Call for contributions to the special issue:

(Dis) embedded informal mobilities

Editors: Lela Rekhviashvili, Wojciech Kębłowski, Claudio Sopranzetti, Tim Schwanen

Informal transport, or the mobility services weakly regulated by the state, ranging from small buses and vans, taxies and station wagons, to rickshaws and motorcycles, is the key enabler of urban mobility in many global regions. Besides a small number of notable publications (e.g., Agbiboa, 2016; Best, 2016; Parsons & Lawreniuk, 2016; Rizzo, 2016; Sopranzetti, 2018), informal mobilities have escaped critical mobilities scholars’ gaze, remained undertheorized and detached from theoretical debates, and been dominated by orthodox—often technocratic and economistic—readings of transport. Much of of the literature on informal transport (Cervero, 2000; Cervero & Golub, 2007; Golub, Balassiano, Araújo, & Ferreira, 2009; Kumar, Singh, Ghate, Pal, & Wilson, 2016) tends to reduce informal transport to an exchange of free and rational individuals, directly characterising informal transport as a perfect example of a self-regulating market at work (Cervero, 2000, p. 3) at largely disregarding its socio-historical situatedness. This is particularly regrettable given that in the past decade digitalization of urban mobility on the one hand, and enhanced attempts at regulation by the state on the other, have shaped informal transport significantly, albeit in different ways in particular geographical contexts (Paget-Seekins, 2015; Rizzo, 2016). The social, environmental and political consequences and contestations of these changes in specific places and are yet to be studied, and theorized.

This special issue aims to move beyond reductionist readings of informal transport. It analyses the socially and culturally embedded character of informal transport, the need for place-dependent understanding of diverse informal transport phenomena, and invites contributions that focus on:

·         Challenges of definition and classification of informal transport
·         Urban mobility governance, and attempts at state regulation and integration into ‘formal’ public transport systems
·         Digitalization, and the changing nature of work and passenger experience

Paper requirements:

The contributions should be about 7,000-8,000 words long and include all essential elements to convey the manuscript, such as: abstract, keywords, introduction, theoretical framework, methods and data, results, conclusions, references, and possibly  tables and figures with captions.

References can be in any style or format as long as the style is consistent, and authors will need to adjust those according to journal requirements at a later stage. Where applicable, author(s) name(s), journal title/book title, chapter title/article title, year of publication, volume number/book chapter and the article number or pagination must be present. 

Important dates:

January 18th: submit the abstract, indicating the commitment to contribute to SI and to attend the authors workshop

February 30th: Submit the full paper 

April 15-17(to be confirmed), 2019: The author’s workshop to be held at Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography.

As guest editors of the special issue we will ensure that all the workshop participants have economic support for travel costs and receive detailed and constructive feedback to prepare their manuscripts for the peer review stage, but cannot guarantee a successful outcome of the peer-review process.

Please send your abstracts to [log in to unmask]

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