as coupons and money; and such a learning process may take a long time and may discourage new users. The focus on individual (and family) lifestyle in transition policies is widespread even if the details of the politics vary geographically. In the Netherlands, broader structural changes are evident in the desired move or turn towards a new governance model for interactions between market, state and civil society advocated by transition activists, and a government discourse of participatiemaatschappij, a term which broadly means ‘society of participation’. While it refers to a transition from a society governed top-down to a society of bottom-up initiatives where citizens take care of themselves and each other, according to Jan Rotmans this is a ‘top-down’ concept and has little to do with empowering ‘bottom-up’ movements in a vision of societal transitions (2015: 29). While it sounds like a policy that empowers grassroots, bottom-up groups, it has been criticized as a cover-up for budget cuts, devolving more responsibility to citizens as a fiscal austerity strategy. One way that low-carbon mobility transitions are currently envisioned within mobility policy, then, is to nudge people towards alternative ways of living, alternative mobility practices that may be less oil dependent and hence produce less carbon. Mobile lifestyles constantly appear in the imaginations, utopian visioning and narratives surrounding low-carbon mobility in the case studies and policy documents we have examined. Throughout our research, policies aimed at promoting low-carbon lifestyles appeared at various government levels with a number of different social, economic and political motives. A low-carbon mobile lifestyle is the ideal outcome of a low-carbon mobility policy which acts by providing individuals with different choices (such as cycle lanes and public transport) to alter their attitude and mobile behaviour. A ‘healthy new smart’ way of living is promoted and envisioned. Lifestyle aspirations are an easy and ‘costfree’ abstraction that can be mapped onto policy as seen by the above cases. Lifestyle is defined as ‘regular patterns of behavior, which represent structural situations as well as habitual behavior and social affinities’ (Ludtke 1996 quoted

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in Scheiner and Kasper 2003: 320). Research on lifestyle began in the late 1980s, making claims about increased individualization of people’s lives beyond class and gender (Scheiner and Kasper 2003). There was an ‘unexpected liberation from traditional patterns, including the disappearance of linear, predictable courses of life, better chances for education for all parts of the population, longer duration of adolescence, changes in the gender relations, smaller households, diversification and flexibilisation of employment and the dissolution of traditional time-regimes’ (Scheiner and Kasper 2003: 3). Lifestyle differs by factors such as age, gender, income, perceptions, beliefs, norms and values; and, also, by structural factors such as motility, technology, cultural influences, policy and regulations and economies. Lifestyle research primarily deals with the life-designs of individuals while considering both individual and social backgrounds. Mobile lifestyle or mobile lives define how people’s daily mobilities are connected to one’s lifestyle. New corporate mobility regimes in the Western world refer to the fact that the people of today’s globalized and industrialized world are living under a naturalized, rationalized and time-space compressed corporate mobilities regime where being a mobile worker is considered normal (Kesselring 2015). Mobile lifestyle is about opportunities and choice of movement. Daily mobility and motility shape lifestyles and identities. In this context, automobility has been examined as a form of personal freedom and set of identity practices (Sheller and Urry 2000). Mobile lifestyle in the context of low-carbon mobility transition then becomes associated with austerity logics. Within a climate change framework, mobile lifestyle is often discussed within the context of saving energy and reducing carbon emissions through the way we live. Our current mobile lives and lifestyles are heavily carbon intensive, and it is assumed that we need to transition to a low-carbon regime because the way we move and live our lives is no longer environmentally sustainable. Low-carbon mobility transition policies draw upon or perform particular imaginations of mobile subjects. As with other policy formations, these imaginaries are reductionist (in some cases deliberately and ironically so) and essentialize the mobile bodies of populations with particular characteristics which we seek to challenge. Perhaps the best example of this is the mobile commuter, deliberately pathologized by a Rotterdam agency attempting to discourage the build-up of congestion at peak hours within the city. The ‘congestion animal’ attempts to characterize this commuter by using derogatory ‘bad’ habits to depict an unhealthy and unhygienic consumer of products, (putatively bad) foods, and mobility and other excesses of excessive consumption, excessive promiscuity, excessive attention to the body (Berlant 2011). This is its taxonomy: Origin: Rotterdam and region Natural habitat: asphalt Food: fast food, weak coffee, candies Activities: eating, making phone calls, painting nails, nose picking, flirting, stare Average age: 18-65.8



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The intention here is not to steer Rotterdam commuters away from fitting this persona but to align less ‘smart’ mobility habits with the meanings of waste and excess rather than, for instance, freedom and independence. And yet, not only does it make these characteristics deviant through quite scornful stereotypes; it makes a fundamental connection and unproblematic or untested one between these qualities of apparent self-destructive, unhealthy, superficial and selfish acts and qualities, with apparently selfish driving. Also in the Netherlands, the foundation Urgenda proposes trying less automobile-centric lifestyles for a month through its ‘Low Car Diet’ campaign. Companies enrol voluntarily, and in 2014, 100 institutions and companies registered for participation, including the Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment, municipalities, universities, banks and big and small companies from different spheres. In registered companies interested employees become participants of the campaign and do not use a car for the period of thirty days, instead cycling, using public transport, carpooling, riding an e-bike or driving an e-car (provided by Urgenda). The campaign runs as a competition: at the end of the thirty-day period the winner – the company that saved more CO2 – is announced during a publicized event. The mid-term goal of the foundation Urgenda is to convince the participating companies to change their corporate mobility policy by reimbursing (and, thus, stimulating) sustainable mobility options, the argument being that this will bring savings to companies and employees. There is an introduction workshop called ‘Mobility can be cheaper, cleaner and healthier’ for each company before the project, and Urgenda does follow-ups and stays in touch with the interested companies after the campaign. The long-term goal is to grow a public that would demand the national policies that would financially stimulate people’s low-carbon mobility choices and provide better infrastructure facilitating low-carbon mobile lifestyles. Urgenda’s argument is that people start to take action once they see a difference in their pockets. During the campaign they might (re-)discover some advantages of cycling, using public transportation and other low-carbon mobility options, and, Urgenda believes, if these options are clearly cheaper than using a car, they will demand from their employers and the government better possibilities to lead low-carbon lifestyles. Such policymaking may be producing new meanings around automobility that was once aligned with images of speed and freedom and is now becoming associated with meanings of ill health, pollution and carbon-intensive mobility. Elsewhere, other imaginations are deployed far more subtly. Lifestyle choices are a key component of the discourse surrounding the switch from private vehicle use to public transit in Singapore, for instance. For example, comfort and speed are heavily emphasized. The LTA has increased frequencies of train services to reduce crowding. An ad campaign from 2015 noted that increased service will allow people more time with family, stating that one can be home in time to put their kids to bed or that there will be ‘more time for breakfast’. Other campaigns, more visible in car parks, appeal to public health concerns, with signs often noting ‘Burn calories, not gas’ (Figure 6.2).

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Figure 6.2  Advertising lifestyle changes in Singapore (Photo by Cristina Temenos 2015).

Such appeals to heteronormative home life and personal welfare highlight the clear vision of mobility transition in Singapore, which has been developing apace with its other urban development initiatives. At the same time, it denotes a government attempting to respond to a citizen base that has expressed deep displeasure with the ways in which mobility has been managed in the city state (Lin 2012). Other instances have focused on transforming the commuting lifestyles of their mobile population, similarly emphasizing the relationship between work and home life. The Smart Work Centre (SWC) scheme in South Korea is perhaps one of the most intriguing. The Ministry of Government Administration began SWCs to reduce greenhouse gases and congestion, but also to improve labour flexibility and working hours, given the country’s poor record of long work hours and long commuting times of, on average, two hours per person. SWC worked well especially in the Korean cultural context because the centre still provides a collective way of working (together in a designated centre) unlike teleworking, which is less acceptable in the context of Korean cultural norms. While a low-carbon mobile lifestyle has easily targeted the ‘everyday commuters’ and attempts have been made to regulate and reduce daily movements, certain policies such as the Eco-card in South Korea have understood an overall ‘green lifestyle’ as an environmentally friendly lifestyle that individuals should feel morally obligated to follow in order to save the planet. Through their ‘Reduce one ton of GHG gases per person’ campaign and introducing a collective emissions savings system of the eco-card, individuals



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are encouraged to consume less energy and produce less carbon in all facets of the daily lifestyle (i.e. using public transport instead of driving, heating the house less in the winter, using paper bags, etc.). Paterson and Stripple explain that ‘there is an emergent government of carbon that entails the “conduct of carbon conduct” through moulding and mobilizing a certain subjectivity (the individual as carbon emitter) to govern their own emissions in various ways – as counters, displacers, dieters, communitarians, or citizens. This carbon governmentality is enabled through calculative practices that simultaneously totalize (aggregating social practices, overall greenhouse gas emissions) and individualise (producing reflexive subjects actively managing their greenhouse gas practices)’ (2010: 359). While some individual lifestyles are calculated and aggregated through a topdown approach, sometimes they were enacted through a bottom-up approach. The Cittaslow and Transition Town movements are examples of grassroots attempts to address GHG emissions (and much else besides). Cittaslow and Transition Towns are small-scale, local interventions focused on reducing the mobility of people, goods and services. While both share a commitment to a slower, more locally focused lifestyle, Cittaslow and Transition Towns come from different backgrounds. Cittaslow emerged from the Slow Food movement popularized in the mid-late 1990s. It is considered a cultural movement focused on improving the quality of life in towns with populations under 55,000 residents. As we write, there are 264 Cittaslow communities in 30 countries throughout the world.9 Transition Towns are grassroots movements explicitly oriented towards slowing the pace of life and the use of resources in reference to post-peak oil and climate change. Resiliency has become a key focus of the Transition Town movement, an alternative concept to sustainability, used to denote greater malleability, flexibility and strength than traditional concepts of sustainability (Hopkins 2011). Cittaslow and Transition Towns are non-governmental low-carbon initiatives which aim to change mobile lives through reduction. Both coming out of the Slow Food movement, they aim to increase access to locally grown and produced food to enhance the overall quality of life, improve local economic stability and increase environmental diversity. Cittaslow and Transition Towns draw on and reflect larger public understandings of alternative mobility transitions that celebrate localism and discursively work in opposition to dominant government policy agendas that favour development, speed and technological fixes. Yet, questions remain about their ability to effect transformation (Brown et al. 2012). Their low uptake indicates that rather than usher in a vastly different mobility transition, they will remain niche initiatives for the foreseeable future. Glenn Lyons argues that the current emphasis of governments is on the greening of private and commercial vehicles through technological development (Lyons 2012). Such a mindset of the automobility regime further enhances the notion that a technology fix is the primary opportunity for change while behaviour change is a ‘nice to have’ bonus allotted less attention and resources. Indeed, the poverty of these imaginations may account for the weaknesses of some of the low-

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carbon lifestyle policies we have encountered. However, the responsibilization and standardization of individuals’ ‘mobility style’ is problematic as a policy approach. Studies show that the ‘direct lifestyle influences’ on carbon emissions are far less than the ‘indirect influences’ – which speaks to the emissions that occur in the preparation, production and delivery of a product or service (Bin and Dowlatabadi 2005; Gotz and Ohnmacht 2012). Social and economic contexts are often missing within individualized mobile subjects, and lifestyle narratives are often not aligned with, and indeed can disrupt, the aims of transition policies. With more refined policy mechanisms, we may be able to determine ‘who’ is being held responsible for climate change, become more explicit on the role of structure in policies aimed at altering individuals’ lifestyle mobilities, and perhaps more importantly, by underpinning the real value of changing people’s lifestyle, there could be more sophisticated and aligned imaginations in individualized climate change policies for a lifestyle transition to occur at the scale needed.

Measurability and calculability Neoliberalism’s focus on the individual and its rolling back of the role of the state might lead us to expect a similar reduction on what is normally thought of as bureaucracy. The opposite is the case. A key feature of neoliberalism is an insistence on quantifiable and calculable outcomes designed, in part, to ensure the primacy of individualism, competition and the workings of the market. Neoliberalism has become identified with an ever more ‘calculable world’. Through neoliberal logics, opportunities for accumulation are multiplied by the invention of ‘calculable objects’ that allow things that previously existed outside of the market to become commodities (Lohmann 2010). Many mobility transition policies rely not only upon market forces but on quantitative equivalences being made between mobility, energy, capital and labour. This is to say that prior to the processes of implementation or execution, policy designing is, from the start, underpinned by a translation, or in some cases a reduction, of mobility (and mobility associated objects and practices) into measurable and accountable units. Perhaps the clearest instances of neoliberal calculability are carbon trading and carbon taxing. While these are distinct policies, they are broadly speaking both market-based tools to reduce carbon emissions. Carbon markets emerged in the 1990s as a market-based solution to global heating whereby emission allowances could be traded in auctions. Carbon markets were spurred internationally by the Kyoto Protocol of 2005. As Lohmann points out, the process of avoiding state-centred solutions to global heating was deeply paradoxical as states (and super-states) had to invent and institutionalize a new form of calculation in order to make carbon emissions a new tradable object. Lohmann suggests that this was central to ‘one of neoliberalism’s potentially greatest class projects: the attempt to privatize the climate itself ’(2010: 78).



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Carbon taxing is a different strategy that still relies on market-based ideas to reduce carbon emissions. A carbon tax works by establishing a price for every tonne of emissions produced. The guiding principle is the idea that a price can account for externalities that the ‘market’ would otherwise ignore. The price allocated to carbon is therefore a price for global heating. Such attempts to include externalities in the logic of markets have been questioned by Vaclav Smil, among others. The largest externality that remains unaccounted for is the undoubtedly very large cost of relatively rapid global warming (that would increase average tropospheric temperature by more than 2° C) attributable to anthropogenic combustion of fossil fuels and land-use changes (IPCC 2014). But in this case there is, at least, a reasonable excuse, as the complexities, interactions, and feedbacks of change attributable to rising concentrations of greenhouse gases are extremely difficult to monetize, especially as some regions, some countries, and some economic sectors will also derive various benefits from rising temperatures and from an accelerated water cycle, and as many of these impacts will not be seen in force for decades to come (and hence will be steeply discounted by today’s valuations). As a result, the carbon tax favored by many environmentalists and by some economists would be nothing but a largely arbitrary (and also a very crude) form of internalizing an unknown fraction of the unfolding and future effects of global warming. (2019: 403)

One place that has received considerable attention for the introduction of a carbon tax in 2008 is British Columbia (BC), Canada. The Provincial Government instituted a tax on carbon-based fuels starting at $10 Canadian a tonne and rising by $5 every year until 2012. Between 2008 and 2012, personal carbon-based fuel consumption in BC decreased by 16 per cent, while it rose by 3 per cent in the rest of Canada.10 Increases in the tax have continued and are currently set at $40 per tonne. The carbon tax was the lynchpin of BC’s 2008 Climate Action Plan, which aimed to reduce GHG emissions by 33 per cent below 2007 levels.11 This has since been replaced by the more ambitious CleanBC plan that has a target of 40 per cent below 2007 levels by 2030. By 2019 the actual decrease in GHG emissions was a little less than 1 per cent. Despite this, international institutions such as the World Bank, as well as environmental think tanks such as the David Suzuki Foundation, have marked the tax as successful because of its link to reductions in GHG emissions (BC reduced emissions by 9.9 per cent between 2008 and 2010 and that decrease has since been reversed)12 and because it has had little effect on the price of energy (in part due to BC’s reliance on hydroelectric power). The perceived success of the BC carbon tax policy led to the Canadian Federal government introducing a country-wide policy in 2019 with an initial price of $20 Canadian per tonne and increasing to $50 Canadian per tonne.

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Carbon trading and carbon taxes, while distinct, both involve governments setting up an infrastructure to convert something as complicated as the effects of GHG emissions into something as seemingly simple as a tax or a tradable asset. While these carbon policies are perhaps the most widely discussed and implemented versions of calculability in transition policy, they set the tone for many smaller scale initiatives which convert externalities into transferable quantities. This means that from the moment mobility is codified into particular measurements, decisions are made based on calculation. Many scholars have identified this as the technocratization of contemporary life, a process that is widespread (Rose 1999; Gherardi and Nicolini 2000; Larner and Le Heron 2004; McFarlane 2006; Larner and Laurie 2010; Temenos and McCann 2012, 2013). At an international level we can see this process, for example, in initiatives of the NGO European Cyclists’ Federation (ECF). In their ‘Cycling Works’ report, the federation estimated that the implementation of cycling schemes and programmes could amount to an economic benefit of 205 billion euros, fleshing it out through various estimations and variables. Thus, we read that ‘We estimate the jobs in the European cycling sector today at around 650.000 full-time equivalents (EU-27, excluding Croatia). With a doubling of bicycle modal share, the employment potential of cycling jobs represents more than 1.000.000 full-time equivalents.’13 The measurability of mobility is not exclusive to governmental decision-making processes but rather a broader procedure of monetization and reduced government regulation, operationalized across a multitude of state and non-state actors and stakeholders. Negative policy works to reduce the production of carbon within a discrete area. Yet, reducing individual production of carbon is perhaps the wrong metric to be assessing. Measuring consumption-based carbon usage, for example, incorporating the carbon cycles involved in producing the things we consume, rather than looking at the carbon produced only when we use the end product, often shows that individuals and societies have a much larger carbon footprint than assumed under a production-based assessment. Recent research on consumption-based accounting in Bristol, UK, has shown that when calculating consumption-based GHG emissions through to 2035, they are estimated to be three times the amount calculated under production-based emissions. Furthermore, any decrease in production-based emissions from mitigation policies would be outpaced by the consumption-based emissions produced (Millward-Hopkins et al. 2017). In addition, focusing on consumption-based emissions pushes policy around lifestyle change, focusing not only on household consumption practices which are a fraction of emissions but also on institutional procurement policy. Therefore, identifying how decisions are made about what and how to evaluate carbon is an important area in the focus on low-carbon transitions. In Portugal, mobility has always been, according to some of our interviewees, about the containment of externalities. Little policy is directed towards achieving certain modal split ratios, certain goals in public transportation or certain targets



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in cycling uptake, for instance. Instead, it is driven by the restraint of negative factors, such as high pollution, deaths on the road and GHG emissions. Mobility is, thus, driven by what we call a negative policy. Not in the sense that the results are negative but in the sense that it is only troubled by the softening of negative indicators. As one of our interviewees put it, What has truly driven mobility and transport policy, in Portugal, is the containment of externalities. Simple as that. Our decision makers do not set positive objectives, like ‘we want a modal split of 30-30-30’, or ‘we want 50% of public transport shares in Lisbon’, or ‘we want the average time-consumption of mobility to be around 15min’, etc. This does not exist. Decision-makers think about the opposite. How do we reduce emissions? How do we reduce energy dependency? How do we reduce fatal collisions? And so on. This is what determined all policy for the past 30 years.14

This logic is also being operationalized at a more personal scale. The Korean ecocard is one instance of this phenomena. The Green-Card works like any other Visa or Master card, but there is no annual fee. The points earned from their ecomileage can be used as coupons or actual money for buying slow foods in grocery stores, using public transportation and any other activities that are approved to be ‘eco-friendly’ by the network. This point system is Korea’s first ever mileage system that gives points to people who use public transportation. The system works by mobilizing forms of calculability that many are already familiar with – the allocation of points to reward behaviour. This is familiar as the basis of frequentflyer programmes where miles flown convert into points or certain credit cards which give you points per unit of currency spent. Like carbon trading, it gives monetary value to certain practices that previously had no such value – and inserts them into the meta-calculation of the ‘market’. A similar process can be seen in the Netherlands with the ‘Low Car Diet’ campaign run by the Urgenda Foundation. The name Urgenda comes from combining two words ‘urgent’ and ‘agenda’, and the slogan of the foundation is ‘together faster sustainable’ (‘samen sneller duurzaam’). According to their website, the Urgenda Foundation ‘aims for a fast transition towards a sustainable society with a circular economy’.15 One focus of its energies is the transition to electric mobility. Low Car Diet as it was run in 2015 refers to a thirty-day period during which the participants did not use their car. Companies register voluntarily, and in 2014 100 institutions and companies enrolled, including the Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment, municipalities, universities, banks and big and small companies from different spheres. There is an introduction workshop ‘Mobility can be cheaper, cleaner and healthier’ for each company before the project. For a flat fee of 2,500 euros companies receive advice during this workshop and are introduced to the possibility of using public transport, e-bikes and e-cars free of charge for the period of the workshop. The promise of Urgenda is that companies will benefit from the ‘diet’ financially, cut their CO2 footprint and get

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more satisfied personnel – both in the short term and in the long term – through the possible follow-up workshop and assistance in redesigning the mobility policy of the company. According to the website of the project, participation may save the company 38 per cent of their mobility costs, CO2 emissions can be cut by 30 per cent and the employees will be 16 per cent more physically active.16 The key to getting things going within the company, according to a mobility expert we interviewed, is to convince CFOs of the company that changing mobility policy will save the company money even though the taxation system currently continues to favour unlimited use of private and lease cars and does not provide incentives for people to switch from the car to public transport or a bike. how can we actually still make people and companies take other measurements because still walking and cycling and going by public transport is still cheaper. You can talk for hours about this system that is not taking care . . . but the main thing is it’s cheaper. And what we do is we wanted to show companies and employees how easy it is to actually access the whole system and actually still after 20 years take a train after you’ve been a student to actually go and do it. And then suddenly this whole behaviour thing starts to work and they actually see that they can change it themselves already and the companies say, hey, I’m saving money here. It’s an easy thing, it’s not about CO2, I’m saving money. And the employee saves money so as soon as money comes in and they see it’s very obvious and easy, then they start to move.17

According to the Low Car Diet approach, the mobility costs reimbursement policy within the company should be designed in such a way that people are financially rewarded for travelling sustainably, and the reimbursements of the costs of travelling by car should be lower than now. The language of the Low Car Diet project (except for the title) is, like individualized weight loss programmes, intentionally positive, rather than critical, and the emphasis lies on giving people flexibility and multiple choices so that people can plan their mobility according to their preferences and needs. The possibilities include using not only cleaner vehicles but also more flexible ways of working and meeting – from home or somewhere between home and work. The project includes competition – between the employees and between the participating companies, and last year the Telegraph Media Group won the Low Car Diet Award as they cut their CO2 emissions by 60 per cent. The video of Low Car Diet wrap-up and the ‘Wall of Fame’ on the website of the project include comments of the employees who participated, and some people talk about ‘revelation’ and discovering a ‘new world’ as they started cycling, taking trains and buses and organizing their mobility differently. Many discovered that they were saving not just money but also sometimes time; they were less stressed when arriving at work, had chatted with people in public transport, got some of their work done while sitting in the train and found that using



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public transportation was not as complicated as they thought. According to the follow-up test by Urgenda, 38 per cent of participants said they would change their travel behaviour whether the policy of their company is amended on the basis of Urgenda’s suggestions or not. This Low Car Diet essentially turns mobility into a budgetary, and therefore company, employee or household, decision based on mobility as well as economic self-discipline. This individualization provides a rationalization of choice and lifestyles that makes decisions thicker and more assessable. Individual choice is made more easily when and if there is a calculus of its benefits – these benefits taking the shape of economic incentives, health gains and so forth. Calculability is thus grafted on to strategies that simultaneously download responsibility to the individual.

Mobility as commodity In addition to the downloading of responsibility to individuals and the operationalization of calculability, we also see mobility transition policies themselves being turned into marketable commodities. This process assumes different, and sometimes conflicting, shapes – in the sense that the object of transition is often disputed or contested and not particularly standardized as different transition visions come into play. For instance, it is apparent how particular models of transition practice and expertise are being made in ways that are intended to circulate for the purposes of economic exchange within new markets of transition expertise and intellectual property. Developing the propensity to effectively monetize and capitalize upon transition knowledge and experience is a strong motivator for investing in several low-carbon mobility transition schemes. As an insular city state, Singapore’s livelihood and economy are run off of carbon-based fuels, yet it does not have carbon-based energy resources. This puts the country in a vulnerable position when policy must contend with increasing economic and social mobility platforms. The lack of resource base has, however, put Singapore in a position to be open to creating markets for anything and everything in service-based economies, and it has done so through positioning the country as a place friendly to Western business and global capital as well as being a leader in urban design (Bok and Coe 2017). Elaborating on the role of the model in Singapore highlights contested visions of mobility futures in the country in particular and the region more broadly. The way in which Singapore’s role is envisioned, produced and moved across the global landscape is a major indicator of whether and how Singapore will achieve its vision for a low-carbon mobility transition. Singapore is often considered a city to be learnt from and emulated globally both in business rankings and among urban planners (Pow 2014). The ‘Singapore Model’ has come to signify a particular style of urban development which is both ecofriendly and creates a welcoming space for businesses (Ibid). Singapore’s policies

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on motorization together with the successes of the public transportation network and its services provided through a public-private partnership demonstrate to other entrepreneurial urban governments a unique balance managing the two main modes of urban transportation. Building on this success the LTA has set up its own consultancy arm, the LTA Academy. Began in 2006, its aim is to act as ‘a global knowledge hub in urban transport. It provides a one-stop platform for government officials, professionals and practitioners from around the world to tap on Singapore’s experience and expertise and exchange knowledge and best practices in urban transport management and development.’18 The LTA Academy bills itself as an ‘enabler’, a research arm and an educator. It has held over 600 professional programmes for approximately 14,000 ‘senior officials’ and professionals from over 100 countries, mainly in the Global South.19 It offers courses on everything from Construction Safety Management course for Qualified Site Supervisors to the Planning and Development of Urban Rail Transit Systems. The LTA partners with other country delegations, sometimes putting on joint programmes with nations such as Denmark and with intergovernmental organizations such as the World Bank. Although it appears that the Singapore Model might be transferred to other cities and countries, it is a unique case because of its particular situation as a city state. Often lauded in urban planning circles, the national state of Singapore is acting as educator to sub-national local urban governments. The particularly neoliberal logic of the state becoming educator and consultant to other state agencies beyond its national boundary provides insight into the extent to which such logics operate and work to maintain mobility transitions within certain countries. Singapore’s LTA Academy effectively translates its mobility planning knowhow – along the lines of the wider ‘Singapore Model’ – into publications, seminars and training for foreign delegations, project advisories and consultancy. Similarly, Dutch urban planning consultancies found purchase in Southwark in London. Southwark’s developing cycling strategy, eager to learn from the renowned Dutch model, invited Danish and Dutch consultants to lead a two-day masterclass for forty local stakeholders in June 2014. According to two interviewees from Southwark Council, this was a key event that helped engage people who had previously displayed little interest in the cycling policy. The workshop prepared ground for collaboration and quickly helped to shape the strategy. The text of the strategy features numerous references to ‘best practices’ from other cities across the world which reflects a broader tendency in London cycling policy to reference examples of cycling infrastructure and ‘cycling culture’ from abroad, with the Netherlands and Denmark seen as models to look up to. Both consultants and policymakers emphasize that no one is talking about copying and pasting solutions (Consultant, Mobycon, 24 November 2014), and it appears that appealing to specific concepts such as ‘Going Dutch’ and ‘Dutch model’ has more to do with presenting an already existing and presumably successful cycling infrastructure to illustrate far-reaching goals of the policies and to communicate technical details in a simpler and more attractive manner (Member of the Cycling Joint Steering Group, 2 February 2015). In this way, locally envisioned mobility transition is entangled in transnational



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dynamics of mobility of expertise and urban imagery. Furthermore, although it is rare for Southwark Council to apply for EU projects, together with Lambeth Council they were looking to apply for EU funding in the framework of the EU project VeloCittà, coordinated by another Dutch consultancy and uniting five European cities with bike share systems. The aim is to ‘improve energy efficiency by shifting journeys currently undertaken by car and public transport to cycling, both by increasing the use of BSS and by increase the mode share of cycling across the case study regions, by increasing the visibility and acceptability of cycling’.20 It is clear that mobility transition imaginaries are themselves mobile, shared and, partially, generic. Mobility consultants, visionary mayors, international organizations and transnational engineering firms travel around the world, produce imaginaries that inform actors and publics worldwide and assist in infrastructure building (McCann 2010, 2013). Ideas and narratives such as the ‘liveable city’ or the ‘smart city’ provide generic templates for mobility planning while specific policies surrounding mobile infrastructures from cycling schemes to Bus Rapid Transit have specific origins and trajectories. These are often built into a repertoire of expertise that can be commoditized. This was perhaps best seen in the European case, where several actors have expressed how the EU ought to become a pioneer of transitions for the sake of technological export worldwide. In a way, the transition endeavours are somewhat of a race: whoever crosses the line first will be in the position to guarantee a better economic return. Wider global networks and institutions are seeking to govern and encourage transition policies at state and transnational scales, especially within the EU, which rely upon transnational diffusions and movements of expertise, policy and discourse over transition. In some respects, the EU’s policies of transnational mobility management, knowledge exchange and harmonization could appear to undermine national or city governments’ working towards marketable sites of expertise if policy diffusion and harmonization become mandatory or parts of the EU apparatus. In fact, they detail numerous examples of policy networks, shared case studies and so-called best practices that are recommended, especially through awards and recognition, potentially levelling Europe’s market out. And yet, this may be marketization just on another scale. Some European leaders see this process as an economic opportunity for Europe to become the world’s leading exporter of sustainable mobility policies and practices, citing the idea that Europe could be seen as a ‘laboratory’ for transition experimentation. But mobility transitions as commodities go beyond the exchange of knowledge and know-how. Services, infrastructures and technology too are sometimes deemed as containing an intrinsic potential for export. They are packed together as saleable, exportable merchandise. In Latourian terms, their ‘assemblage’ bears an agency of profitability (Latour 2005). The Korean ‘G-Valley’ for electric vehicles is an example of this encouraged by a partnership of actors using financial incentives and tax reductions to encourage electric vehicle production and innovation in Korea. This also drew on other interests invested in the branding and place identity of Seoul as a centre for high-tech industries, of which electric vehicles were just one.

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We can see a similar logic in Milton Keynes in the UK. The Transport Systems Catapult’s Low-Carbon Urban Transport Zone (LUTZ) Pathfinder pods are one of several autonomous vehicles to be developed and trialled in the UK. The pods are intended to cater for not only planned but spontaneous mobilities and respond intelligently to dynamic demand. The pods have a maximum speed of 15 miles per hour and were unveiled in 2014 alongside three other autonomous vehicle schemes, based in Greenwich, Coventry and Bristol during the year. Within Milton Keynes, LUTZ Pathfinder sits within a context of a wider range of lowcarbon mobility systems including charging points for electric vehicles, an electric vehicle car-club and an electric bus service and a wider local government agenda ‘Milton Keynes a Sustainable Future: A Low Carbon Prospectus’. The pods are recognizably part of the way Milton Keynes promotes itself, as a current member of the UK smart cities programme. A report to the city’s cabinet saw the LUTZ Pathfinder as an ‘exemplar project to position Milton Keynes as a leading Smart City and low carbon economy’. The pods are part of the city council’s commitment to ‘deliver quality and sustainable public transport initiatives and information’ – key priorities within the city’s corporate plan. The Transport Systems Catapult (TSC) innovation centre, launched in Milton Keynes by Vince Cable in June 2014, marks a wider government and automotive industry strategy to develop new mobility technologies and infrastructure. The Catapult, one of a series of other UK catapult centres funded by the department of Business Innovation and Skills (BIS), is an envisioning of mobility transitions that can be made possible by a competitive market of knowledge products. It is intended by the government as a way to lead towards significant competitive advantage in the sector, to ‘position the UK as the leading provider of innovative and integrated transport solutions to the rest of the world, exploiting a market estimated to be worth £900bn by 2025’. The emphasis on low-carbon mobilities, and the wider development of intelligent mobility systems, is not the intended outcome but a by-product of the Catapult, as the Chief Technical Officer of the Catapult explained in an interview. The aim is rather to build the capability within the UK to sustain and lead a market in mobility technologies, training and expertise, intellectual property rights and, so far, light touch regulatory frameworks. The intention was to capture a global market. Like Seoul, the scheme also married with a city – in this case, Milton Keynes – to become a model of low-carbon technologies. While such modelling is not solely neoliberal in nature (Söderström and Geertman 2013; Bunnell 2015; Cohen 2015), examining this process from the perspective of neoliberal logics helps us to understand how governments faced with a mandate to cut their own budgets and keep taxes low are able to attract and generate capital in the name of governance (Krueger and Gibbs 2007; Temenos and McCann 2012).

Conclusion While there are other instances of (neo)liberal logics at play within the realms of mobility transitions, we believe these three – the downloading of responsibility



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towards the individual, the calculability of mobility and the commodification of transition policy – can be utilized as reference points for a broader framework that positions mobility transition policies and initiatives within a context of market-based solutions, with an intrinsic economic rationale to underpin them. Clearly, these three logics supersede what we now know as neoliberalism. Indeed, neoliberalism itself is an intensified and accelerated version of liberalism – a political philosophy and tradition that is centuries old. Nonetheless, approaches to mobility transition across the world, in a variety of contexts, show a remarkably limited imagination in envisioning how we might get from our current situation to a new constellation of mobility for a low-carbon future. For the most part, these imaginations are limited by the boundaries of mainstream, market-based economics. Transitions to different mobile futures are shoe-horned into seemingly common-sense logics that we (consumers and practitioners of mobility) recognize from other domains of our lives. We accumulate green points as if they are cash, and we monitor our own mobilities through walking aps measuring our travels in steps or calories. Mobility transition (like low-carbon transition more broadly) is framed within a logic of competition, individualism, calculability and exchange (Bulkeley 2013). In short, we are told that transition might happen if and when the economy wins, grows and expands. We are told it might happen when we learn to behave appropriately. Transition is framed as post-political (Swyngedouw 2010; North, Nurse and Barker 2017), as an obvious need for all equally where everyone will be a winner and there will be no losers. The (neo)liberal framing of transition policies within the logics of markets is not simply obvious, natural or common sense. There are other logics for the production of mobility transitions. One model, for instance, would be to simply recognize that the demands of global heating trump the demands to grow economies and to construct policy at government level that prioritizes GHG emission reduction even when there are losers such as the fossil fuel industry. This logic is often ridiculed or simply ignored as the demands of ‘the economy’ are seen as obviously prior to any others. As we write this, that logic has been quite dramatically unmasked by government reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic across the world. In every country where we explored mobility transition policies, national governments have introduced policies and actions that have recognized that the need to combat the disease is more important than the immediate shortand medium-term needs of the economy. Such moves may, coincidently, result in the single biggest annual drop in carbon emissions on record (above 5 per cent). Clearly, global heating is also an emergency – just one that happens over a longer time frame and is rarely framed as an ‘emergency’. Global heating will also certainly result in a much greater loss of life than Covid-19. In one ironic twist, it is estimated that the reduction of air pollution in and around Wuhan, China, following the closing down of industry and travel bans may result in more lives being saved than are lost through the effects of the virus. If it has taught us nothing else, Covid-19 has shown that it is possible for governments to take dramatic action to combat an emergency even if there are negative effects on the economy. It is a choice.

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CChapter 7 COMMONING MOBILITY TRANSITIONS

Introduction In the previous chapter, we saw how efforts to transition to low-carbon mobility futures were framed within largely (neo)liberal logics. Most often, attempts to enact low-carbon mobility policies are fettered by the logic of market economies where the target of a low-carbon future is, at best, second in a ranked list of aims. This (neo) liberal logic is perhaps the most significant part of an infrastructural and cultural ‘lock-in’ (Urry 2009) supporting high-carbon mobilities. This ‘lock-in’ cannot be separated from wider debates on cultural political economies of transitions to sustainability – from questioning what ideologies and corresponding forms of political and economic organization are supporting current high-carbon living (Schwanen, Banister and Anable 2011; Gössling and Cohen 2014). If we do not do that, we may merely reproduce existing mobility regimes, centred around the narratives of mobility as an individual right and a precursor to economic growth, even if we seemingly aspire to transition to low-carbon mobility.1 In this chapter2, we expose the dominant logics behind mobility transition policies and highlight a logic of commoning mobility that may as of yet be marginal but has a potential to help radically reimagine mobility futures as more equitable, inclusive and liveable. In this task, we build on the analysis of the initiatives we have identified throughout the world, while we are also inspired by research on just transitions, mobility justice and a long intellectual history of research into environmental and racial justice (Bullard and Johnson 1997; Swilling and Annecke 2012; Agyeman et al. 2016; Sheller 2018). In examining the logics behind mobility transition projects as well as that of policies, initiatives and projects they are entangled with, we have analysed the broader context of mobility transition policies and projects, including policies in the sphere of transport, health, work, environment, trade, economy, urban and regional development. We have identified three interrelated ‘logics’ of mobility transition – logics being a cohering, structuring and even a coalition of rationalities, rhetorics, ideologies and discourses which underpin the policy and practice of mobility transition (in the same way that Foucault identified the logic of ‘normalization’ as an inner functional coherence within biopolitics within his writing (Eagleton 1991)). Two dominant logics emerged across the countries

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we studied, all of which operate under an increasingly neoliberal, capitalist global economy. These are scarcity underlying mobility transition planning and austerity as a response to scarcity. The third logic, commoning, is one which is emergent, often quiet and defiant against the predominant logics of scarcity and austerity. However, it is a logic which demonstrates that spaces of alternatives and potential transformations are alive and well across the global north and Global South. Commoning was not a dominant logic and did not appear in the majority of our case studies. Indeed, instances of commoning were small scale and often incomplete, exhibiting tensions with current governance structures. Drawing on literatures on commoning and the notion of mobility as movement, meaning and practice outlined in Chapter 3, we highlight the possibility of alternative politics, programmes and policies, demonstrating how the logic of commoning can transform spaces of governance and practices of mobility and challenge the dominant narratives on the meaning of mobility in society.

The politics of mobility and mobility justice Geographers and others have primarily engaged transition studies by drawing on analyses that use the multi-level perspective (MLP), discussed in detail in Chapter 2. To recap, MLP approaches often start from the premise that the transition in question is singularly focused on reducing carbon emissions and has a largely techno-social solution. Justice is usually not at the centre of MLP approaches, which, despite some recent engagements, largely fail to account for existing power dynamics and politics (Sheller 2012; Geels 2014; Affolderbach and Schulz 2016). While some studies have considered the politics of sustainability transitions in general (Avelino et al. 2016; Chatterton 2016), research on mobility transitions, more often than not, focuses on technological change as a starting point of inquiry. Yet, while technology-powered sustainable mobility solutions (from electric bicycles to drones used for deliveries) are abundant, transport scholars agree that focusing on technology is insufficient and can be counterproductive (Banister et al. 2013; Ferreira, Bertolini and Næss 2017; Temenos et al. 2017). Little, if any, attention has been paid to parallel theorizations of mobility transitions originating from a concern for social justice. As scholars of environmental justice and just sustainability have long argued, a singular focus on carbon emissions may lead to transitions that fail to address structural asymmetries of power. Thus, Mark Swilling and Eve Annecke take the discussions of equity to a global level: what is at stake is not simply a transition to a mode of production and consumption that is not dependent on resource depletion and environmental degradation, but as important is the challenge of a just transition that addresses the widening inequalities between the approximately one billion people who live on or below the poverty line and billion or so who are responsible for over 80 per cent of consumption expenditure. (Swilling and Annecke 2012: xiii)



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While thinking through the political implications of low-carbon transitions has begun in areas such as building standards (Affolderbach and Schulz 2016) and energy (Bouzarovski and Simcock 2017; Petrova 2018), fundamental questions surrounding the politics of mobility transitions and, in particular, questions of justice have yet to be explored to account for mobility as a key site and crucial process of consideration. Predating the theorization of transitions to low-carbon mobility futures has been work on mobility justice. As we saw in Chapter 2, Ivan Illich, for example, argued that high energy use in all its forms corrodes social relations and degrades landscapes. ‘Participatory democracy’, he argued, ‘demands low-energy technology, and free people must travel the road to productive social relations at the speed of a bicycle’ (1974: 8). Travelling at the speed of a bicycle signified that a radical structural shift away from modernist’s obsession with speed was necessary to address environmental crisis. Critical race scholars have also focused on mobility equity primarily, though not exclusively in the United States. Theorists of ‘just transportation’ have explored the long history of connections between unequal access to mobility and racism linking contemporary arguments about such things as the provision of public transit and the racial profiling of black drivers to deep historical trajectories connecting race to mobility including Jim Crow Laws and activism around bus boycotts (Bullard and Johnson 1997; Bullard, Johnson and Torres 2004). In addition to connecting race and class in discussions of transit, Bullard frequently linked issues of social justice to environmental issues through an analysis of environmental racism (2007). Also work in the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller and Urry 2006), informed by earlier work on transit justice, has sought to provide a framework for thinking through the role of mobility in systematically asymmetrical power relations. The three elements of mobility – movement, meaning and practice – are always circumscribed by existing governance structures, histories, power relations and embodied experiences. Mobility is in and of itself relational. How and why mobility happens exerts its own force on the ways laws are constructed and politics play out across spaces, affecting political and lived outcomes and spatial formations (Cresswell 2006; Adey 2009; Temenos and McCann 2012). Mobility, then, is always both spatial and political. We contend that any meaningful consideration of transition must also entail a consideration of the politics of mobility transitions, including questioning the relationship between an individualized ‘right to move’ (Cresswell 2006) and how collective social needs are mediated through mobilities. Cresswell, for example, charts how the Los Angeles Bus Rider’s Union fought for access to public transportation in an automobile dominated city, drawing on a long history of urban activism for racial justice (2006). In these instances, struggles over how to move and its representations are inextricably linked with struggles over urban space, the politics of distribution of resources and the question of participation in decision making. Likewise, Sheller charts how Philadelphia’s attempts to move its citizens to bikeand car-sharing schemes and active transportation are resisted, seen as projects of racialized gentrification, and the historically embedded patterns of inequality,

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poverty and segregation felt by poor and ethnic minorities also produce particularly strong desires for car ownership as a signal of security and status (2015). In this instance, achieving mobility transition requires attending to the cultural logics of racial justice simultaneously. In her recent book Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes, Sheller engages with the debate on transport justice beyond mobilities research, in particular with the seminal work by Karel Martens (2017), and elaborates on why his focus on more equitable distribution of accessibility is not enough for a radical transformation of mobility systems as it ‘does not recognize the underlying wider politics of uneven mobilities’, for instance by taking for granted equal participation in decision making and treating space as a neutral ‘container’ (Sheller 2018). Theorizations of transportation justice and mobility justice have proliferated over the last decade (Mullen and Marsden 2016; Martens 2017; Pereira, Schwanen and Banister 2017; Banister 2018; Sheller 2018; Cook and Butz 2019; Davidson 2020), and it is beyond the scope of this book to provide an overview of this rich debate. Our goal here is to propose a new politics of mobility transitions that ties the issues of power, participation, justice and transitions to low-carbon mobility together through the notion of commoning. To foreground this conceptualization, in the next section we outline the dominant logics of scarcity and austerity that largely frame contemporary public policy debates concerning mobility.

Contested scarcities and austere mobilities The logics of scarcity and calls for some forms of austerity – for saving resources such as time, money, space and oil – are ubiquitous in debates surrounding mobility and society in the twenty-first century. Scarcity is consistently naturalized, generalized and taken out of specific historical and geographic contexts. In our research, scarcity has been invoked as motivation to accelerate transition or as an excuse to hinder change in almost every case, from the national level (e.g. Chile, the Netherlands, Norway, Singapore) to the level of urban street space (e.g. São Paulo, Almaty, Santiago, Vancouver). In most contexts, scarcity and austerity logics, even when working in quite contradictory ways, borrow from the political-economic tendencies of neoliberalism as an economic logic based on Darwinian or neoMalthusian imperatives of competition, efficiency and individualism, severed, as Bourdieu puts it, from a ‘social logic [. . .] subject to the rule of fairness’ (1998) and becoming an arch-enemy of institutional and social collective structures. While scarcity is often presented as a taken-for-granted ‘fact’ it is more often the case that the resource that is defined as ‘scarce’ – ‘deficiency in the supply of the material goods’ (Schaefer 1983: 279) – exists in relation to other resources that are ignored or marginalized. The definition of something (space, time, energy, etc.) with a particular limit or finitude plays an active role in the definition of appropriate responses. As Denier suggests in the very different context of health care, economically rational and mechanistic approaches to scarcity tend to lead towards rationing mechanisms in order to divide up or limit access to a limited



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resource (Denier 2007). In the Netherlands, for example, the scarcity of road space and the relatively small territorial footprint of the country was evoked by many Dutch policy experts in interviews: ‘We’ve got a lack of space in the city, we’ve got a lack of space on the road and we’ve got a lack of space . . . it’s a strange metaphor, but a lack of space in the air’ (Expert, Urgenda, 24 July 2015). In this sense, scarcity is evoked as a lack of space, a lack of room for pedestrians, cyclists, cars, within cities for people and buildings to inhabit and even within the air – imagined to be full of unwanted carbon and exhaust particulates. And so, despite its reputation as a leader in cycling policy, road congestion is presented as ‘the mobility problem’ of the country (TFMM, n.d.).3 Through the national programme ‘Optimising Use’ (‘Beter Benutten’), discussed in detail in Chapter 5, behaviour change is encouraged via incentives to ration those scarce resources, by driving during alternate times, telecommuting or occasionally working from home, using e-bikes or adopting carpooling. In this instance, neither environmental impact nor the rationality of driving itself (during low congestion periods) is questioned: high-carbon mobility has to be managed by minor adjustments to individual behaviour rather than through systemic change. In Singapore scarcity is an explicit policy rationale for its introduction of timebased electronic road pricing (ERP), the usage-based toll system that varies by place and time of day, and the vehicle quota system (VQS), which both taxes and limits the amount of cars on the road – both detailed in Chapter 5 (Government of Singapore, 2013). Neither policy is new, with the first version of ERP beginning in 1975 and the VQS established in 1990, nor is the discursive emphasis on individual behaviour change. ERP and VQS policies have been successful in stemming road congestion from individual vehicles, yet neither questions the assumed ‘right to mobility’ that underpins contemporary debates within mobility transition. Rather, the financialization of automobility through heavier taxing of people driving during peak hours under ERP and through the high price of a Certificate of Entitlement under the VQS tacitly excludes those without the financial means to travel from engaging in the free market of movement. When demand is high for driving certificates, their price rises accordingly. Mobility is therefore traded on a ‘free’ market. Scarcities, so prominent in Dutch and Singaporean policy goals are relative, as both countries’ road networks are among the densest in the world.4 These scarcities, usually framed within discussions on saving time in the daily commute, are a consequence not of lacking infrastructure but of presumptions about the value of particular mobilities above others and their apparent right to particular proportions of those scarcities. Contradictions come to the fore even more prominently in protests against new cycling lanes in São Paulo in 2015 where the redistribution of ‘scarce’ road space was seen as a ‘theft’ by taxi drivers and automobilists despite the significantly smaller share of urban space that cyclists were using compared to drivers. Indeed, São Paulo’s municipal authorities have accommodated over the past years a significant amount of bike lanes. In just a couple of years, the city went from having 35 kilometres of lanes in 20115 to an impressive figure of 400 kilometres in 2016,6 a figure that would position São Paulo in the top-ten cities with the

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Figure 7.1  ‘Reduction is a theft’ (Photo by André Nóvoa).

most cycling lanes in the United States.7 The number of cycling commuters is still around 1 per cent,8 but the local government is taking effort in raising this number, aided by a number of associations, such as Ciclocidade.9 These measures have been met with controversy, however. Even though the general population sees these as beneficial, there are groups of people that protest against them, as discussed further, where a paper that reads ‘reduction is a theft’ (referring to the reduction of car-space in favour of cycling) is glued to a sign announcing the construction of cycling lanes by the local government (Figure 7.1). These brief examples demonstrate the constructed and contested nature of scarcities in mobility policy debates. Furthermore, discourses on scarcity continue to shape thinking on mobility and imaginations of fairer and cleaner mobile futures. Most national and supranational policies we examined demonstrate that, despite the perceived pressures of scarcity, the role of mobility has not been critically reassessed at a societal level: reducing mobility of goods and people remains a ‘taboo’ subject within neoliberal growth paradigms and ecological modernization approaches (Schwanen, Banister and Anable 2011; Gössling and Cohen 2014). In the context of scarcity, mobility is expressed in square metres of road space, kilometres of motorway network, millions of Euros, limits of pollution or minutes of saved travel time. Mobility is rationalized as a proxy for sparingly managing a variety of resources and is the only thing we cannot get enough of. Such logics, we have observed in our study, most often leads to advocating some form of saving those resources, either through top-down state and local policies or through bottom-up community projects. For example, in several cases, the response of policymakers and politicians to managing the dual pressures of moving people and goods while also addressing



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environmental concerns has been to pare back state services rather than increase interventions to encourage sustainable mobile futures. The result is the creation of what we call austere mobilities – mobilities that require fewer resources: they are, for instance, cheaper (for the state) or occupy less space. In an age of financial austerity, austere mobilities may involve the creation of spaces where only the most basic level of infrastructure is provided, and previously existing services such as public transportation are increasingly contracted out to private companies. This was the case in Portugal during the 2008 socio-economic crisis. Instead of upgrading public transportation or incentivizing state-driven sustainable solutions, the Portuguese government, pressed by a joint supervision committee between the International Monetary Fund and EU authorities (the troika), adopted a series of neoliberal policies based on a strict economic rationale aimed at reducing state spending. This meant supplying mobility through the efforts of private companies and further liberalizing the transport sector. Examples include attempts to privatize public companies and rewrite laws to accommodate emerging privatized flexible transport services like Uber. Illustrating an entanglement of financial austerity policies and austere mobilities leading to low-carbon mobility projects that delegate responsibility for transition to its citizens, in Amsterdam, the removal of a bus line in a public transportation dependent community was followed by a pilot of electric cab on demand that was not perceived by the inhabitants as an adequate substitution and was discontinued (see also Moran Figueroa 2015). Austere mobilities are underpinned by logics of austerity broadly understood as limiting consumption. The argument for austerity is necessarily linked to dominant or established definitions of what has been defined as ‘scarce’. Thus, they are not necessarily linked to financial austerity policies, which are but a recent articulation of an ancient and ever-changing set of ideas (see Schui 2014) and may also result in immobilities. A good example of this is the case of Telework New Zealand, a company promoting the reduction of traffic congestion and emissions by encouraging people to avoid commuting altogether. They respond to the logics of scarcity by proposing ways that companies can save money, space on the road and travel time through immobility, and operationalize this austerity logic through using a ‘Benefit Calculator’ to calculate the savings for their clients, drawing on the calculative principles of transition discussed in Chapter 6 (Bevis England, personal communication, 11 March 2015). A similar logic and toolkit is offered by the ‘Low Car Diet’ campaign by the Dutch environmental foundation Urgenda, discussed in Chapter 6, whereby they help participating companies try a ‘low-car’ diet for a limited period of time and explore the results together with participants. By transforming an environmental argument into an economic one, they encourage people to cycle, work from home or dedicated places closer to home and demonstrate the benefits of transition to the employer: ‘[T]he companies say, hey . . . it’s not about CO2, I’m saving money’ (Expert, Urgenda, 24 July 2015). While they also emphasize health and well-being benefits of driving less, the appeal to economics, in their view, is the most powerful. Another player in the austere mobilities field is the Transition Town movement focusing on small-scale practices within defined areas (Mason and Whitehead

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2012; Jarvis 2015). While mobility is not foremost among their concerns, their general philosophical orientation is towards localization. Practically, this means emphasizing local, organic agriculture and diet, construction using local materials, practising local consensual forms of democracy, developing Local Economic Transfer Schemes (LETS) and generally acting against the incorporation into wider global networks. The movement is oriented towards dramatically reduced mobilities of food, energy, capital, materials and people. The agents for transition are communities rather than the state. Governments, advocates argue, will be too late and individuals too ineffective (Hopkins 2011). Transition towns draw on and reflect larger public understandings of alternative mobility transitions that celebrate localism and discursively work in opposition to dominant policy agendas that favour development, speed and technological fixes. Yet, their low uptake and upper-middle-class support base (Aiken 2012) indicate that rather than usher in a vastly different mobility transition, they may remain as niche initiatives. These examples focus on curbing individual behaviour in response to largescale societal crises. Even though they are not coupled with the politics of financial austerity, they may nevertheless follow dominant logics of neoliberalization that focus on reducing dependence on state services and relying on individual momentum and ingenuity to provide solutions within current socio-economic systems. Thinking about mobilities in the context of austerity directs attention to certain problems and paradoxes that these discourses and projects may entail. Like financial austerity, logics of austere mobilities are deeply ideological, driven by ‘moral and political considerations’ (Schui 2014: 6) and are fraught with contradictions. While economic austerity policies could be associated with anticonsumerist ideology, and historically have been, contemporary financial austerity policies do not target individual consumption, which is seen as the primary driver of the economy (Bramall 2013; Schui 2014). Instead, they are focused on government expenditure, most prominently on consumable services such as health care and public transportation, and the reduction of labour costs. The logics of austere mobilities are often also based on a paradox that reflects a similar ideological choice to propose that some mobile subjects take care of themselves while subsidizing the mobilities of others. Thus, globally, people are encouraged to take up healthier lifestyles through walking and cycling (costing the government nothing when not supported by investment into infrastructure), as we addressed in the previous chapter. Meanwhile, national governments implement policies maintaining and promoting (auto)mobility consumption through road building, economic incentives for corporate policies stimulating car use and exporting oil (Spinney 2016). Furthermore, like financial austerity measures which distribute the responsibility of bearing the consequences of debt via saving on spending (Blyth 2015), austere mobilities do not adequately reflect the parties primarily responsible for creating the debt itself. For example, the UN discourse on ‘leapfrogging’ – the hope that countries in the Global South will transition to low-carbon mobility regimes by skipping the stage of political carelessness about carbon emissions that characterized many OECD countries’ development – illustrates the disjunction



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between the origins of the emissions and the sites where austerity logics may be applied. Guilt-free unlimited private car usage is envisaged as a thing of the past; however, with around 10 per cent of the world population accounting ‘for eighty percent of total motorised passenger-kilometres (p-km) with much of the world’s population hardly travelling at all’, mobility is still a scarce and restricted resource for many (IPCC 2014: 606). Mobility thus remains a desired and legitimate act and calls for curbing it are not embedded in national policy. Yet, understanding mobility through a lens of austerity allows us to identify problematic distributions of responsibility for producing the negative consequences of high-carbon mobility and existing inequalities in accessibility. Austere mobilities are a response to scarcity discourses. We argue that both scarcity discourses and attendant responses can and should be challenged, and in the next section we point to an alternative possibility for rethinking mobility as a transformative set of practices enabling fairer sustainable futures.

Commoning mobility Apart from the logics of austerity as a response to scarcity and climate change, we have observed some initiatives underpinned by a politics that not only questions the sheer quantity of movement, emitted CO2 or investment but challenges the very logics of scarcity and pushes for rethinking the value of mobility and possible forms of mobility governance. Connecting our findings with geographic debates on commons, we demonstrate how these initiatives are instances of commoning mobility and argue for the need to theorize mobility as commons, articulating a new politics of mobility transitions. Common property and commonwealth have been of interest to economists and philosophers from Hobbes (1651 [1966]) to Marx (1867 [1977]). In the twentieth century, Hardin’s understanding of the ‘tragedy of the commons’, which argued that commonly held resources are subject to overuse and destruction (and can be seen in the logic of austere mobilities set out above), has been a flashpoint for these debates (1968). While this thesis has had considerable impact on debates surrounding state ownership versus privatization, Ostrom convincingly argued for the regulation of the common pool resources (CPR) by self-governing institutions as an alternative mode of governance (1990). Our argument focuses on not only common spaces themselves but the processes of commoning, of changing logics and perceptions, as well as practices of governance and management of access to mobility. The notion of commoning, rather than commons, highlights active and collective processes of making commons (Bresnihan 2013; Linebaugh 2014). Within geography, the notion of commoning is primarily engaged through two debates, the discussion of the management of CPR beyond the state and the market, and the interrogation of the notions of commons and commoning as tools to envision and enact alternative post-capitalist politics (Huron 2015). While often still focusing on the actual physical properties of commons, geographers have

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been pushing towards understanding commons as ‘complex social and political ecologies which articulate particular socio-spatial practices, social relationships and forms of governance that underpin them to produce and reproduce them’ (see also Brown 2007; Chatterton 2010: 626). As such the processual, the spatial and the relational dimensions of commons come forward as the focus shifts towards commoning (Chatterton 2010; Williams 2018) and to strategies and practices which can work to ‘assemble more inclusive, just and sustainable spaces’ (Jeffrey, McFarlane and Vasudevan 2012: 2) and as we argue, mobilities. Moreover, if commoning describes a set of processual relations through which something becomes common, it should be understood in relation to the processes of enclosure that wrestle something from the commons. As Jeffrey, McFarlane and Vasudevan write, ‘the seizure of the commons is actively assembled through porous, sociomaterial and distanciated forms of enclosure – through relations of stability and flux, fixity and movement’ (2012: 2). Such practices are also dialectically related to practices of commoning, which might seek to subvert, undermine or reuse those enclosures through different spatialities, at different scales and even through the production of different forms of subjectivity. The acts of enclosure are literally and figuratively connected to questions of (in)justice. The spatial act of enclosure enacts a redistribution of resources – removing them from many and allocating them to some. One such resource is mobility. From the beginning of the seventeenth century in the UK, the enclosure acts were experienced by many as a limit on their ‘right to roam’. This included both people and livestock that people wished to graze on common land. This right was explicitly recognized in the Countryside and Rights of Way Act of 2000, affirming the right to roam on all common land as well as routes through private land along so-called rights of way in England and Wales. For Blomley, the hedge marked one of the key materialities of enclosure in Britain, concretizing ‘a new set of controversial discourses around land and property rights’ aiming ‘to prevent the forms of physical movement associated with the commoning economy’ (2007: 5). Enclosing practices, as well as immobilizing, were inherently displacing too, causing desperate mobilities resulting from dispossession and eviction as labourers and peasant farmers sought subsistence elsewhere. More recently, carcentric planning has been theorized as enclosures of public space and as scarcityproducing regimes (Illich 1983; Hoeschele 2010). Given this history, it is surprising that the literature on commoning and mobility is absent. There are few engagements with the notion of the commons as it relates to transport. While Verlinghieri and Venturini mention a possibility of thinking of mobility as a common in the context of discussing the right to mobility, they do not elaborate what that might entail (2018). Road infrastructure has been repeatedly framed as commons with congestion being seen as a ‘tragedy of the commons’ (Iaione 2010; Frischmann 2012). A broader approach is taken by O’Boyle, shifting the focus to mobility that he views as a ‘form of infrastructure commons’ and defines ‘mobility commons’ as ‘the availability of means to move safely and freely about the community with minimal impediment or inconvenience’ (2010: 59). Yet, this discussion remains focused on infrastructure management rather



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than the meaning of mobility and particular politics of mobility that produce existing inequalities in access to infrastructure and the detrimental environmental footprint, for which particular mobile ‘classes’ are responsible. A more thorough engagement with the concept of ‘mobility commons’ approaches small-scale, localized endeavours such as community-owned transport and social enterprises running transportation services as common infrastructure that can potentially be integrated into larger transport systems (Glover 2017). Developing insights on transport services and transport infrastructure as a common pool resource, Glover puts forward an approach that is broader than traditional notions of the commons as a bordered territory, urging a reconsideration of the use of material infrastructures and asking questions of participation in mobility governance. This vision, however, still relies on scarcity discourses, neglecting to engage with the potential for curbing movement or reconsidering its value. Hardt and Negri push beyond the notion of property as commons and think through other intellectual and cultural resources. They define the notion of cultural commons as ‘dynamic, involving both the product of labor and the means of future production. This common is not only the earth we share but also the languages we create, the social practices we establish, the modes of sociality that define our relationships, and so forth’ (Hardt and Negri 2009: 350). Interestingly, migration and citizenship scholars use the notion of ‘mobile commons’ to refer to ‘the world of knowledge, of information, of tricks for survival, of mutual care, of social relations, of services exchange, of solidarity and sociability’ that migrants share and contribute to (Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2013: 190). Yet while they place the emphasis on sociality in situations of mobility and precarity, we focus on mobility itself as a process to be commoned. Mimi Sheller appears to bridge these two lenses discussing a more mobile imaginary of the commons, or commoning, as apolitical action – and one which the contemporary movement demands. What if the commons were not just about the sharing of a territory, a space, a resource, or a product, but could also refer to the affordances and capabilities for practices of moving, travelling, gathering, assembling, as well as pausing and being present. What if we conceived of mobility as a commons, and the commons as mobile. (2018: 161)

Our theorization of mobility as commons follows this broader definition, embracing forms of thinking about and organizing mobility that draw on the logics of commoning such as communal decision-making practices, openness to new forms of perceiving the right to mobility as well as the right to immobility (the right not to be displaced), the awareness of the social production of mobility and the power relations inherent in it, as well as a commitment to creating equity and working in the interest of the public good, contested as it may be. This notion of commoning has continuities with work on just sustainabilities and just transitions that have social justice at its heart. While the precise meaning of the commons may not have been widely interrogated, it is the case that transport justice advocates have asked

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us to focus on mobility as a key factor in ongoing tools of exclusion and, more hopefully, as a broad citizenship right and a resource at the heart of establishing an equitable common good (Bullard and Johnson 1997; Browne 2015; Sharpe 2016). For Sheller, it implies a kind of ‘mindful movement’, mobilities which are ‘shared with others, and based upon forms of solidarity, reciprocity, caring, trust, generosity, and stewardship’ (2018: 169). Commoning mobility can therefore be understood as a process that encompasses governance shifts to more communal and democratic forms while also seeking to move beyond small-scale, niche interventions and projects. It is important to remember that ‘the commons’ are always contested, as is the ideology behind it. Furthermore, while Glover (2017) describes mobility commons as a regime of ownership and Iaione (2010) and Frischmann (2012) focus on infrastructures, our emphasis is on rethinking the value, the meaning and practice of mobility as a step towards reconfiguring societal mobility regimes in more equitable and environmentally sustainable ways: a new politics of mobility transition.

Towards a new politics of mobility transitions In this section, we illustrate ways to think about commoning mobility by drawing out the three essential elements of a politics of mobility introduced in Chapter 3: movement, meaning and practice. Using two examples from our research, we illustrate what a new politics of mobility transitions might look like by focusing on commoning movement, commoning meaning and commoning practice. Commoning movement refers to collective engagement with the amount and type of movement across space; commoning meaning is defined here as collective reconsidering of the societal value of mobility; and commoning practice as collective rethinking of ways in which mobility is performed and governed, with a particular emphasis on the latter. These elements of mobility are entangled with each other, so too are the elements of commoning mobility. As physical movement is ‘the raw material for the production of mobility’ (Cresswell 2010: 19), commoning movement more often than not takes place in conjunction with commoning meaning and practice, which are entangled elements of mobility that unfold across spatial scales and levels of governance. Elements of commoning meaning, movement and practice are present in the Transition Town movement and telework initiatives, yet they are manifested more strongly in bottom-up movements challenging the enclosure of public space through car-centric planning and emphasizing the collective nature of producing mobility and of mobility transitions, such as a youth-led initiative ‘Generation Zero’ in New Zealand or a smaller pro-cycling community group ‘Velo-Almaty’ in Kazakhstan. The latter emphasizes that being involved in cycling advocacy means engaging with others, also drivers and pedestrians whom they see as ‘closest allies’; it means creating a community and fostering ‘urban culture’.10 In the Netherlands, we have observed a number of small-scale initiatives in the field of cycling and smart technology that either explicitly mobilized the notion of



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the commons or have otherwise engaged with meaning, movement and practice as communal. One example of the former is CommonBike project, aiming at creating a decentralized open-source bike-sharing system which can be joined by a company or someone who only owns one bike. Another example of a project engaging the rhetoric of commons is Cycling Data Commons (‘Fietsdatacommons’) Lab – a series of workshops, organized in 2019 by Waag, an Amsterdam-based foundation, with the goal of exploring the possibilities and challenges linked to collection, storage and use of cycling data. In these two examples the focus on mobility politics intersects with the politics of data and commoning mobility in the rapidly smartifying mobility sector encouraging a search for the forms of data collection and management driven by community rather than big tech. One of the two vignettes below will focus on a project that is not explicitly framed as a commoning project; yet its focus on rethinking the meaning of mobility and highlighting its communal dimension makes it a good example illustrative of projects approaching mobility commons logics. These vignettes may invite a suggestion that commoning may only work on small-scale and in activist ‘bubbles’, not challenging the system as whole, not addressing massive asymmetries in access to various forms of mobility, decisionmaking power and to the power to contribute to mainstream discourses on mobility. This does not have to be the case (although more research on the subject is due). One example that illustrates that commoning can potentially take place on a larger scale is ‘participatory value evaluation’ (PVE), developed by Niek Mouter, Paul Koster and Thijs Dekker (2019), as an alternative to cost-benefit analysis. They staged an experiment in which inhabitants of Amsterdam had to distribute a limited budget of the Amsterdam Transport Authority. In cost-benefit analysis people are treated as consumers who take care of their individual interests. In PVE people are approached as citizens, asked to step into the shoes of the decision-maker who takes care of the common good. The researchers have found out that when treated as citizens, people are ready to make the choices that are not beneficial for them but are seen by them as benefiting the community contributing to a transition to fairer and greener mobilities. Of course, any such potential forms of participation need to be critically examined in terms of inclusivity and actual impact on decision making. Yet, these experiments and this concept do offer a potential opening for considering how mobility can be commoned. It is particularly pressing to challenge the framing of mobile subjects as consumers of mobility as we see big tech advancing this vision and shaping the discourse on mobility, for example, through the concept ‘mobility as a service’ and related notions emphasizing the highly individualized nature of desirable mobility (see also Verkade and te Brömmelstroet 2020). In the two brief vignettes discussed further we illustrate how commoning movement, meaning and practice can be found across two diverse sites, one in the Global North, the other in the Global South, creating openings for transformative politics of mobility transitions. As we noted, we highlight these cases as exceptions to hegemonic neoliberal practices. Commoning mobility in both cases is not a totalizing nor discrete process; rather, it is a process that exhibits governance and practice-based transformations that set the stage to redirect and restructure

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radical democratic engagement within existing material circumstances. Both cases produce ‘renegade cartographies’ (Katz 1996) of commoning, showing that alternative mobility practices are possible. Mobilizing mobility: Fostering community connections through cycling Commoning the meaning of mobility happens when a social actor or actors actively push to rethink the social impacts of movement, its representations or the meaning of relationships on the move. In the IJburg area in Amsterdam, for example, a bottom-up neighbourhood civic initiative began in 2011 aimed at increasing cycling through community connections and activism. Ring-Ring® uses a smartphone application to encourage more people to cycle, but it works differently from other nudging applications of such type. Cycling kilometres – fietskilometers in Dutch, or Fkm – are recorded, and Fkm can be ‘exchanged’ for discounts in local shops. The core distinguishing feature of this application is, however, its focus on changing and politicizing the meaning of mobility, where it provides a possibility to ‘mobilise mobility’11 for a social goal. A public authority, a private company or a group of citizens can start a ‘group’ in the application, set a cycling target (e.g. to achieve 1000 Fkm per month), allocate an amount of money and announce that it will be spent on a particular social goal if the target is achieved. Ring-Ring® collects the money from the donor and mediates the exchange, transferring the money to a particular local initiative chosen by the group. Projects such as a local library, art installations on a local cycling route, a monument in the neighbourhood, trips to a pony farm for children with disabilities, purchasing bikes for handicapped people and planting trees were co-financed in this way. A non-market-based intervention, Ring-Ring® attempts to shift the meaning of mobility to rethink its potential as a common contribution to society. The rationale behind the programme is that cycling contributes to neighbourhoods and cities not only as an environment-friendly mobility mode but also as activity which – when undertaken collectively – supports liveability, sociality and prosperity of places, since cyclists are encouraged to frequent small businesses in the local economy and to be more deeply engaged in the community and place around them due to their slower speeds and openness. Thus, cycling, according to the founder of Ring-Ring,® is a ‘gift’ to oneself and to the society: by being mobile you are enacting change and reconfiguring your relationship with the community (Janine Hogendoorn, Ring-Ring®, 30 August 2017). The interface of the application mediates commoning movement and meaning by showing the number of Fkm cycled by an individual user, the total amount of Fkm cycled by all users and the amount of Fkm cycled by particular groups working towards a common social goal. While the key objective of Ring-Ring® is to increase cycling rates, preferably encouraging people to switch from driving to cycling, its broader social goal is to reassess mobility beyond its utilitarian value and do it in a democratic



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fashion facilitating bottom-up initiatives and investment into local communal projects. The idea seems to resonate with the current bikenomics thinking that monetizes the effects of cycling in order to advocate for investment into cycling as multiple societal returns can be expected (Blue 2016). Yet, according to the Ring-Ring® founder, the idea here is not to monetize cycling – which she finds to be a somewhat ‘sad’ development – but an adaptation of cycling advocacy to ‘make their story heard’. It is ideally about decentralizing and democratizing the process of ascribing value in society (Janine Hogendoorn, Ring-Ring®, 30 August 2017). The founder of the initiative is currently considering ways in which the use of data collected through the application could be ‘democratized’, for example, be shared with scholars or policymakers on the basis of a subscription (given that users agree to that, the data is anonymized, etc). Thus, at the core of the Ring-Ring® mission is commoning the meaning of mobility, yet it also advances commoning movement and commoning practice, aiming for a bottom-up transition driven by reconsidering the value of mobility, raising awareness of its collective impact and mobilizing networks of local actors for a bottom-up social change. There are some challenges to keeping the project consistent with this vision: for example, Ring-Ring® as a platform is decidedly open. This means that any organization can join, including companies whose activities may clash with the environmentalist philosophy of the platform. Thus, in Antwerp where the city started the collaboration with Ring-Ring®, employers such as Shell and Monsanto became involved. According to the founder, this does not have to conflict with the Ring-Ring® goal of getting more people to cycle and help the environment, and above all people, using the application, have freedom of choice of which initiatives and organizations to support. Also, the very set-up of the platform as a smartphone application led by one person’s particular philosophy creates its own enclosures, as this way is only partially decentralized and appeals to particular audiences, potentially excluding the elderly or those who can’t afford access to the internet or data platforms. Transformative mobility governance in Santiago de Chile Commoning mobility practices are a key step in transforming attitudes and expectations of how mobility is conceived and managed. In order to reconfigure societal mobility regimes in more equitable and environmentally sustainable ways, this needs to be done from the planning phase forward. While mobility practices are most commonly defined as instances of movement, such as driving a car, they also encompass practices of how mobility is governed. Commoning mobility practices are actions that can bring about a shift towards more participatory decision-making models whereby the impacts of mobility practices are collectively managed. The activism surrounding the construction of concession (toll) highways in Santiago, Chile’s capital city, is an example of this kind of transformative politics. While not without contradictions and tensions (the campaign was successful in some areas, less so in others), it is possible to draw out the potential for radical

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democratic decision-making structures and activism that effected change in formal governance practices. In 1996 the Chilean government announced the construction of concession highways in and around the country’s capital, Santiago, to combat worldrecord levels of air pollution. The highways were the subject of sustained multistakeholder protests which ultimately transformed the role of citizen participation in governance and planning, establishing a new set of mobility governance practices that have increased the role of participatory democracy within the country more broadly (Sagaris 2012, 2014). The protests were specifically focused on issues of mobility justice, asking who is intended to move freely in the city, along highways and who can and should be forced to move through the displacement of entire neighbourhoods. Intended to increase the speed and ease of people commuting into the city while maintaining, not reducing, current levels of traffic congestion, the highway plan included a thirty-three-kilometre road cutting through the largest metropolitan park and several historical neighbourhoods in the city centre. The highways were mobility infrastructures that hijacked once common space. Their building was an enclosure intended for the freedom of circulation of the car and its wealthier inhabitants. The original plan affected ten historic neighbourhoods in northern Santiago, four of which emerged as major opponents to the project, including Bellavista, the historic cultural and artistic centre of Santiago; La Vega, home to the major markets that anchor the food distribution system throughout Chile; Vita Cura, a high-income traditionally politically conservative neighbourhood; and Recolleta, a low-income, working-class neighbourhood close to the city centre. In 1997, these socioeconomically and culturally diverse neighbourhoods came together in opposition to form Coordinadora No a la Costanera Norte (Coalition against the Costanera Norte, hereafter Coordinadora), comprised of twenty-five organizations and a handful of individuals. Maintaining a strong focus on social and environmental sustainability, the Coordinadora was noted for its radically democratic governance structure that included consensus-based decision making and a non-hierarchical organizational structure (Ducci 2000, 2004; Sagaris 2012, 2014). The coalition was successful in holding officials responsible for consulting with communities and worked to reframe how governments engaged civil society organizations and communities to have more equal footing with business lobbyists. The Coordinadora created enough oversight and opposition that, coupled with uncertain profit margins, the project was put on temporary hold between 1999 and 2003 (Figure 7.2). In 2003 the Coordinadora was again faced with opposing a pro-business government, fighting opaque and clientalistic planning decisions (Posner 2003; Sagaris 2012; Huerta 2015). By that time, it was apparent that car ownership in the eastern suburbs had risen enough to ensure a profitable business model, and the project was put back out for public tender (Engel, Fischer and Galetovic 1999). The Coordinadora was again faced with opposing a pro-business government, which found a consortium of businesses ready to build the Costanera Norte.



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Figure 7.2  Santiago region with Costanera Norte outlined in blue (Google Maps adapted by authors).

The first thing that we did when we emerged was highways yes or NO! And we raised a whole debate about highways and impacts on cities and people and so on. But of course as soon as you do that some people come back at you and say ‘well but if not highways, then what?’ So right away in the midst of the campaign, so when we were forged as citizens and as organizations we were immediately thinking ‘yeah, what?!’ So we were immediately thinking about walking and cycling and public transport and so on. It was a very quick, very short distance between . . . they tried to frame us as a kind of NIMBY type of thing but I think that that kind of transition was really really clear. We were fighting for our organizations, for our communities but also for the city.12

The governance system in Chile is centralized, but planning decisions are split between various ministries and implemented by regional offices. The seventeenyear dictatorship had changed governance infrastructures, making them increasingly opaque and clientalistic (Huerta 2000; Posner 2009; Sagaris 2012). The Coordinadora persisted in demanding meetings with government and business stakeholders. Their non-hierarchical structure also meant that the coalition defied expectations, sometimes bringing up to thirty members of the Coordinadora to government offices and taking over public consultations at which planners were expecting to speak. Instead, community members each spoke in turn, with the meetings

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lasting, according to our interviews, up to three hours before everyone had had their say (Activists, personal communication, 21 January 2015). This persistence shaped how citizens understood their role in the future of Santiago’s mobility infrastructure. Spatially, these four neighbourhoods are today seen as catalysts for the relatively young civil society within Chile and many such organizations in Santiago are located within these four neighbourhoods. Furthermore, many of the Coordinadora members have gone on to work in civil society, become planners and remain community activists with a specific emphasis on mobility transitions focusing on issues such as cycling and public transit (Sagaris 2014). According to one of the activists involved: What we considered a victory is that we survived as urban communities and what we learned and what we built and all the contacts and the networks and the knowledge, and the experience that we accumulated were available after the fight was over to put into the citizen led urban planning. . . . We look at the environment but everything is articulated around social justice and people’s rights and that kind of thing. (Interview, activist, 15 January 2015)

Thus a fight about the placement and mode of transportation in the mid-1990s has grown to shape how citizens actualize their agency within sustainable mobility transitions. The construction of the Costanera Norte was intended as a measure to mitigate environmental externalities such as air pollution without altering the broader ideological vision of modernity in process through increasing automobility in Chile. This attempt backfired and sparked a significant battle over fundamental views on citizenship, belonging and participatory governance that has had lasting effects on planning not only within Santiago but within the country (Figure 7.3).

Figure 7.3  Costanera Norte (Photo by Mariordo (Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz)/CC BY-SA 3.0).



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The effect of the Coordinadora’s action was material, a significant rerouting of the highway saved three of the four neighbourhoods at risk, costing the companies $500 million Chilean pesos, including compensation for those displaced. This campaign also established public participation and consultation in planning processes as a democratic right throughout Chile. However, Chile faces challenges in achieving a sustainable mobility transition, especially if the visions of how it should look are at odds with capitalist logics. Such logics are particularly acute in Chile, an early experimental ground for neoliberalism, which was written into the country’s constitution enacted under Pinochet’s military dictatorship as an explicit turn away from the victory of Allende’s social democratic movement in the 1970s. This recent legacy of the dictatorship had crushed Chilean’s sense of civic participation while simultaneously exploiting the land and its people (Camargo 2013). Still operating under the same constitution, Chile faces challenges to achieving a sustainable mobility transition, especially if the visions of how it should look are at odds with capitalist logics. Thus, the success of the Coordinadora is the achievement not only of rerouting of the highway – a success which some have argued is relatively minor – but in establishing a precedent for citizen involvement in urban planning and discussions about mobility futures. The work of increasing citizen participation has also helped in citizens having a greater say over land impact assessments. Further, in maintaining a cross-class opposition to the highway and a commitment to non-hierarchical leadership, the Coordinadora engendered a precedence whereby social sustainability concerns received equal footing with environmental issues, further emphasizing that environmental concern was not just an issue for rural campesinos and indigenados (farmers and indigenous peoples) and thus could and should be taken into account as a valid concern from a cosmopolitan perspective. The success of the Coordinadora shows that even in the face of challenges, there is space for reimagining how commoning mobility practices can be structured through collective governance processes. In the post-dictatorship planning landscape, this victory was a watershed moment in participatory democracy that was able to be articulated into long-term change. Its success is in establishing a precedent for citizen involvement in urban planning and discussions about mobility futures. The shift to inclusive governance allowed previously marginalized voices of working-class and Indigenous people to be provisionally included within governance processes while also establishing a wider political landscape in which activism, dissent and debate could operate in a public sphere, creating a more just decision-making arena by widening who had access to powerful people and institutions. Intersectional solidarity that was highlighted in this particular case has had longer-term effects which can be seen in the most recent protests in 2018 in Chile. The long-term rising inequalities and exponential rise in the cost of living had been fostering discontent, and it was a question of mobility justice that ignited – quite literally – the protests. A 30 peso (4 per cent) rise in the cost of metro fares instigated a student-led protest, takeovers of the city’s main metro and train stations and a coordinated fare evasion campaign. Confrontations with the police led to the burning of seventeen metro stations and in all eighty-one sustained damage.

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While the Coordinadora used multiple spatial strategies to protest the highways, the protests beginning in October 2018 and ongoing at the time of writing look like traditional street tactics. However, they are tied to an understanding of the economic system and of participatory democracy that can be traced back to early post-dictatorship activism. ‘It’s not 30 pesos, its 30 years’ is a constant refrain of the street chants (Cortès 2020). The phrase linking the 4 per cent hike in transit fares, which translates to 13.8 per cent of the monthly minimum wage – the second highest in Latin America – is associated with the neoliberal experiment in Chile, particularly the post-dictatorship period where critics claim that opacity and clientelism changed little else than costume – from military uniforms to business suits. Mobility transition without mobility justice, however, means that many of these battles are in reality never complete. The victory of the Coordinadora was only partial, and while some material benefits were accrued, the value of this victory remained in the governance process. Commoning practice in this instance is focused on governance. Without a major structural shift, growing inequality through neoliberal privatization in Chile remained an issue over the thirty years since the dictatorship ended and democracy was supposedly restored. Yet mobility remained a key flashpoint for social unrest. As Amanda Huron (2015, p 965) argues, the ‘gap between the politics of commons reclamation and the everyday practice of the long-term maintenance of commons is one that urgently needs to be filled’. Following her argument, we hold that the focus of commning mobility needs to be on explicating longer-term social processes reflective of social reproduction and explicitly political ways of rethinking low-carbon mobility transitions. This case highlights the need to focus on democratic forms of politics from below when considering how commoning mobility practices can effect successful shifts in governance and practice. Commoning decision-making practices about key articulations of mobility – such as how to build new road infrastructure – were able to achieve a political stronghold in the decision-making process. There is a tension here. The Costanera was built, enclosing key mobility infrastructures and reinforcing key automobility patterns favoured under current neoliberal capitalist economies. However, several communities won the right to immobility, the right not to be displaced. The meanings and practices of commoning that we have identified thus far are not straightforward, nor are they complete transformations. It is important to remember that they can be sought within as well as beyond current political assemblages in order to think through future possibilities and applications.

Conclusions Commoning mobility refers to projects that highlight the shared responsibility for what mobility does to societies and communities: whether in the form of schemes that may drive sustainability and accessibility agendas or projects that develop collective mobility governance arrangements driven by communities sharing a



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vision of sustainable living. The notion of commoning mobility captures the logics of a number of low-carbon transition initiatives as well as the dialectically related processes which enclose mobilities. Commoning mobility proposes a reconsideration of the value of mobility and its collective repercussions in addition to the communal management of transport. This means rethinking the role of mobility as what keeps communities both connected and diverse. Mobilities may be the means through which we interact with each other and with the environment around us (te Brömmelstroet et al. 2017), something we share and can collectively govern rather than something we value only as it is converted into financial equivalent, square kilometres and minutes of commute – mobility as fetish. An emphasis on commoning – collectively rethinking – the meaning of mobility is missing from earlier scholarly engagements with the notion of commons as applied to mobility, and it brings together the call for mobility transitions beyond technofixes and for the grounded prefigurative politics that commoning can help realize. Second, a new politics of mobility transitions based on the logics of commons invites us to interrogate mobility-related scarcities and their enclosures, which prioritizes particular scarcities over others, for example, congestion over lack of space for pedestrians. Austere mobilities can then be critically scrutinized through the commons perspective as a set of enclosing mobilities, meanings and practices. The alternative to a scarcity view of mobility is one in which pure metrics of overall mobility are replaced by a socially mediated assessment of contemporary mobility and any future mobility. In this case, it would not be simply austere mobilities which are imposed but mobilities in which the needs of different sectors of society and the power relations that operate between them are included in the calculation. So, some kinds of austerity might be imposed on the kinetic elite while new opportunities for mobility (and immobility) be provided to the kinetic underclass. Finally, sharing practices – which Dowling, Maalsen and Kent (2018) have recently articulated as socio-material entanglements in the context of car sharing – can be critically reassessed using ‘commoning’ as a heuristic. Take bike sharing. Although lauded as a harbinger of sustainable and equitable mobility, the politics of developing bike shares have stirred controversy. Studies have shown that these services may strengthen rather than eliminate transport inequalities as docking stations are often built in more affluent areas (Clark and Curl 2016; Gavin et al. 2016) and price and credit card eligibility may be another barrier to wider use (Goodman and Cheshire 2014). The issue of participation has been equally important: from San Francisco to Amsterdam, bikeshare bikes have been vandalized by local inhabitants claiming their right not only to urban space but to decision making. Furthermore, the idea of ‘the tragedy of the commons’ has been evoked to interpret the use of public space by bikeshare companies (Rushe 2017). Yet, we argue that it is more than overuse of a shared space that is at stake. These debates point to the profoundly contested nature of mobility transitions and to the key role of the question of the ‘right to mobility’ as much as a ‘right to the city’ (Lefebvre 1996; Verlinghieri and Venturini 2018) in those transitions. Indeed, commoning mobility as commoning meaning, movement and practice shifts

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attention from a narrow understanding of mobility commons as infrastructure towards exploring a range of possibilities of reconfiguring the political debate on planning fairer and more liveable cities. Such a shift necessarily brings various forms of ‘transition’ together – particularly those focused on carbon reduction and those rooted in long-standing work on mobility justice. Future work on commoning mobility can help to elaborate the recent resurgence of interest in urban commons and enclosures (cf. Leitner 2017). Those possibilities begin with questioning the decision-making processes behind urban mobility policies and embeddedness of those decisions in broader ideological regimes that allocate scarcities in ways that have produced detrimental societal and environmental effects across the globe.

CChapter 8 CONCLUSION TOWARDS JUST MOBILITY TRANSITIONS

In this book we have explored a number of transversal themes that have arisen from a large international research programme looking at mobility transition policies in fourteen countries around the globe as well as within international bodies such as the UN and the EU. In addition to intergovernmental and national policy frameworks we examined local initiatives within each country, including those of non-state actors. Initiatives ranged in scale from the UN’s ‘Avoid, Shift, Improve’ approach to mobility transition down to reward schemes designed to nudge individuals to ‘consume’ different forms of mobility in their everyday life. In between were a familiar array of initiatives that have been taken up worldwide including carbon taxes, BRT systems, cycle sharing schemes and active transport promotion more generally. Throughout, we have been informed by the insights of work within the mobilities turn in the social sciences and humanities (Urry 2000; Sheller and Urry 2006; Adey et al. 2013) that asks us to centre the idea of mobility as a fully social aspect of life that comes complete with its own sets of often contextually dependent politics (Cresswell 2006, 2010; Sheller 2018). Our central contention is that thinking about mobility in this way changes the ways we think about transitions to different mobile futures. In this conclusion, in light of the current Covid-19 crisis, we reflect on mobility transitions in the face of not only another global emergency but how that emergency has illustrated new possibilities of much quicker and sharper transitions than might have previously been imagined. We reiterate the points made in the chapters that precede this, outline some key points that policymakers might operationalize to produce future mobilities that are both low-carbon and socially just, and provide a typology of transition policies that we have encountered.

Covid-19, Low-carbon transitions and mobility justice In the introduction to this book we reflected on the opportunities for transition that have been opened up by the Covid-19 crisis. Suddenly, it was possible to make decisions that were not primarily economic, decisions that would dramatically

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reduce carbon emissions almost overnight. Flights were cancelled, people were instructed to work from home, roads emptied and the air became comparatively clear over the world’s global cities. This did not involve the slow progress of technological innovations from protected niches to the wider world; it involved the determined decisions of governments informed by the guidance of the World Health Organization. Certain forms of mobility had clearly caused a problem, and the problem could be addressed by transforming mobilities – notably the closure or significant reduction of international travel and local ‘lock-down’ restrictions within and between neighbourhoods, towns and cities. A similar logic could be used to address global heating. Certain forms of mobility – those that are fossil fuel dependent – are a major cause of the problem of global heating – a problem that has already killed more people than Covid-19 and will kill many more. As with Covid-19 it could be addressed by the actions of governments determined to limit GHG emissions originating from the ways we move. The difference is that deaths, R rates and extensive media reporting have demonstrated the direct link between mobility and the spread of the virus, which has also depended on culturally embedded ways of understanding mobility as pathological – and to some extent – forms of sino-phobia, but also more broadly the reassertion of nationalism and the protection of national borders which has resulted from other mobile emergencies such as the ‘migrant crisis’ (Heller 2021). Climate change and global heating, on the other hand, are easily bracketed away from simple direct and linear causation from mobility. In our research, we encountered numerous ways in which governments, both national and local, were attempting to change the ways we move. These include the imposition of carbon pricing and taxation, support for vehicle electrification, development of cycle rental schemes and cycle infrastructure, BRT systems, forms of telework and behavioural nudges such as green purchasing points schemes. Rarely were these entirely government implemented. Most often they were enacted by combinations of government, business and social enterprise. Clearly, work is being done to enact mobility transitions but nothing on the scale that we have seen in response to Covid-19. While the headline figures of GHG reduction associated with Covid-19 are impressive, it quickly became clear that the actions that led to them had other, negative consequences. Take teleworking, for instance. In our research we encountered several instances where telework was proposed and, to some degree, implemented as a way of reducing the need to travel to and from work. This was particularly apparent in Christchurch, New Zealand, following the earthquake of 2011. Similarly, many countries around the world have insisted on home working, where possible, during Covid-19. This has certainly been the case in the UK. Newspapers have been awash with tips on working from home and stories about how people either like it or don’t like it and how it might continue once the current crisis is over.1 In the week leading up to 14 June 2020 49 per cent of workers reported working, at least some of the time, from home according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). This is, on the face of it, a staggering change in work habits which could lead to significant drops in GHG emissions if it becomes permanent. As



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with much else, however, the headline figure hides distinct inequalities. Another ONS report looking at the period 28 March 2020 to 26 April notes: During lockdown, those with the lowest household incomes increased their total time in paid work, working a similar amount of time outside of the home as they did in 2014 to 2015; this may indicate that that those in lower income households are in occupations that cannot be undertaken from home. People with the highest household incomes continued to work the same amount on average, as they made a greater switch towards homeworking time. There was a substantial reduction in the amount of time we spent travelling, compared with 2014 to 2015; this was less pronounced for people in households with lower incomes, who saw a smaller increase in time spent on a range of leisure activities when compared with households with higher incomes.2

While it was true that a massive reduction in mobility-related GHG emissions was brought about very quickly through government action, it is also true that such measures have had variable consequences for different groups within the population. In general, richer people are more likely to be able to work at home and may even be saving money by not paying for train fares or petrol during lockdown. You cannot run a hospital and look after sick people from home, neither can you deliver groceries or packages from home. You cannot manufacture much-needed protective equipment or ventilators from home. And even when it is possible to work from home, what home means is very different for poorer people in more crowded housing than it is for richer people with detached homes and gardens. And even within a single household there are different burdens on people with young children who can no longer go to school. This is still particularly true for women. And it is not just wealth or gender that differentiates the effects of these measures. It has become obvious that government action, along with the virus itself, has affected different Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) people in particularly adverse ways. BAME people are more likely to live in poverty, have overcrowded living environments and work in jobs that cannot be done from home (including on the front lines of the health services and service sector jobs). The variable outcomes of anti-Covid-19 measures listed earlier are apparent in the UK, a relatively wealthy, developed country. Such differences become even more magnified when we look elsewhere. In India, for instance, the government announced measures similar to many parts of Europe on 30 March 2020, including a general lockdown and social distancing. ‘Working from home’ and social distancing mean something very different in a country where 80 per cent of workers work in the informal sector and most people live in shared one-room homes. Informal labourers found themselves without work, or any available transport overnight, and many had to walk over a hundred kilometres to their rural homes. Measures designed for the UK or elsewhere were applied to an entirely different context with disastrous consequences. They effectively protected the rich while condemning the poor to more of the same.

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Whom they cannot protect are those who face bigger everyday health threats – hunger, homelessness, the risks of more dangerous diseases. If anything, a lockdown adversely affects the vast majority of people for whom this novel coronavirus is a smaller risk when compared to more serious and immediate issues such as hunger, domestic violence or eviction. And when ‘home’ is a room in a slim with community toilets, or when lockdown refugees are transported in buses or housed in makeshift camps, there is clearly greater crowding than if they were outdoors: it might well be that lockdown then exacerbated the spread of the virus among us.3

Issues such as those that arose in India could be seen elsewhere. Camps for refugees and asylum seekers in places such as Lesbos and elsewhere, for instance, are places where working from home and keeping 2 metres apart make little sense. In Chile the October 2019 protests discussed in Chapter 7 had shown initial hope among citizens that the government could be forced to address mobility justice and other social inequalities. However, with the onset of Covid-19, hope was replaced by fear and uncertainty. People were naturally concerned about catching the virus, but they were also worried about losing their jobs, incomes and status. Less well-off workers were the most affected, faced with the sudden worry of taking home enough cash to ‘pay for food and family upkeep’. People found themselves weighing up the need to go out to work against their fear of leaving the house, and previously routine behaviour became a daily conundrum.4 With daily mobility restricted due to the Covid-19 lockdown, in May 2020, more protests erupted in the economically deprived neighbourhood of El Bosque in Santiago, this time over food shortages. With people out of work, a diminished social safety net and food scarcity at the beginning of the pandemic pushing families and individuals already experiencing poverty into starvation, ongoing tensions quickly arose and the freedom to move about the neighbourhood and the city versus the worry about contracting the virus became a flashpoint for violent police repression of the protests. What these illustrations reveal is that even when a set of actions result in dramatic reductions in GHG emissions from mobility, we may not welcome all the consequences. Stopping moving has revealed disproportionate vulnerabilities and structural forms of injustice. A transition to a low-carbon future needs to be a just transition and that means paying attention to the variable consequences of changes in policy and the actions that follow. This was rarely the case in the various approaches to transition we explored in our research, issues of (in)justice are key both for understanding the embedded politics of mobility as they shape policy agendas and outcomes in different contexts and for assessing the panorama of societal aspirations for mobile futures, be it the techno-hype of the driverless cars or nostalgic dreams of slowness. Mobility transitions should be evaluated as to whether they are ‘just transitions’, especially given that these debates are often missing from the formation of the policies and evaluations or criteria as to their relative success or failure. We draw on the growing body of literature on



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mobility justice (Montegary and White 2015, Sheller 2018), the ethics of mobility (Bergmann and Sager 2008), environmental justice and social exclusion (Mitchell and Dorling 2003; Walker 2012) and transport disadvantage and justice (Lucas 2012; Schwanen et al. 2015). We are specifically adjoining the nascent debate on the intersections of low-carbon transitions, mobility politics and justice, which covers a diverse range of topics such as discussions on the ‘class-based dimension’ of sustainability-as-density approach in Vancouver (Quastel, Moos and Lynch 2012), ‘racialized mobility transitions’ in Philadelphia (Sheller 2015) and the impact that carbon mitigation policies for transport have on equity (Lucas and Pangbourne 2014). Throughout this book we have indicated the asymmetries in access to mobility implicated in current mobility regimes in addition to the real and potential outcomes of policies aimed at reducing GHG emissions. We believe that a mobility approach to transition can help ensure more just mobilities futures. While some transitions enable the imperatives of social justice to piggyback or provide another leg to the social and economic rationale, many transition policies demonstrate inequitable usage by reinforcing already segregated passengers and neighbourhoods along the lines of class and even access to mobility. Perhaps one of the most concrete examples of this is the Transantiago, in Santiago, Chile, a highly contentious policy which evolved as an attempt to reform and expand access to the public bus system in Chile while simultaneously helping to alleviate its notorious air pollution problem. The government sought to take responsibility for a deregulated transit system. Initially designed to run without subsidies, the system was based on private sector funding and operators. The launch was unmitigated chaos, creating vast queues for the buses, four-hour wait times and a malfunctioning electronic ticket system. Disability activists continue to protest the design of the buses and stations (Muñoz and Gschwender 2008). Furthermore, as we already discussed in Chapter 7, the ongoing mobility justice issues that stemmed in part from the failure of Transantiago and privatization of public infrastructures were catalyst for current protests across Chile. Similar tensions surrounding access and ability haunt what is often seen as an effective way of battling climate change, the ‘carbon tax’. Taxing carbon is one of the most successful ways of reducing carbon emissions. It has, for example, been demonstratively successful in British Columbia, Canada and within Norway. It is one of the simplest and most wide ranging of mechanisms to institute at regional, national and international scales. It is also the case, however, that carbon taxes are blunt instruments that are in no way progressive in the ways they allocate costs. As such, these schemes disproportionately affect those least able to adapt – poor people and those living in rural and remote areas. Low-carbon mobility policies for rural and remote areas are not abundant, which is why the Partnership on Sustainable Low Carbon Transport (SLoCaT), one of the key associated bodies of the UN in the area of mobility transitions, is calling attention to rural mobility, arguing that by 2030, 30 per cent of the population worldwide will still live in rural areas. Some of our cases, however, offer another type of discussion on remoteness, low-carbon mobility and justice, for example, the city of Nur-Sultan in Kazakhstan. Nur-Sultan is built as an ‘oasis’ with green

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ambitions using petromoney that is, arguably, unequally distributed throughout the country. Norway, a low-carbon policy leader, and also a petroleum dependent state, has a paradoxical relationship to mobility justice. Oslo is often held up by urban planners as one of the ‘greenest cities’, yet its transportation systems are funded through subsidies from its state-run oil industry. Guilt is exported. Masdar City in the UAE offers another variation of problematic ‘low carbon’ solutions. The city aimed to become the world’s largest 100 per cent zero-carbon city, but it quickly became a city that was too expensive to build and could not keep up the zero-carbon status. In cases ranging from the imposition of carbon taxes, to the design and implementation of public transport, to the building of green mega-projects it is clear that issues of justice need to be consistently connected to mobility as we move towards transition. Taking mobility seriously as a fully social facet of life can help.

Summarizing our arguments In this book we have made the case for thinking more carefully about the ‘mobility’ part of ‘mobility transitions’. Doing so, we have argued, involves thinking about forms of types and patterns of geographical movement (or non-movement), the meanings attached to them and the various practices that are employed and embodied in getting from one place to another. All of this, we have argued, needs to be thought through in relation to power that is both productive of and produced by mobility. In Chapter 2 we considered the idea of transition and the various ways that thinkers have envisioned transitions of all sorts and mobility transitions in particular. These ranged from grand theories of global mobility transitions, such as Zelinsky’s Mobility Transition Hypothesis (Zelinsky 1971), to mid-level, empirical approaches to transition and the MLP approach to socio-technical transitions that has become the dominant way of conceptualizing transitions to low-carbon futures. Finally, we outlined approaches to transition arising from political urgency such as those of the New Economics Foundation and the Transition Town movement. The point of this journey through approaches to transition was to make clear the breadth of factors involved in thinking about the ways mobilities might transition or, indeed, have transitioned. The various forces at play in these various approaches far exceed a focus on changes in technology or even sociotechnical regimes. This leads us to Chapter 3 where we outlined what an approach emerging from mobilities theory might bring to the study of transitions. Work in the mobilities turn centres mobility as both a concept and an object of study in its theorizing. It recognizes that mobility is not simply a by-product of other more important aspects of society. Neither is it an inefficiency in an imperfect system. It is not something to be technocratically managed. Mobility takes material form, is laden with and productive of meaning and is reiteratively practised in everyday life. It is both produced by and productive of systematically asymmetrical power relations. Mobility is central to our existence on earth and



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particularly to our hyper but unevenly connected twenty-first-century existence. It should not be surprising, therefore, that accounts of mobility transition need to take mobility seriously – not just as a problem that needs a technical solution but as a fully rounded dimension of more-than-human life where all forms of mobility exist in relation to both other mobilities and immobility – as reactions to Covid-19 amply demonstrate. In Chapter 4 we turned to one of the main forms of complexity in mobility transitions – the varied and interconnected mechanisms that can lead to transition. Any attempt at policy creation around transition to low-carbon futures exists within a context that includes intergovernmental and international bodies such as the UN or the EU, as well as national and local governments (often acting against each other), non-governmental organizations, bottom-up social movements and entrepreneurial businesses among others. Transition policies can be the result of grassroots actions or top-down government policy and often both. They are almost always informed by international agreements such as the Paris Accords, global initiatives such as the UN’s sustainability goals and the scientific advice of the IPCC. All of these actors play roles in transition mechanisms that variously focus on movements, meanings and practice in interconnected ways. Chapter 5 takes the messiness of transition mechanisms a step further by considering policies as assemblages. Transition policies are always linked to realms and agendas outside of the immediate concern of transitions to low-carbon futures ranging from the general discourse of economic growth to more specific but related concerns around other environmental issues such as air pollution and land scarcity. In addition, and importantly, low-carbon transitions always exist in relation to the need for social justice and ideas around just transitions. Policies themselves are mobile and ideas and practices generated in one place often travel and become part of assemblages elsewhere. While Chapter 3 complicated the notion of mobility transitions emerging through clear and linear mechanisms, the focus on assemblages further complicates the idea of transitions as following a linear path that starts out with a clear intention to reduce GHG emissions. While Chapter 5 focused on the multiplicity of competing interests that coalesce in a policy assemblage, Chapter 6 focuses on what has perhaps been the biggest factor in limiting the success of mobility transition policies – the boundaries set of mainstream, market-based, (neo)liberal logics. From the large-scale development of carbon trading schemes and carbon taxes to the micro-scale attempts to nudge our behaviour as consumers, we have seen how mobility transition policies have been made to look like systems and policies we already recognize from other domains of our everyday life. This brings us back to the reactions to Covid-19 which, often, have shown a different imagination – one where it is possible to think of governments enacting change which does not primarily protect or expand market economies. British prime minister Boris Johnson, on emerging from hospital, felt compelled to say that there was such a thing as society – words which immediately, and presumably intentionally, brought to mind Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal project. This is certainly complicated, as there are clear and increasing elements of neoliberal thinking as the crisis progresses, and we are told (in the

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UK) that the ‘common sense’ of British citizens can replace government-ordered obligations. Nonetheless, we have seen concerted action across the globe that puts government at the heart of addressing a major problem in ways that seemed beyond the imaginable just a few years ago. Similar leaps in imagination are needed for transition policies to be successful. In Chapter 7 we considered one alternative form of logic that might bring about a just, low-carbon transition in mobility – the logic of the commons. While the vast majority of transition policies we encountered were guided by (neo)liberal logics there were occasions where different, and more just, possibilities broke through. While (neo)liberal policies often rested on logics of scarcity and austerity, commoning rests on a different approach that was applied to movements, meanings and practices in often small-scale ways. Commoning approaches reveal that there is already another mobility at work within and alongside the dominant worlds of automobile, fossil fuel–centred mobilities. The logic of commoning is centred on the shared responsibility we have for how mobility operates on society and creates new ways of valuing mobility for its capacity to connect diverse communities. It provides a living alternative to dominant forms of movement, narrative of mobility and mobile practices. It is a logic that has an inbuilt predisposition to take social justice seriously. The research behind this book has largely focused on policy. We set out to assess whether or not policies were successful or not across a range of contexts across the globe. The chapters of this book provide that assessment. What might this mean for the future development of mobility transition policy? What might transition policies that take mobility seriously within a commoning logic look like?

A primer for policy The main source domain for the information in this research has been policy. One possible outcome of our research could be a set of policies to recommend for a transition to low or non-carbon mobilities. Policy design involves ‘the development and implementation of policy strategies that seek to change radically key societal structures’ (Voß, Smith and Grin 2009: 278) such as our current dependence on fossil fuels, particularly oil, for the ways we move. One conclusion we have drawn from our research, however, is that it is unwise or even impossible to proffer what might be called ‘ideal’ transitions policies. All the policies we have looked at have positives and negatives and these, in turn, are geographically variable. They depend on context, which may mean accounting for how a policy fits within a much wider landscape of other policies and programmes – and as we have argued, culturally contextual meanings and practices – that may or may not contradict it. We have, however, distilled several issues and themes policymakers should seek to take account of when thinking about transition policies. First, policymakers need to pay attention to what it is that is transitioning. A mobility transition is not straightforwardly a transport technology transition. A fully realized transition in mobility involves simultaneous transitions in movement,



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meaning and practice in the context of power. Focusing on one of these (usually movement) at the expense of the others is likely to result in full or partial failure. There is a long history of transport planners (and theorists) thinking of the ways we move as a largely technical problem to be solved in a technocratic way. At a macro level the most straightforward approach to reducing carbon emissions from transport is to: (a) reduce or eliminate the need to travel (by using ICT, for instance) and; (b) decrease the length of trips (so public transport becomes a more viable option) that need to be made. This means that social, cultural and political issues are often ignored or sidelined. Mobility is always more than the lines of maps of planners; it is loaded with shared and individual meanings and is productive of and produced within contexts of asymmetrical power relations. We believe that an approach to mobility transitions that is informed by work in the new mobilities paradigm and is sensitive to local and national contexts is most likely to include as many stakeholders as possible and have a greater chance of success. The suggestions that follow are all rooted in this first observation. Second, policymakers need to consider the strategic alignment of transition policies at different scales, although avoid paying lip service to different aims. They should ask in what ways will transition policy be more or less likely to fail given their nesting within often-contradictory scales and times of policymaking? The most significant mismatch of policy at different scales and times of policymaking occurred when medium- to long-term environmental transition concerns were in contradiction to shorter-term economic goals of growth and profitability. There were many attempts to fold mobility transition into a narrative of economic growth within a (neo)liberal economy including carbon tax (Canada), road pricing (Singapore) and the eco-card (South Korea). In the broader context of the EU a policy of free mobility of economic purposes was always working in tension with an expressed desire to transition to a low-carbon future. The moral of the story is that if mobility transition policy is siloed in one domain it is doomed to fail. Transition should be mainstreamed across policy domains. Transition policies should also be evaluated within an array of their neighbouring and even distant policies, and at multiple scales, in order to establish potential discord and possible alignments. Our collation and comparison of transition policies may offer one example of this. Third, good transition policies will include an evaluation of the equitability of transition policies before implementation across categories of social difference (class, age, gender, race and ethnicity) and geography. Who do policies work for? While it is possible to say that carbon tax policies, for instance, are likely to result in reduced carbon emissions, it is also clear that such a policy is socially regressive and likely to disproportionately impact impoverished, marginalized and, particularly, rural communities. Similarly, the promotion of a BRT system such as Transantiago may well reduce carbon emissions in the city but is far from ideal if it is inaccessible to the mobility disabled. More than that, by being inaccessible it actually contributes to the production of disability. One way to think through this issue is to produce transition policies in bundles. A carbon tax, for instance, could be coupled with policies that actively assist the impoverished and marginalized

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populations who disproportionately bear the brunt of the costs. This might include, for instance, providing subsidies aimed at the poor for the purchase of electric vehicles. Such bundling may allow, as we have seen, multiple imperatives and purposes from low-carbon to social justice, to be addressed simultaneously and give deeper purchase to their success and long-term adoption. Fourth, even when policies appear to work, policymakers need to explore and account for the ‘downstream’ consequences of policy decisions, and determine more precise measures for success and failure. This means imagining mobility within a much broader social, cultural, economic, infrastructural, environmental context of jobs and welfare, of health and leisure, of familial relations and social structures, of landscapes, atmospheres and natures – with non-linear relations and unpredictable effects connecting them. While the absolute reduction in carbon emissions is one important measure, it is necessary to consider other possible impacts such as the social ones noted earlier. The widespread adoption of automated electric vehicles, for instance, could result in unsustainable increases in power production. Similarly, the sudden possibility of cars with no inhabitants could increase congestion in an alarming way as cars will be travelling with no driver or passengers. Creating a light rail system with fewer stops in an urban area may result in fewer buses serving the communities along the route where the train does not stop, thus reducing access to essential services for the most transitdependent groups – most often the poor, women, disabled people and people of colour. Fifth, policymakers should avoid overly simplistic, reductive or universalist understandings of mobile bodies and subjects. Transport planning has traditionally assumed a universal human being as the typical mobile subject. Commuters have been imagined as though they have no gender (the ‘neuter commuter’ (Law 1999)), passengers have been entered into flow models as seemingly universal PAX (Cresswell 2006), issues of disability and accessibility have not been included in consideration of transition policies (as in the case of Transantiago in Chile). Little, if any, attention is paid to racially marked bodies (Sheller 2015). In reality, any transition policy should take into account the diversity of human bodies and subjects and their different needs. Sixth, the range of stakeholders in mobility transition policies need to be maximized (Banister 2008). There is a danger of experts and government officials (or corporations) telling citizens how to move, with preordained and universalizing ideas of how we live, and should live, our lives. Even the language that is used can alienate potential allies by creating meanings for mobility that are not aligned with the needs and desires of everyday life (Avelino 2009). Policymakers need to become policy-enablers who encourage and stimulate local organizations, coalitions and individuals in democratized community participation for mobility transition. Rather than being aligned with the dominant narrative of economic growth, mobility needs to become aligned with notions of citizenship and the common good in order to more successfully transition. Seventh, policymakers need to question dominant narratives which ineluctably associate economic growth with growth in mobility. Of all the tensions that lead to



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transition failure that we have identified this is the most frequent. As long as mobility and economic growth are conceptually and culturally linked, then transition policies can never reach their full potential. Mobility transition will inevitably lead to some ‘losers’ who will not benefit economically from such a move. Low-carbon mobility transitions are often added on as afterthoughts to economic purposes. Electric vehicle production in South Africa, for instance, is seen, primarily, as an economic development strategy. Even schemes to change patterns of commuting in Rotterdam were more about the efficient management of the workday and road congestion than they were about reducing carbon emissions.

A typology of transition policies These seven considerations for the construction of mobility transitions policy can be applied across the typology of policies that might help bring about low-carbon mobilities that we have already established. Each of these types represents distinct logics and opportunities and are operationally interlinked. Technological transitions. Much of the work on transition has centred on transitions in technology, most notably in the MLP on transition literature (Geels and Kemp 2012). Even in the media, stories about low-carbon futures tend to centre on the possibilities offered by new technologies such as electric vehicles, hydrogen cells or nuclear fusion. Technological transformation is the easiest kind of transition to imagine as it appears to have such limited impact on the rest of our lives and can be imagined with currently dominant economic and political systems. There are rarely any implied differences in the need for mobility, patterns of mobility or practices of mobility. New technological mobilities appear to slip easily into business as usual models and conform to (neo)liberal expectations of a modern capitalist economy. Despite these criticisms it is clearly the case that technology, and changes in technology, will play a role in transitions to low-carbon futures. Infrastructural transitions. Many of the transition policies we have examined have centred on changes to urban infrastructure rather than technology per se. The most common of these involves the construction of discrete spaces in the city that encourage and enable more environmentally friendly forms of mobility. These include the provision of discrete bike lanes in Brazil and the Netherlands, charging stations for electric vehicles in Portugal and Norway, infrastructure of BRT, but also concession highways in Chile and the provision of workspaces closer to where people live in South Korea and the Netherlands. At a more general level we have seen instances of more significant infrastructural change in a move towards higher density and mixed-use cities in which public transport and home/work arrangements are systematically reimagined. The utopian but exclusive spaces of the United Arab Emirates provide one set of examples of this, the sustainable business park of South Korea another. Such arrangements are also imagined and enacted from the bottom-up in Transition Towns and Slow Cities in Canada, South Korea and elsewhere. These include a wider reimagining of space

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than bicycle or bus lanes and are more holistic in nature. We have seen, however, how existing urban infrastructures that were built for the automobile make such wholesale reimaginings difficult to put into practice while giving infrastructure a sense of obduracy or stubbornness to change. Regulatory and legislative transitions. Some attempts at transition policy are largely top-down attempts at governing and regulating mobility. The most obvious example of this is the carbon tax introduced in British Columbia (and later, Canada as a whole). As with the carbon tax, these efforts are often financial in nature – using systems of penalties and/or rewards to move people towards low-carbon futures. Other forms of regulation and legislation combine with the other types of transition policy discussed here. Norway, for instance, plays at active governmental role in the support of electric vehicles and their infrastructure. Indeed, electric vehicles are often subsidized by governments in the form of direct payments or some form of tax credit. Singapore, as a compact city state, has been able to impose transition policies such as road charging in an authoritarian top-down way. The landscape of regulatory and legislative transitions is also geographically varied. Such policies are more often found at state, city or municipal level than at national level. Often local policies exist in direct contradiction to national policies that are more likely to be focused on economic growth. We saw this, for example, in the case of Vancouver attempting to become the ‘Greenest City’ at the same time as the Harper government was writing climate change out of Federal government policy in Canada. Lifestyle transitions. Transition policies aimed at lifestyle can emerge in both top-down and bottom-up ways. Top-down attempts at lifestyle transition tend to be forms of neoliberal ‘responsibilizing’ transition so that transition is imagined to be the outcome of individual decisions rather than government or corporate action. Examples include the eco-card in South Korea that fits lifestyle choices into a commodity culture of shopping and rewards. The promotion of public transit in Singapore connected the use of the train system to the importance of spending time with your family. Active transportation policies that advocate walking and cycling link non-carbon mobilities to health and well-being discourses. Lifestyle transition policies are particularly prevalent around various attempts to promote car-sharing and flexible working such as in Rotterdam. These schemes, more often than not, attempt to lock such lifestyle choices into a system of profitability alongside a discourse that places the responsibility for transition at the feet of the individual or family. There are, however, some lifestyle transition moves that emerge from the bottom-up and appear to be less directly focused on fitting into a capitalist logic. This includes cycling activists such as those in Brazil (Aldred 2010) and some telework organizations such as Telework New Zealand. Movements such as Transition Towns are more generally critical of dominant neoliberal logics and advocate lifestyle choices as genuine alternatives (Mason and Whitehead 2012). *********



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As we complete these final words, the consequences, and to some extent promise, of the Covid-19 crisis in reducing carbon emissions are unclear. If the severity of the response to the crisis has led to significant short-term reductions in carbon emissions, they also signify – as Monika Büscher has recently argued – the vast magnitude of the task in sustaining these levels of reduction.5 As economies and movement unevenly open up, and some stutter back into lockdown-like restrictions, GHG emissions are creeping back up to pre-Covid levels (Le Quéré et al. 2020). The ability for governments to make hitherto unbelievable decisions of economic self-harm does show some possibility that economic interests can be overridden by the concern for social and environmental well-being. At the same time the Covid response has demonstrated the weaknesses of global coordination and the huge suspicion between states. This has seen major economies and trading blocs sniping at one another, resorting to national interest first over global cooperation and collaboration (whether in the stock piling of therapeutic drugs or spying for competitive advantage). It has not showed the best of us or our ability to act in concert. The recovery plans to come out of the pandemic, most aimed at stimulating economic growth and preserving jobs, may further lean in to highcarbon structures than lean away from them, or even repeat or perpetrate social and mobility injustices in the name of green or low-carbon mobility (Sheller 2020). In Britain, the immediate signs of planning once more appear contradictory. Large investments in city centres are seeing attempts to redistribute the use of public streets for more active travel in the longer term, through widened pavements and the re-designation of roads for cycle lanes.6 In London a £2bn investment has been made into the Streetspace project. Travelling into cities and workplaces is less positive. More people are now driving and considering driving to work as the cocoon-like properties often emphasized about the car as private space, a bubble of protection from pollution or unwanted others, now offers protection from the airborne atmospheres of disease possible within the shared spaces of public transport. But if Covid does not produce the structural answers to lowering carbon emissions through something like a low-carbon mobility transition, perhaps it provides the opening that radical political and policy action is possible which can undermine some of the governing logics that have prevented significant and consistent transition, as we have seen. Moreover, and perhaps just as usefully, it may have provided some kind of heuristics from the different diagnoses of Covid’s social and environmental implications, and the deep-rooted structural inequalities which have produced them. How can we use these productively with mobilities thinking to help us get out of this? Perhaps, this is our chance to begin ‘commoning’ mobility? Around the world bottom-up initiatives on commoning Streetspace are but one example of how the global pandemic makes the existing inequalities and pure absurdities of space distribution in car-centric cities visible. With fewer riding cars, pedestrians are still confined to narrow sidewalks. Green spaces and spaces for play that became even more important during the lockdown are ‘scarce’ in cities with eerily empty

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roads and on-street parking spaces full as ever. In the Netherlands the Cyclists’ Union started an initiative ‘Give the street back!’:7 a petition and a crowdsourced ‘streetbook’ that allows people to list their street as the one where space needs to be redistributed in favour of cycling, walking, playing, dwelling, etc. – ‘more room for people’. Yet, as we discuss in Chapter 7, commoning mobility is much more than a mere redistribution of space; it is also about commoning the meaning, practices and governance of mobility. We are currently in a situation that uniquely affords us to reconsider what mobility means for our communities, now that millions of people do not commute daily and have not commuted daily for a while. It is a moment to ponder: what does it mean to be on the move for different people in their daily lives, what impact it has on them and their communities? What do they miss, if anything, and what they can do without? From a recent research it appears that car drivers miss their commutes the least, while those who cycle and walk miss their commutes the most because of the very experience of it, mobile socialities and everything that being on the move means to them (Rubin et al. 2020). Mobility is not a dead time, as we knew from mobility research all along, yet now millions of people had to consider the meaning of mobility for themselves. The question is how can we build on this momentum of rediscovering what a city is, what a daily rhythm is or can be and how mobility makes our lives worth living or miserable, more connected with each other or more isolated. Just recently the organization Transport for Quality of Life produced a two pager which suggests that only a rights-based and climate emergency underpinned plan for transport policy will be enough, mixing pandemic metaphors with an argument for public transport investment: We are seeing a partial vision of the future we need, to save the climate, to have clean air in our towns and cities, to rid our urban areas of traffic noise, and for everyone to safely and healthily make the trips that keep the economy and society going. How can we grasp that vision and make it permanent, whilst also ensuring that public transport recovers from its spell in CV 19 intensive care to play its essential role in avoiding vehicle use and carbon emissions?8

They create a logic-map to illustrate their briefing that sees carbon budgets driving spending budgets. On the other side a Swiss-style emphasis is given that would apply universal rights to mobility ‘that enables everyone to live well without a car’, which puts the onus on public transport, and although they are not mentioned, presumably other policies too. In some ways, the map echoes some of the principles developed in this book around what a just and in-common mobility transition might be. Their underlying point is to guarantee equity of access and use so that those modes of mobility are actually viable for people to use to live well. While the briefing is transport policy focused, it gestures to a more comprehensive, cross and multi-scalar approach to mobility, akin to the entanglements of mobility justice Mimi Sheller (2018) has explored, and that would attend to the inconsistencies and incompatibilities of policy explored throughout this book. Fulfilling a



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universal right to public transport and the ability to live well without the car, as we have argued, entails much broader policy concerns than that of transport. Sustaining a just mobility transition requires some of the tenets of commoning mobility we have explored and to harness the reservoirs of urgency, political energy and participative principles people are now drawing from to disentangle the emergencies of Covid-19, climate change and neoliberal capitalism.

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NOTES Chapter 1 1 See https​:/​/ec​​.euro​​pa​.eu​​/clim​​a​/pol​​icies​​/tran​​sport​​/a​via​​tion_​​en (accessed 8 August 2019). 2 International Energy Agency. https://www​.iea​.org/. 3 These are different from Wilbur Zelinsky’s well-known hypothesis of the mobility transition – which applied to general changes in population (Zelinsky 1971). 4 See Helen Coffey, ‘Flygskam: What Is the Flight Shaming Environmental Movement that’s Sweeping Europe?’ The Independent, 5 June 2019, as a representative story. https​:/​/ ww​​w​.ind​​epend​​ent​.c​​o​.uk/​​trave​​l​/new​​s​-and​​-advi​​ce​/fl​​ygska​​m​-ant​​i​-fly​​ing​-f​​l ight​​-sham​​ing​s​​weden​​-gret​​a​-tho​​rnber​​g​-env​​ironm​​ent​-a​​i​r​-tr​​avel-​​train​​-brag​​-a894​​5196.​​html (accessed 1 August 2020). 5 The Dutch carrier KLM has asked people to ‘fly responsibly’ – even going so far as asking travellers to consider taking the train instead. See https://flyresponsibly​.klm​ .com​/en​#home (accessed 9 August 2019). 6 See Tim Stanley, ‘Greta Thunberg is selling the rich an eco-lifestyle the rest of us will never afford’, The Telegraph, 19 August 2019, https​:/​/ww​​w​.tel​​egrap​​h​.co.​​uk​/ne​​ws​/20​​19​ /08​​/19​/g​​reta-​​thunb​​erg​-s​​ellin​​g​-ric​​h​-eco​​-life​​sty​le​​-rest​​-us​-w​​ill​-n​​ever/​ (accessed 1 August 2020). 7 Data from government of British Columbia at https​:/​/ww​​w2​.go​​v​.bc.​​ca​/go​​v​/con​​tent/​​ envir​​onmen​​t​/cli​​mate-​​chang​​e​/pla​​nning​​-and-​​​actio​​n​/car​​bon​-t​​ax (accessed 25 July 2019). 8 For a full report, see British Columbia Carbon Tax Review, Sustainable Prosperity, Ottawa, September 2012. https​:/​/in​​stitu​​te​.sm​​artpr​​osper​​ity​.c​​a​/sit​​es​/de​​fault​​/file​​s​/pub​​licat​​ ions/​​files​​/Read​​%20Su​​​bmiss​​ion​%2​​0here​​.pdf (accessed 1 August 2020).

Chapter 2 1 http:​/​/www​​.theg​​uardi​​an​.co​​m​/cit​​ies​/2​​015​/a​​pr​/30​​/have​​-we​-r​​eally​​-re​ac​​hed​-p​​eak​-c​​ar. 2 Supported by the research council funded Demand Centre (Dynamics of Energy, Mobility and Demand). 3 Figures from International Transport Forum http:​/​/www​​.inte​​rnati​​onalt​​ransp​​ortfo​​rum​ .o​​rg​/jt​​rc​/Di​​scuss​​ionPa​​pers/​​​DP201​​309​.p​​df. 4 V. Gordon Childe’s (1937) ‘urban revolution’ hypothesis suggested that urban life was born as a result of an ‘Neolithic revolution’ in Mesopotamia, where the fertility of the land enabled the planting of crops and production of a surplus which allowed people to stop being nomads and settle down in proto-urban settlements. 5 http:​/​/tra​​pese.​​clear​​ercha​​nnel.​​org​/r​​esour​​ces​/r​​ocky-​​road​-​​a5​-we​​b​.pdf​ (accessed 1 August 2020). 6 http:​/​/tra​​pese.​​clear​​ercha​​nnel.​​org​/r​​esour​​ces​/r​​ocky-​​road​-​​a5​-we​​b​.pdf​ p.6 (accessed 1 August 2020).

160 Notes

Chapter 3 1 See Jon Henley, '#stayontheground: Swedes turn to train amid climate 'flight shame', The Guardian, 4 June 2019 https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​/wo​​rld​/2​​019​/j​​un​/04​​/stay​​onthe​​ groun​​d​-swe​​des​-t​​urn​-t​​o​-tra​​ins​-a​​​mid​-c​​limat​​e​-fli​​ght​-s​​hame (accessed 19 December 2019). 2 http://www​.telework​.co​.nz/. 3 http:​/​/www​​.envi​​ronme​​ntall​​eader​​.com/​​2010/​​07​/26​​/carg​​o​-shi​​ps​-ad​​opt​-e​​ven​-s​​lower​​-spee​​​ ds​-to​​-save​​-fuel​/. 4 http:​/​/ec.​​europ​​a​.eu/​​envir​​onmen​​t​/eco​​ap​/ab​​out​-e​​co​-in​​novat​​ion​/p​​olici​​es​-ma​​tt​ers​​/eu​/4​​ 96​_en​​.htm. 5 See https://ocasio​-cortez​.house​.gov​/gnd. 6 See https​:/​/la​​bour.​​org​.u​​k​/man​​ifest​​o​/a​-g​​reen-​​indus​​trial​​-​revo​​lutio​​n/. 7 See https​:/​/ww​​w​.gnd​​foreu​​rope.​​com​/1​​0​-pil​​lars-​​of​-th​​e​-gre​​en​-ne​​w​-d​ea​​l​-for​​-euro​​pe. 8 See http:​/​/www​​.unto​​kenin​​g​.org​​/upda​​tes​/2​​018​/1​​/27​/u​​ntoke​​ning-​​mobil​​ity​-b​​eyond​​-pave​​ me​nt-​​paint​​-and-​​place​ (accessed 28 January 2020). 9 http:​/​/www​​.unto​​kenin​​g​.org​​/upda​​tes​/2​​018​/1​​/27​/u​​ntoke​​ning-​​mobil​​ity​-b​​eyond​​-pave​​me​ nt-​​paint​​-and-​​place​ (accessed 29 January 2020).

Chapter 4 1 UNEP – The Emissions Gap Report 2013, p. xi, http:​/​/www​​.unep​​.org/​​pdf​/U​​NEPEm​​ issio​​nsGap​​Repor​​​t2013​​.pdf (accessed 1 August 2020). 2 https​:/​/ww​​w​.bbc​​.co​.u​​k​/new​​s​/sci​​ence-​​envir​​onme​n​​t​-508​​01493​ (accessed 1 August 2020). 3 The Brundtland Report is the nickname for the ‘Our Common Future’ report of the World Commission on Environment and Development. The report tied together environmental concerns with political–economic ambitions for development (WEDC, 1987). The report is widely known as having laid a pathway to sustainable development principles enshrined in the Rio Declaration and the UN Commission for Sustainable Development. 4 https://brtdata​.org (accessed 20 December 2019). 5 Interview with José Manuel Viegas, president of ITF-OECD (Interviewee 1). 6 A summary factsheet (2011) on the ASI paradigm can be found at Sustainable Urban Transport Project (SUTP) website: http:​/​/www​​.sutp​​.org/​​news-​​archi​​ve​-ma​​inmen​​u​-156​​ /sutp​​-news​​-main​​menu-​​155​/2​​660​-f​​actsh​​eet​-s​​ustai​​nable​​-urba​​n​-tra​​nspor​​t​-avo​​id​-sh​​​ift​-i​​ mprov​​e​-a​-s​​-i​-re​​lease​d (accessed 1 August 2020). 7 Source: interviewee 1, interviewee 9. 8 http:​/​/www​​.un​.o​​rg​/cl​​imate​​chang​​e​/sum​​mit​/w​​p​-con​​tent/​​uploa​​ds​/si​​tes​/2​​/2014​​/​05​/T​​ RANSP​​ORT​-P​​R​.pdf​ (accessed 1 August 2020). 9 http:​/​/unh​​abita​​t​.org​​/acti​​on​-pl​​atfor​​m​-on-​​urban​​-elec​​tric-​​mobil​​ity​-i​​ni​tia​​tive-​​uemi/​. 10 http:​/​/www​​.un​.o​​rg​/cl​​imate​​chang​​e​/sum​​mit​/w​​p​-con​​tent/​​uploa​​ds​/si​​tes​/2​​/2014​​/07​/T​​ RANSP​​OR​T​-A​​ction​​-Plan​​-UIC.​​pdf (accessed 1 August 2020). 11 This is visible, for instance, in the eighth goal of the ‘Millennium Development Goals’, which unfolds into six key targets, four of which are specifically calling for action in developing countries. http:​/​/www​​.un​.o​​rg​/mi​​llenn​​iumgo​​als​/g​​lo​bal​​.shtm​l (accessed 1 August 2020).

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12 See the UNEP mandate (1997). http:​/​/www​​.unep​​.org/​​docum​​ents.​​multi​​lingu​​al​/de​​fault​​ .asp?​​Docum​​entID​​=287&​​Artic​​​leID=​​1728&​​l​=en (accessed 1 August 2020). 13 UNEP Climate Change Programme (2009). http:​/​/www​​.unep​​.org/​​clima​​techa​​nge​/ P​​ortal​​s​/5​/d​​ocume​​​nts​/J​​une​.p​​df (accessed 1 August 2020). 14 http:​/​/www​​.unep​​.org/​​clima​​techa​​nge​/m​​it​iga​​tion/​ (accessed 1 August 2020). 15 https​:/​/ww​​w​.une​​nviro​​nment​​.org/​​explo​​re​-to​​pics/​​​trans​​port (accessed 1 August 2020). 16 UNEP (2013) Emissions Gap Report. http:​/​/www​​.unep​​.org/​​pdf​/U​​NEPEm​​issio​​nsGap​​ Repor​​​t2013​​.pdf (accessed 1 August 2020). 17 The Partnership for Clean Fuels and Vehicles and UNEP (2014). An Overview of the Partnership for Clean Fuels and Vehicles (PCFV). http:​/​/www​​.unep​​.org/​​Trans​​port/​​ New​/P​​CFV​/p​​df​/PC​​FV​-Br​​ochur​​e​-Apr​​il20​1​​4​_com​​bined​​.pdf (accessed 1 August 2020). 18 Todd and Todd (2009) http:​/​/www​​.unep​​.org/​​trans​​port/​​pcfv/​​PDF​/l​​eadph​​aseou​​t​repo​​rt​. pd​f (accessed 1 August 2020) and the website of the initiative http://www​.unep​.org​/ transport​/new​/pcfv/ (accessed 1 August 2020). 19 http://www​.unep​.org​/Transport​/gfei​.asp; for example, GFEI Moving Forward. https​:/​ /ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​t​=398​​&v​=H​V​​DwvG5​​U8Bs (accessed 1 August 2020). See the interactive website ‘GFEI Auto Tool’ that allows to see detailed data related to fuel usage and fuel economy policies per country. http:​/​/www​​.unep​​.org/​​trans​​port/​​gfei/​​au​ tot​​ool/ (accessed 1 August 2020). 20 http:​/​/www​​.unep​​.org/​​trans​​port/​​share​​thero​​ad​/a​b​​out​.a​​sp (accessed 1 August 2020). 21 http:​/​/www​​.unep​​.org/​​trans​​port/​​share​​thero​​ad​/PD​​F​/StR​​_arti​​cle​_U​​rbanW​​​orldD​​ec201​​0​ .pdf​(accessed 1 August 2020). 22 Interview with Rosário Macário, professor at the Instituto Superior Técnico. 26 January 2016. 23 Macário. 24 Macário. 25 Assembleia da República (2015) Lei n.º 52/2015, Diário da República, 1ª serie, 111, p. 3674. Retrieved 1 March 2016, from http:​/​/app​​.parl​​ament​​o​.pt/​​webut​​ils​/d​​ocs​/d​​oc​.pd​​ f​?pat​​h​=614​​85230​​63446​​f764c​​32467​​95a58​​68774​​d546f​​334e7​​a6777​​4c336​​47062​​6e526​​ c6548​​52766​​33139​​68634​​84a76​​646d4​​66b62​​334d7​​64d6a​​41784​​e5339​​4d587​​a5579​​587a4​​ 9774d​​54557​​5​6347​​526d&​​fich=​​L​_52_​​2015.​​pdf​&I​​nline​​=true​ (accessed 1 August 2020). 26 Ibid, p. 3679. 27 Interview with Nunes da Silva, professor at Instituto Superior Técnico. 21 January 2016. 28 Interview with João Vieira, consultant of Transport, Innovation and Systems (TIS). 5 February 2016. 29 Ibid. 30 Interview with Nunes da Silva, professor at Instituto Superior Técnico. 21 January 2016. 31 Interview with João Vieira, consultant of Transport, Innovation and Systems (TIS). 5 February 2016. 32 NordicEV Outlook 2018, Insights from leaders in electric mobility. https​:/​/ww​​w​.nor​​ dicen​​ergy.​​org​/w​​p​-con​​tent/​​uploa​​ds​/20​​18​/05​​/Nord​​icEV​O​​utloo​​k2018​​.pdf (accessed 1 August 2020). 33 Norwegian Ministry of Climate and the Environment (2012). Norwegian Climate Policy. Report No. 21 (2011–2012) to the Storting (white paper). Oslo: Norway. 34 Ibid., p. 4. 35 Ibid., p. 10. 36 Norwegian Ministry of Climate and the Environment (2014). New emission commitment for Norway for 2030 – towards joint fulfilment with the EU. Meld. St. 13 (2014–2015) Report to the Storting (white paper). Oslo: Norway.

162 Notes 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

Ibid. Ibid. Interview Participant 3, Norwegian Society for the Conservation of Nature (2015). https​:/​/ww​​w​.npd​​.no​/e​​n​/fac​​ts​/ne​​ws​/Pr​​oduct​​ion​-f​​i gure​​s​/202​​0​/pro​​ducti​​on​-fi​​​gures​​-janu​​ ary​-2​​020/ (accessed 4 March 2020). https​:/​/ww​​w​.nor​​skpet​​roleu​​m​.no/​​en​/pr​​oduct​​ion​-a​​nd​-ex​​ports​​/expo​​rts​-​o​​f​-oil​​-and-​​gas/;​ https​:/​/sc​​ience​​busin​​ess​.n​​et​/in​​terna​​tiona​​l​-new​​s​/pre​​ssure​​-buil​​ds​-no​​rway-​​chang​​e​-tac​​k​ -an​d​​-cut-​​out​-o​​il​-fa​​ster (accessed 4 March 2020). https​:/​/en​​ergyt​​ransi​​tion.​​org​/2​​018​/1​​0​/nor​​ways-​​clima​​t​e​-hy​​pocri​​sy/ (accessed 4 March 2020). Adomatis 2018. https​:/​/ww​​w​.reu​​ters.​​com​/a​​rticl​​e​/us-​​norwa​​y​-oil​​/norw​​ay​-se​​es​-ne​​ar​ -re​​cord-​​oil​-g​​as​-ou​​tput-​​in​-20​​22​-as​​-inve​​​stmen​​t​-ris​​es​-id​​USKBN​​1F016​C (accessed 4 March 2020). Muttitt et al., 2017. http:​/​/pri​​ceofo​​il​.or​​g​/con​​tent/​​uploa​​ds​/20​​17​/08​​/The-​​Skys-​​Limit​​​ -Norw​​ay​-1.​​pdf (accessed 1 August 2020). http://www​.generationzero​.org/ (accessed 1 August 2020). http://transportblog​.co​.nz/ (accessed 1 August 2020). http://youthdelegation​.org​.nz/ (accessed 1 August 2020). http://www​.generationzero​.org​/about (accessed 1 August 2020). The submission form made by Gen Zero required one simple click http://www​ .generationzero​.org​/skypath, whereas the one made by the council and Skypath team requested a complicated process and extra time to be completed. http://www​.congestionfree​.co​.nz/ (accessed 1 August 2020). Velo-Almaty group member, 3 December 2015. Velo-Almaty group member, 3 December 2015. PR manager, Samruk Kazyna, 23 November 2015. https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​/en​​viron​​ment/​​2019/​​oct​/1​​7​/ext​​incti​​on​-re​​belli​​on​-ac​​tivis​​t​ s​-lo​​ndon-​​under​​groun​d (accessed March 4 2020). Harwood and Hudson (2019). https​:/​/ne​​wint.​​org​/f​​eatur​​es​/20​​19​/12​​/30​/h​​as​-ex​​tinct​​ion​ -r​​ebell​​ion​-g​​​ot​-ri​​ght​-t​​actic​s (accessed 2 April 2020). Ibid. https​:/​/ww​​w​.bbc​​.co​.u​​k​/new​​s​/uk-​​engla​​nd​-lo​​n​don-​​49696​​973 (accessed 2 April 2020). https​:/​/ww​​w​.bbc​​.co​.u​​k​/new​​s​/wor​​ld​-as​​i​a​-51​​69196​​7; https​:/​/ww​​w​.bbc​​.com/​​futur​​e​/art​​ icle/​​20200​​326​-c​​ovid-​​19​-th​​e​-imp​​act​-o​​f​-cor​​onavi​​rus​​-o​​n​-the​​-envi​​ronme​​nt (accessed 2 April 2020). https​:/​/ww​​w​.com​​pas​.o​​x​.ac.​​uk​/20​​20​/ae​​romob​​iliti​​es​-un​​derbe​​lly​-r​​eveal​​ed​-i​n​​-covi​​d​-19-​​ crisi​​s/ (accessed 1 August 2020).

Chapter 5 1 https​:/​/ww​​w​.hca​​mag​.c​​om​/nz​​/news​​/gene​​ral​/c​​hrist​​churc​​h​-qua​​ke​-hi​​ghlig​​hts​-n​​eed​-f​​or​wo​​rkpla​​c​e​-fl​​exibi​​lity/​​14125​​1. 2 Much of the world’s better-off population is currently working from home due to Covid-19 and carbon emissions have declined and air pollution has been reduced – so there is good reason to believe Belvis was at least partly correct although the longterm effects of the Covid-19 shut down are not yet known.

Notes

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3 Interview, Telework New Zealand, 11 March 2015. 4 See an overview of Covid-19-related transport initiatives, including those facilitating low-carbon travel here: https://nacto​.org​/program​/covid19/. 5 ICLEI (2011). Curitiba, Brazil. https​:/​/ec​​omobi​​lity.​​org​/w​​pdm​-p​​ackag​​e​/cur​​itiba​​ -braz​​il​-a-​​model​​-of​-t​​ransi​​t​-ori​​ented​​-pl​an​​ning/​​?wpdm​​dl​=19​​81 (accessed 1 August 2020). 6 http:​/​/art​​icles​​.lati​​mes​.c​​om​/19​​96​-06​​-03​/n​​ews​/m​​n​-114​​​10​_1_​​world​​-city​ (accessed 1 August 2020). 7 http:​/​/www​​.g​-va​​lley.​​kr​/in​​trodu​​ction​​/int_​​su​mma​​ry​.js​p (accessed 15 March 2016). 8 Interview, Seoul Metropolitan Government, 6 October, 2015. 9 Beter Benutten (n.d.) Ambitie en doel Beter Benutten. Retrieved 23 June 2015 from http://www​.beterbenutten​.nl​/overons. 10 Beter Benutten (n.d.) Ambitie en doel Beter Benutten. Retrieved 20 August 2020 from http://www​.beterbenutten​.nl​/overons. 11 Beter Benutten (n.d.) Ambitie en doel Beter Benutten. Retrieved 23 June 2015 from http://www​.beterbenutten​.nl​/overons. 12 See the website www​.beterbenutten​.nl (accessed 1 August 2020). 13 Goudappel Coffeng (2013), Inschatting duurzaamheidseffecten programma Beter Benutten. 14 The notion of a ‘vehicular’ moment is taken from McLennan’s (2004) conceptualization of a ‘vehicular idea’, concepts which help to move certain agendas forward. McLennan (2004). See also Temenos and McCann (2012). 15 Interview, Sean Wheldrake, Bike Share Toronto, 2014. 16 Interview, Sean Wheldrake, Bike Share Toronto, 2014. 17 Interview, Masdar Institute, 13 December 2015. 18 This is a complex relationship, however, and is addressed further in Chapter 6. 19 Interview, 2016. The UAE relies heavily on its foreign workers and provides competitive salary and long-term visas to skilled expats. 20 Interview, Urban Planning Council, 14 December 2015, Abu Dhabi.

Chapter 6 1 See https​:/​/ww​​w​.eea​​.euro​​pa​.eu​​/data​​-and-​​maps/​​indic​​ators​​/tran​​sport​​-emis​​sions​​-of​-g​​ reenh​​ouse-​​gases​​/tran​​sport​​-emis​​sions​​-​of​-g​​reenh​​ouse-​​gases​​-12 (accessed 1 August 2020). 2 See https​:/​/ww​​w​.epa​​.gov/​​ghgem​​issio​​ns​/gl​​obal-​​green​​house​​-gas-​​em​iss​​ions-​​data (accessed 1 August 2020). 3 https​:/​/b8​​f65cb​​373b1​​b7b15​​feb​-c​​70d8e​​ad6ce​​d550b​​4d987​​d7c03​​fcdd1​​d​.ssl​​.cf3.​​rackc​​ dn​.co​​m​/cms​​/repo​​rts​/d​​ocume​​nts​/0​​00​/00​​2​/327​​/orig​​inal/​​Carbo​​n​-Maj​​​ors​-R​​eport​​-2017​​ .pdf?​​14996​​91240​ (accessed 1 August 2020). 4 Interview, KCEN public relations manager, 18 June 2015. 5 http://kcen​.kr​/USR​_main2013​.jsp??​=GREENLIFE​_A​/ABOUT​/about (accessed 1 August 2020). 6 http://www​.ecomoney​.co​.kr/ (accessed 1 August 2020). 7 Statistics on regional differences can also be found from http://www​.kcen​.kr​/USR​ _main2013​.jsp??​=GREENLIFE​_A​/SIGN​/statistic (accessed 1 August 2020). 8 Translated from Dutch. http://www​.filedier​.nl​/over​-filedier/ (accessed 20 August 2016).

164 Notes 9 http://www​.cittaslow​.org (accessed 1 August 2020). 10 The Economist (2014) British Columbia’s Carbon Tax: The Evidence Mounts. 11 British Columbia (2008) Climate Action Plan. http:​/​/www​​.live​​smart​​bc​.ca​​/atta​​chmen​​ts​ /cl​​imate​​actio​​n​_​pla​​n​_web​​.pdf (accessed 2 February 2015). 12 Sustainable Prosperity (2012) British Columbia’s Carbon Tax Shift: The First Four Years. http:​/​/www​​.sust​​ainab​​lepro​​speri​​ty​.ca​​/dl87​​​2​&dis​​play (accessed 30 January 2014). 13 https​:/​/ec​​f​.com​​/site​​s​/ecf​​.com/​​files​​/1411​​25​-Cy​​cling​​-Work​​s​-Job​​s​-and​​-Job-​​Creat​​ion​-i​​n​ -the​​​-Cycl​​ing​-E​​conom​​y​.pdf​ (accessed 14 April 2020). 14 Interview with Sérgio Pinheiro, transport specialist, 20 January 2016. 15 http://www​.urgenda​.nl/ (accessed 1 August 2020). 16 The data relate to the impacts of the change of behaviour by the enrolled participants and are calculated by Urgenda. In 2016 Urgenda used Carbon Manager for this: participants themselves enter the data related to their travel on Low Car Diet website and see how clean, cheap and healthy the chosen practices are. See http://www​ .lowcardiet​.nl/. 17 Interview, Urgenda, 24 July 2015. 18 Land Transportation Authority, www​.l​​ta​.go​​v​.sg/​​conte​​nt​/lt​​aweb/​​en​/ac​​ademi​​es​/lt​​aacad​​ emy​.h​​tml (accessed 2015). 19 Ibid. 20 http:​/​/vel​​o​-cit​​ta​.eu​​/abou​​t​/vel​​ocitt​​a​-o​bj​​ectiv​​es/ (accessed 20 August 2020).

Chapter 7 1 E.g. see the analysis of cycling utopias as potentially reproducing the meanings of mobility central to car-centric societies. Nikolaeva and Nello-Deakin (2019). Popan (2019). 2 This chapter develops an earlier publication: Nikolaeva, Adey, et al. (2019). https:// doi​.org​/10​.1111​/tran​.12287. For a full overview of publications and debates on the subject, see https​:/​/ci​​tiesa​​ndmob​​iliti​​es​.co​​m​/com​​monin​​g​​-mob​​ility​/ 3 TFMM (n.d.) Mobiliteitsprobleem in Nederland. http:​/​/www​​.tfmm​​.nl​/m​​obili​​teits​​ probl​​eem​-i​​n​-ne​d​​erlan​​d/. 4 Trading Economics (n.d.) Road density (km of road per sq. km of land area) https​:/​/tr​​ ading​​econo​​mics.​​com​/c​​ountr​​y​-lis​​t​/roa​​d​-den​​sity-​​km​-of​​-road​​-per-​​sq​-km​​-of​-l​​and​​-a​​rea​ -w​​b​-dat​​a​.htm​​l. 5 Mobilize Brasil (2011), Diagnóstico da mobilidade urbana sustentável em capitais brasileiras. 6 CETSP (2014), Ciclovias em São Paulo. Retrieved 5 August 2015, from http:​/​/www​​ .cets​​p​.com​​.br​/m​​edia/​​31650​​5​/sp%​​20400​​k​m​_v2​​s​.pdf​. 7 Perimeter Bicycling Association of America (2014), Alliance Benchmarking Report. Retrieved 5 August 2015, from http://www​.perimeterbicycling​.com/. 8 Aliança Bike, Bicicleta para Todos, Bike Anjo and UCB (2015), A bicicleta no Brasil. Retrieved 28 July 2015, from http:​/​/www​​.unia​​odeci​​clist​​as​.or​​g​.br/​​bibli​​oteca​​/adqu​​i​ra​-l​​ ivro/​. 9 http://www​.ciclocidade​.org​.br/. 10 Velo-Almaty group member, 3 December 2015. 11 The term is coined by Aradau, Huysmans and Squire (2010) and originally means political mobilization of mobile, usually marginalized groups (e.g. Roma, mobile sex

Notes

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workers) to demand rights and advance causes that no local or national authority raises. 12 Interview, activist, 15 January 2015.

Chapter 8 1 See, for instance, https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​/bu​​sines​​s​/202​​0​/jun​​/18​/u​​k​-wor​​king-​​ from-​​home-​​ons​-c​​o​rona​​virus​​-busi​​nesse​s (accessed 1 August 2020). 2 https​:/​/ww​​w​.ons​​.gov.​​uk​/ec​​onomy​​/nati​​onala​​ccoun​​ts​/sa​​telli​​teacc​​ounts​​/bull​​etins​​/coro​​ navir​​usand​​howpe​​oples​​pentt​​heirt​​imeun​​derre​​stric​​tion​s​​/28ma​​rchto​​26apr​​il202​​0. 3 Krithika Srinivasan, ‘Lockdown protects the well-off, but what about those who face hunger, homelessness or poor health?’ Hindu Times, 18 April 2020, https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​ hindu​​.com/​​socie​​ty​/lo​​ckdow​​n​-pro​​tects​​-the-​​well-​​off​-b​​ut​-wh​​at​-ab​​out​-t​​hose-​​who​-f​​ace​-h​​ unger​​-home​​lessn​​ess​-o​​r​-po​o​​r​-hea​​lth​/a​​rticl​​e3137​​3630.​​ece (accessed 30 June 2020). 4 Oscar Mac-Clur, Emmanuelle Barozete and José Conejeros, ‘Chile during the pandemic: Have the emotions of October subsided?’ Open Democracy, 7 September 2020, https​:/​/ww​​w​.ope​​ndemo​​cracy​​.net/​​en​/de​​mocra​​ciaab​​ierta​​/chil​​e​-pan​​demia​​-have​​ -emot​​ions-​​​octob​​er​-su​​bside​​d/ (accessed 16 September 2020). 5 https​:/​/ww​​w​.lan​​caste​​r​.ac.​​uk​/ce​​more/​​covid​​-19​-o​​ther-​​mobil​​ities​​-a​re-​​impos​​sible​/ (accessed 1 August 2020). 6 https​:/​/ww​​w​.sus​​trans​​.org.​​uk​/sp​​ace​-​t​​o​-mov​​e/ (accessed 1 August 2020). 7 In Dutch ‘Geef de straat terug’. https://actie​.fietsersbond​.nl/ (accessed 31 August 2020). 8 https​:/​/ww​​w​.tra​​nspor​​tforq​​ualit​​yofli​​fe​.co​​m​/u​/f​​i les/​​20071​​8​_The​​%20lo​​ng​-ha​​ul​%20​​respo​​ nse​%2​​0to​%2​​0Covi​​d​%20a​​nd​%20​​the​%2​​0Clim​​ate​%2​​0Emer​​gency​​%20-%​​20a​%2​​0t​ran​​ sport​​%20lo​​gic​%2​​0map_​​v2c​_F​​inal.​​pdf (accessed 1 August 2020).

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INDEX Abu Dhabi  93–4, 97 active transport  28, 36–7 activism  6, 81, 96, 105, 147, 154 agents, mechanism, and structures and  55, 72, 74, 76, 79, 80 commoning mobility transitions and  123, 133–5, 139, 140 Actor Network Theory  22, 25, 26 Adey, P.  164 n.1 advocacy  72, 93 bike  95–6 for climate policy change  100 cycling  132, 135 environmental  70 political  53 Affolderbach, J.  48 agency  47, 56, 59, 61, 81, 105 autonomous sense of  23 intergovernmental  64 of profitability  117 scales of  24 state  116 structure and  25, 26, 83, 98 sustainable mobility transitions and  138 Air Transport Action Group (ATAG)  62 all-at-once transitions  14 ‘All Change’ report  19 Alves, M.  68 Amsterdam (Netherlands)  127, 134 Amsterdam Transport Authority  133 Anable, J.  45 Anderson, B.  82–3 Annecke, E.  50–1, 53, 122 Anthropocene mobilities  4 Antipode (journal)  16 Antwerp  135 Aotearoa, New Zealand  9, 72–3, 78, 81, 99, 103 Aradau, C.  164 n.1 assemblage idea of  11

meaning of  82 policy (see policy assemblages) socio-technical  26 Association of American Geographers  16 Astana. See Nur-Sultan Auckland (New Zealand)  103 Auckland Unitary Plan  73 austere mobilities  127 austerity and scarcity logics  124–9 automobility  1, 4, 5, 11, 164 n.1 agents, mechanisms, and structures and  63, 64, 66, 69–70, 72, 74, 75, 80 approaches to transition and  18–21, 27, 28, 31, 33 commoning mobility transitions and  123–30, 132, 135, 136, 138, 140, 141 just mobility transitions and  150, 154–7 liberal logics and  103, 106–9, 113, 114, 117, 118 mobilities approach and  39–41, 43–5, 49, 51 policy assemblages and  85–7, 89–91, 93, 94, 97 Sheller on  59 Avoid-Shift-Improve (ASI) approach  14, 32, 61–3, 143 summary factsheet  160 n.6 Baker, T.  95 Banister, D.  32, 45 Bauman, Z.  41–2 Beasly, L.  97 Belcher, O.  3 Benjamin, W.  37 Berkhout, F.  23 ‘Beter Benutten’ (‘Optimising Use’) (Netherlands)  78, 89–90, 125 Bike Share Toronto  92–3

Index bike sharing  141 Bissell, D.  45 Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) people  145 Blomley, N.  130 Bogotá (Colombia)  85 Bourdieu, P.  124 Bouzarovski, S.  39 Brazil  66, 78, 84, 102, 125–6, 154 Bristol (UK)  112 Britain  155 British Columbia (Canada)  7, 8, 147 carbon tax in  111, 154 Brundtland Report  57, 160 n.3 Bulgaria  15 Bullard, R. D.  123 Büscher, M.  155 Business Innovation and Skills (BIS)  118 Bus Rapid Transit (BRT)  60, 84–5, 102, 151 Bus Riders Union (Los Angeles)  8, 52, 53, 123 Campaign for Better Transport (CBT)  74 Canada  7–9, 66, 77–8, 88–9, 92–3, 154 Canitez, F.  26 carbon governmentality  109 Carbon Majors Database  103 carbon markets  110 carbon tax/taxing  7–8, 53, 59, 70–1, 110, 111 just mobility transitions and  147, 151–2 carbon trading  69, 110, 112 Chandler, D.  88 Childe, V. G.  159 n.4 Chile  8, 66, 78, 135–40, 146 Chinese mobility transition and power  48, 49 Christchurch, Aotearoa (New Zealand)  81, 144 Ciclocidade  126 cities  38–9. See also individual cities citizen participation  139 Cittaslow  87, 88, 109 ‘City of Almaty Sustainable Transport’, The (UNDP)  75 CleanBC plan (British Columbia)  111

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Climate Action Plan (British Columbia)  111 Coffey, H.  159 n.4 collective actors, within socio-technical regime  47 Commission on Travel Demand  19 CommonBike project  133 commoning, of mobility transitions  121–2, 129–32 contested scarcities and austere mobilities and  124–9 enclosure acts and  130 meaning, movement, and practice and  132–4 new politics of mobility transitions and  132–4 mobilizing mobility  134–5 transformative mobility governance in Santiago  135– 40 politics of mobility and mobility justice and  122–4 common pool resources (CPR)  129, 131 communities of color  51 ‘Congestion Free Network’ (CNF) (New Zealand)  74 Congestion Zone  44 constellations, of mobility  37 Coordinadora No a la Costanera Norte (Coalition against the Costanera Norte) (Coordinadora)  136–9, 137, 138 Countryside and Rights of Way Act (2000) (UK)  130 Covid-19  1–3, 5, 39, 60, 77, 119 just mobility transitions and  149, 155, 157 low-carbon transitions and mobility justice and  143–8 policy assemblages and  81, 89, 92, 99 transition approaches and  14, 22 Cresswell, T.  7, 14, 20, 28, 35–7, 65, 96, 123, 132, 143, 152 crisis temporalities  91–4 Critical Mass  75 ‘Critical quantum’  27 cultural commons  131 cultural niches  40–1 cultural transition  41

186 Index Curitiba (Brazil)  84, 102 cycling  10, 154, 156 active transportation and  36–7, 39, 91 agents, mechanisms, and structures and  63, 66, 73–5 commoning mobility transitions and  123, 125–8, 132–3, 137, 138 fostering community connections through  134–5 liberal logics and  103, 112, 114, 116–17 mobilities approaches and  40, 43, 44 policy assemblages and  84, 90, 93, 95–7 transition approaches and  26, 27, 31 utopias  164 n.1 Cycling Data Commons Lab  133 Cycling Master Plan (Guelph)  95–6 ‘Cycling Works’ report (ECF)  112 ‘Cyclists’ Union (Netherlands)  156 Czech Republic  15 dark futures, of mobility  42 David Suzuki Foundation  111 Davis, K.  16 De Coss-Corzo, A.  88 Dekker, T.  133 DeLanda, M.  83 Deleuze, G.  83 Deleuzian transition  13–14 demographic transition model  16 Denier, Y.  124–5 Denmark  116 deresponsibilization, of state  102 Derickson, K.  89 Doucette, J.  87 Dowling, R.  141 Earth Uprising and US Climate Strike  57 eco-card (South Korea)  108, 113, 154 economic sustainability  42 electric vehicle (EV)  69 Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) (Singapore)  90–1, 125 enclosure acts  130 Energy and Equity (Illich)  27 England, B.  81

entanglements, of transition  55–9 environmental nationalism  59 equity, on global level  122 ethnographic sensibility  95, 96 EU emissions trading scheme (EU ETS)  70 European Central Bank (ECB)  67 ‘European Cyclists’ Federation (ECF)  112 European Single Transport Area  64 European Union (EU)  57, 60, 64–5, 67 Extinction Rebellion  75 Ferguson, J.  42 feudalism to capitalism, transition from  15–16 FIA Foundation for the Automobile and Society (FIA)  63 fietskilometers (cycling kilometres) (FKM)  134 fixities  45, 109, 128, 130 agents, mechanism, and structures and  69, 78, 80 policy assemblages and  83, 89, 90 flexible transport  67 flight shaming  40 movement  5–6 Foucault, M.  102 fourth era of travel hypothesis  19–20, 33 France  20 Frischmann, B. M.  132 G-Car sharing system  86–7 Geels, F.  20, 21, 22, 24, 26, 47–8 Generation Zero (Aotearoa, New Zealand)  72–3, 132, 162 n.49 T Blog and  73–4 German Technical Corporation (GIZ)  61 Germany  20 Ghertner, D. A.  2 Ghosh, B.  24 ‘Give the street back!’ initiative (Netherlands)  156 Global Fuel Economy Initiative (GFEI)  63 global heating  2, 30, 55–6, 60–1, 92, 119, 144 as hyperobject  55

Index Lohmann on  110 Glover, L.  132 grassroots activist networks  79 Great Transition, The document  30–1 Greece  99 green economies  63 Greenest City Action Plan (Vancouver)  88 greenhouse gas (GHG)  1, 56–8, 73, 87, 91, 102–3, 144, 146 Green New Deal  50 Guardian, The (newspaper)  4–5, 19 Guattari, F.  83 Guelph (Canada)  95–6 Guelph Coalition for Active Transportation  95–6 G-Valley (South Korea)  78, 86–7, 117 EV Sharing Master Plan  86 Haarstad, H.  39 habits  44 pluralizing  44–5 practice and  45 as slow-creep transformations  45 Hardin, G.  129 Hardt, M.  16, 131 Harper, S.  42 Heathrow Airport (London)  76–7, 79–80 Higham, J. E.  53, 58 high speed transport system  28 Hobbes, T.  129 Hopkins, D.  26, 53, 58 Hopkins, R.  29 Huber, M.  51 Hudson, M.  76 Huron, A.  140 Huysmans, J.  164 n.1 hyperloop  4–5 Iaione, C.  132 Illich, I.  27, 28, 123 immobilities  7, 16, 41, 149 commoning mobility transitions and  127, 130, 131, 140, 141 India  145, 146 infrastructure  4 agents, mechanisms, and structures and  57, 58, 63, 65, 68, 73–5

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commoning mobility transitions and  121, 127, 128, 130–2, 136, 137, 140, 142 just mobility transitions and  144, 147, 153–4 liberal logics and  107, 112, 116–18 mobilities approach and  38, 39, 45, 50, 51 policy assemblages and  88–90, 93, 96, 99 transition approaches and  14, 21–2, 26 Institute for Transportation Studies at UC Davis  63 Instituto Da Mobilidade e Dos Transportes (Institute of Mobility and Transport) (IMT)  68 intergovernmental institutions  60–2 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)  5, 60, 63, 149 International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO)  62 International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT)  63 International Energy Agency (IEA)  63 International Monetary Fund (IMF)  67 International Transport Forum (ITFOECD)  61, 63 interrupted growth hypothesis  19 intersectional solidarity  139 Japan  20 Jeffrey, A.  130 Johnson, B.  149 judicial activism  80 Juridical Regime of Public Service of Passenger Transport (RJSPTP) (Portugal)  67 justice  50–2 Lawhon and Murphy on  52–4 mobility  48, 50–3, 59, 72, 77, 121–4, 136, 139, 140, 142, 143–8, 156 power and  54 Sheller on  51–3 Untokening Collective and  52–3 just mobility transitions  143 covid-19, low-carbon transitions and  143–8

188 Index just transition, idea of  7, 122 Kahn, S.  76 Kanger, L.  24 Kazakhstan  9, 74, 78, 79 Kemp, R.  21 Kent, J. L.  141 KLM  159 n.5 ‘Korea Climate & Environment Network’ (KCEN)  103–5, 113 Green-Card system of  105, 113 Koster, P.  133 Kuhn, T.  13 Kyoto Protocol  69, 110 Lambeth Council  117 Land Transport Authority (LTA) (Singapore)  91, 102, 107 Academy  116 Lawhon, M.  50, 52 leapfrogging  128 Lefebvre, H.  37 liberalization  15, 33, 68, 127 liberal logics and lifestyle  101–2 measurability and calculability  110– 15 mobile lifestyles and individual primacy and  102–10 mobility as commodity and  115–18 liberal transition forms  49 liberation, as radical form of transition  28 lifestyle  2, 4, 11, 41, 106, 128. See also liberal logics and lifestyle agents, mechanisms, and structures and  73, 74 policy assemblages and  87, 97–8 lifestyle transitions  65, 77, 92, 110, 154 Lin, W.  77 linear transition  13 Local Economic Transfer Schemes (LETS)  128 localization  2, 87 agents, mechanisms, and structures and  75, 78 commoning mobility transitions and  128, 131 liberal logics and  101, 109 mobilities approach and  38, 48 transition approaches and  29, 30

Lohmann, L.  110 ‘Low Carbon Auckland Plan’  103 low-carbon future  9, 32 agents, mechanisms, and structures and  65, 77, 80 commoning mobility transitions and  121, 123, 140 just mobility transitions and  146, 148, 149, 151, 153, 154 liberal logics and  115, 119 mobilities approach and  37, 42 policy assemblages and  91, 99 low-carbon mobilities. See also individual entries Chinese mobility transition and  49 habits and  45 justice and  51 policy assemblages and  81–5, 96 sustainable development and  57 transition policies  79 mobile lifestyle and  106–9 Low Carbon Mobility Transitions (Hopkins and Higham)  53 low-carbon transitions  11. See also lowcarbon mobilities agents, mechanisms, and structures and  61, 69, 71, 79 commoning and  123, 141 just mobility transitions and  147, 149, 150 liberal logics and  105, 112, 119 mobilities approach and  39, 53 policy assemblages and  82, 84–8, 91 Low-Carbon Urban Transport Zone (LUTZ) Pathfinder pods (Milton Keynes)  118 ‘Low Car Diet’ campaign (Urgenda Foundation) (Netherlands)  107, 113–15, 127 website  164 n.16 Maalsen, S.  141 Macário, R.  66 McCann, E.  83, 163 n.14 McFarlane, C.  82–3, 130 McGuirk, P.  95 McLennan, G.  163 n.14 mainstream transition theory  15 Markard, J.  25

Index Martens, K.  124 Marx, K.  15, 129 Masdar City (United Arab Emirates)  93–4, 148 meaning  35, 39–42. See also movement; practice relational  41–2 meso-level, of transitions  78 Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) (Los Angeles)  8 Metz, D.  19, 20, 33 militant particularism  29 Milton Keynes (UK)  118 ‘Milton Keynes a Sustainable Future’ agenda  118 mobile commons. See commoning, of mobility transitions mobilities turn (new mobilities paradigm)  7, 35 mobility  13, 17, 19, 29–30, 33, 149–51. See also individual entries agents, mechanisms, and structures and  55, 56, 60, 72–3, 75–7, 79 commoning  122, 123, 125, 129–35, 141 global social  3 liberal logics and  104–6, 108 meaning-making and  42 policy assemblages and  89, 95, 98 in social landscape  38 mobility, as derived demand  32 mobility futures  37, 115, 121, 123, 139 agents, mechanisms, and structures and  65–6, 77, 80 policy assemblages and  91, 99 mobility justice agents, mechanisms, and structures and  59, 72, 77 commoning mobility transitions and  121–4, 136, 139, 140, 142 just mobility transitions and  143–8, 156 mobility transitions and  48, 50–3 Mobility Justice (Sheller)  124 mobility law, Portuguese  66, 67 mobility transition hypothesis  16–18, 18, 33 phases of  17–18

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mobility transitions  35–7, 55. See also individual entries justice and  50–4 meaning of  39–42 movement and  37–9 power and  47–50 practice and  43–6 monopoly, transport as  28 Morency, C.  32 Mouter, N.  133 movement  17, 37–9, 47, 89, 95, 109. See also mobility by embodied and socially coded beings  39 multi-level perspective (MLP), on transitions  20–4, 33, 36, 49, 122, 153 centred on technology  26 critique of  24 levels of  21–3, 25–6 nested hierarchy  22, 23 power and  47 revised  25 Murphy, J.  50, 52 Murphy, M.  31 negative policy  112 Negri, A.  16, 131 Nello-Deakin, S.  164 n.1 neoliberalism  101, 110, 119, 139 nested hierarchy  22 multiple levels of  23 Netherlands  9, 78, 79, 89, 105–8, 116, 125, 132–4, 156 New Economics Foundation (NEF)  30– 1 niches  21–4, 54 cultural  40–1 social networks in  24 Nikolaeva, A.  164 n.1 non-industrial approach  103 non-state actors and bottom-up movements  72–7 Congestion Free Network (CFN) (Auckland) and  75 Generation Zero and  72–3 T-Blog and  73–4 Velo Almaty group  75

190 Index XR London  76–7 non-transition  14 Norway  5, 9, 53, 59, 66, 78, 147, 148, 154 oil and gas exports in  71 state approaches to mobility in  69– 72 2011–12 White Paper  70 Nur-Sultan (formerly Astana)  75, 147–8 Nyland, B.  71 O’Boyle, T.  130 Office of National Statistics (ONS)  144– 5 Oil Change International  71 Oslo (Norway)  148 Ostrom, E.  129 Paris Accords  149 Park, B. G.  87 participatiemaatschappij (society of participation)  106 participatory democracy  27, 123, 136, 140 ‘participatory value evaluation’ (PVE)  133 Partnership for Clean Fuels and Vehicles (PCFV)  63 Partnership on Sustainable Low Carbon Transport (SLoCaT)  147 Pasadena Blue Line  8 patchwork transitions  85–91, 95, 96 Paterson, M.  109 PAX  39, 152 peak oil  2 post-  3, 4, 29, 30, 109 Personalized Journey Planning Project (Auckland)  103 Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) (UAE)  94 Plyushteva, A.  44–5 policy assemblages  81 actors, subjectivity, and place-making and  94–8 crisis temporalities and  91–4 in crisis time  98–100 low-carbon mobilities  81–5 multiplicity and patchwork transitions and  85–91 policy design  150–3 politics of mobility  19

‘polluter pays’ principle  69 Popan, C. a.  164 n.1 Portugal, state approaches to mobility in  66–9, 112–13 austere mobilities and  127 transition from mobility-as-a-right to mobility-as-a-service  66–7, 69 post-socialist transitions  15 power  5, 8, 10, 12, 16, 77–9, 106. See also meaning-making; movement; practice Chinese mobility transition and  48, 49 commoning mobility transitions and  122–4, 131, 133, 141 Geels on  47–8 Green New Deal and  50 justice and  54 just mobility transitions and  148, 151, 152 meaning and significance of  47 mobilities approach and  35–7, 39–40, 48, 52–4 policy assemblages and  83, 88, 96, 99 transformation of  7, 45 Tyfield on  48 practice  4, 10–12, 131–6. See also meaning-making; movement agents, mechanisms, and structures and  58, 63, 72, 77, 78 commuting, reshaping  46 energy sector and  43 habits and  45 liberal logics and  101–2, 105, 109, 116, 117 mobilities approach and  40, 48, 49 policy assemblages and  81–3, 88, 96, 99 reiteration process and  44 social and  43–4 transition approaches and  26, 29, 33 predict, provide, manage (PPM)  62 Pugh, J.  88 random transition  13 Raven, R.  23–4 ‘Reduce one ton of GHG gases per person’ campaign (South Korea)  109 regulatory and legislative transitions  154

Index reiteration and practice  44 relationality  37, 38 meaning-making and  41–2 relocalization  29–30 representation  9, 22, 37, 41, 49, 58, 66, 79, 105, 112, 123, 134, 153 resiliency  109 retrograde transition  13 Ring-Ring®  134–5 Rocky Road to Real Transition, The document  30 Rose, N.  102 Rotmans, J.  105 Santiago (Chile)  8, 78 transformative mobility governance in  135–40 São Paulo (Brazil)  125–6 scale  2, 3, 11, 12, 49 agents, mechanisms and structures and  54–61, 64, 70, 72, 75, 77, 80 commoning mobility transitions and  122, 127, 128, 130–3 just mobility transitions and  143, 144, 147, 149–51 liberal logics and  101, 110, 112, 113, 117 policy assemblages and  82, 84, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 99–100 transition approaches and  14–15, 17, 22–4, 31, 33 scarcity and austerity logics  124–9 Schot, J.  23, 24 Schultz, C.  48 Schwanen, T.  21, 45 Senegal  99 ‘Share the Road’ campaign  63 Share the Road Coalition  96 Sheller, M.  40–1, 51–3, 59, 72, 77, 123–4, 131, 132, 156 Shove, E.  43 Silva, N.  67, 68 Singapore  9, 10, 66, 72, 78, 79, 90–1, 107, 125 urban development in  115–16, 154 Skypath (Aotearoa, New Zealand)  73, 162 n.49 slow cities. See Cittaslow

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Slow Food movement  109 Smart Work Centre (SWC) programme (South Korea)  69, 92, 107 Smil, V.  111 Social and Ecologically Responsible Geographers research group  16 social construct, mobility as  37 societal modernization  19 socio-technical approaches, to transition  50, 53 socio-technical landscape  22, 26 socio-technical regime  21, 24, 25 collective actors within  47 South Africa  9, 153 South Korea  69, 78, 92, 99, 103–4, 108, 113, 117, 154 Southwark (London)  116–17 Spratt, S.  31 Squire, V.  164 n.1 state actors and top-down approaches to transition  65 Norway and  69–72 Portugal and  66–9, 72 stepped transition  13 strategic niche management  21 Stripple, J.  109 subsidiarity principle  64 Surface Transport Masterplan (STMP) (Abu Dhabi)  97 sustainability  3, 4, 147, 149, 153, 160 n.3 agents, mechanisms, and structures and  57, 60–2, 67, 70, 72, 74, 75 commoning mobility transitions and  121, 122, 127, 129–32, 135, 139–41 environmental  42, 51, 56, 136 liberal logics and  106–8, 113, 114, 118 mobilities approach and  36, 42–3, 47, 48, 53 policy assemblages and  84, 88–9, 93, 96–8 transition approaches and  15, 21, 25, 26, 29–31 sustainable development goals (SDGs)  61, 149 sustainable mobility  4, 14, 32, 51, 62, 90, 117

192 Index practices and  44 transition to  38, 40, 50, 138, 139 Sustainable Urban Transport Project (SUTP)  160 n.6 Swilling, M.  50–1, 53, 122 Taiwan  99 T Blog  73–4 technocratization, of contemporary life  112 technological regime  21 technological transitions  153 technology  26, 52 fix  109 mobility transitions and  36 Telegraph Media Group  114 teleworking  81, 95, 144 Telework New Zealand  81, 95, 127, 154 Temenos, C.  163 n.14 Thatcher, M.  149 third way public-private partnerships (P3)  78 Thunberg, G.  5–6 Toronto (Canada)  92 ‘tragedy of the commons’  141 TranSantiago bus system (Santiago, Chile)  8, 147, 151 transformative mobility governance, in Santiago  135–40 transition  14. See also individual entries bridging and  65 empirical analyses of  19–20 entangled mechanisms of  77–80 grand theories of  15–19 mobile lifestyle and  106 mobility futures and  37, 65–6 models of  13–14 movement  29–30 multi-level perspective (MLP) on  20–6 notion of  13 political analyses of  27–31 sustainable mobility and  32 in time and space  14–15 transition-by-stealth  58 transition policies, typology of  153–4 Transitions (journal)  16 Transition Town Guelph  96

Transition Towns  10, 38, 40, 109 commoning mobility transitions and  127–8, 132 just mobility transitions  148, 153, 154 policy assemblages and  87, 88 transition approaches and  29, 30, 33 transit justice  123 transit-oriented development (TOD)  84 transportation sector  3, 5 Transport for Quality of Life  156 Transport Mobility Management (TMM) (Abu Dhabi)  97 Transport Systems Catapult (TSC) (UK)  118 Trapese Collective  30 Tsing, A.  55 Tyers, R.  6 Tyfield, D.  48, 49 UN Climate Summit  62 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)  63, 69 United Arab Emirates (UAE)  9, 87, 93–4, 97–8 United Nations, mobility within  61 United Nations Climate Talks (2019)  57 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)  63 United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)  56, 62–4 Emissions Gap Report  63 Untokening Collective  52–3 urban activism, for racial justice  123–4 urban revolution hypothesis  159 n.4 Ureta, S. n.  85–6 Urgenda Foundation (Netherlands)  107–8, 113–15, 127, 164 n.16 Urry, J.  28, 42 Vancouver  77–8, 88–9, 102, 147 Vancouver’s Greenest city programme  77–8, 88, 154 Vancouverism  88, 97 Vasudevan, A.  130 vehicle purchase tax  70 vehicle quota system (VQS) (Singapore)  91, 125

Index ‘vehicular idea’  163 n.14 Velo-Almaty group (Kazakhstan)  75 VeloCittà project  117 Venturini, F.  130 Verlinghieri, E.  130 Viegas, J. M.  61 Vieira, J.  67, 68 Villaseñor, A.  57 Waag (Amsterdam)  133 Walker, G.  43 walking  1, 27, 31, 145, 154–6 active transportation and  36–7, 39, 91

agents, mechanism, and structures and  63, 66, 68 commoning mobility transitions and  128, 137 liberal logics and  103, 119 mobilities approach and  40, 43 policy assemblages and  88, 97 Ward, K.  83 Wilson, G. A.  13 World Bank  63, 111 XR London  76–7 Zelinsky, W.  16–17, 20, 33

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