FINAL Call for Papers - Organized Session at the AAG Annual Meeting 2017:
From sustainable to critical transport studies: a global perspective

Wojciech Kębłowski
PhD Researcher
Université libre de Bruxelles, Institut de Gestion de l'Environnement et d'Aménagement du Territoire
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Cosmopolis Centre for Urban Research, Department of Geography
email: [log in to unmask]

Kobe Boussauw
Assistant Professor
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Cosmopolis Centre for Urban Research, Department of Geography
email: [log in to unmask]


.: Session outline :.

The transport debate often appears to set aside the issues of uneven distribution of benefits of transport policies and practices, and as a result pays insufficient attention to political-economic dimensions that underpin them. Centered on issues of utility, efficiency and economic growth, the dominant transport narrative continues to advocate ‘rational’ planning and decision-making utilising mathematical models and technical knowledge, and thus ultimately approaches transport and mobility in a manner that can be identified as ‘neoclassical’. Offering an ostensible critique of the economic tenets of the neoclassical approaches, a growing body of literature has framed the discussion about transport as a matter of sustainable development, thus introducing a number of environmental and social issues to the debate (Banister, 2008; Hickman, Hall, & Banister, 2013) yet advancing primarily technological and behavioral innovations.

In our view, the quite fierce debate between the proponents of “neoclassical” and “sustainable” perspectives to a substantial extent functions as masquerade veiling fundamental political-economic choices embedded in transport planning and practice. As a result, little room is left for analysing systemic relations that underpin transport policy and practice. In turn, it has contributed to a largely technical, descriptive and de-politicised character of urban transport studies (Kębłowski et al., 2015).

The pressing need to understand political-economic issues shaping transport has instigated calls (Schwanen, 2016; Shaw and Sidaway, 2011) for the mobilization of more critical approaches that would radically reject the current preoccupation with economic rationales and neo-classical formulas on the one hand, and the continuous infatuation with ‘smart’ or ‘green’ technological innovations and emphasis on individual behaviours on the other (Boussauw and Vanoutrive, 2017). However, critical perspectives on urban transport remain fragmented, their fuzziness and frailty being mirrored by the lack of coherent political agenda and dispersion of circuits of knowledge about transport in actual urban policies. At the same time, a number of ‘critical’ transport initiatives have sprung up in cities across the globe in the last decades, often in relation to activity of urban social movements. These practices claim to offer a more progressive, inclusive and just approach to the way transport and policy infrastructure take shape. However, they are not impervious to the forces of “alter-washing” that attempt to institutionalize, hijack and align them to the neoclassical-sustainable orthodoxy.

Although the outlined triad of neoclassical, sustainable, and critical mobility can be applied to the various, usually successive phases in transport policy thinking in the Global North, deconstructing mobility discourses in emerging economies or (post-)conflict regions is far less straightforward (Pojani and Stead, 2017). On the one hand, transport technicians, urban planners, and policy makers in such regions are usually quite well aware about sustainable, even critical, mobility discourses that exist in developed countries. On the other hand, they are bound to facilitate economic growth that is essential to even basic levels of well-being, and do this by meeting any demand for more personal mobility, often regardless of the impact on the urban (or the global) environment.

To respond to the challenges outlined, this session welcomes studies aspiring to contribute to the critical urban transport agenda, opening the debate to various related aspects of mobility and transport. We look forward to receiving papers offering theoretical frameworks to critically analyse transport policies, infrastructures and systems, or empirical studies looking at specific transport policy development and practices, both in the Global North and the Global South. Abstracts may embrace (without being limited to) the following topics:

- urban transport regimes and regulatory frameworks
- transport (in)justice and (in)equality
- transport poverty
- land-use and core-periphery tensions in transport
- transport and the uneven modalities and impact of climate change
- citizen participation in transport planning
- the right to (im)mobility
- mobility and the right to the city
- critical transport policies and practices


.: Submission procedure :.

Potential session participants should send an abstract of maximum 250 words to Wojciech Kębłowski [log in to unmask] by Friday October 20th. We will get back to you before November 14th. Please note that participants are also expected to register and submit their abstracts through the AAG website themselves by November 17th at latest.


.: References :.

Banister, D. (2008), “The sustainable mobility paradigm”, Transport Policy, Vol. 15 No. 2, pp. 73–80.
Boussauw, K. and Vanoutrive, T. (2017), “Transport policy in Belgium: translating sustainability discourses into unsustainable outcomes”, Transport Policy, Vol. 53, pp. 11–19.
Hickman, R., Hall, P. and Banister, D. (2013), “Planning more for sustainable mobility”, Journal of Transport Geography, Vol. 33, pp. 210–219.
Kębłowski, W., Bassens, D. and Van Criekingen, M. (2015), The Differential Performativity of Academic Knowledges in Urban Transport and Mobility Policy and Practice: A View from Brussels, Working paper, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Cosmopolis.
Pojani, D. and Stead, D. (2017) (eds.), The Urban Transport Crisis in Emerging Economies, Berlin: Springer.
Schwanen, T. (2016), “Geographies of transport I: Reinventing a field?”, Vol. 40 No. 1, pp. 126–137.
Shaw, J. and Sidaway, J.D. (2011), “Making links: On (re)engaging with transport and transport geography”, Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 35 No. 4, pp. 502–520.