Speaker
Description
Recent post-growth scholarship has begun to problematize the strong growth orientation in transport planning, with new investments in transport serving primary as ‘spatial’ or ‘mobility’ fixes, rather than serving other socio-ecological objectives. However, it has done so in ways that reproduce public sector-led and/or individual mobility transformations. It has thereby overlooked a wide range of community-led bottom-up initiatives, limiting the breadth of possible alternative solutions to enable post-growth mobilities. This paper addresses this gap by critically assessing the role of transport cooperatives as ways to ‘common mobilities’, with both cooperatives and the commons/commoning often claimed as strategies particularly suitable to post-growth. In particular, it builds on interview data and participant observation to examine two railway cooperatives, Railcoop in France and Go-op in the UK. This paper analyses their potential for post-growth mobilities by drawing together commoning scholarship with a nascent body of post-growth transport and mobilities literature, assessing commoning dimensions around access, use, benefit, care and responsibility along with the external risk to be ‘enclosed’ as further ‘mobility fixes’ fuelling economic growth. It foregrounds the importance different transport modes’ material specificities (here: trains and train tracks) in enabling and/or limiting the potential for post-growth mobility commons by shaping (a) affordability, rendering cooperatives more vulnerable to outside pressures, limiting access, uses and benefits (b) the dominance of national governance regimes of different transport modes, limiting autonomous decision-making within cooperatives and (c) the degree of expertise necessary to participate in decision-making, rendering them vulnerable to unequal (care) responsibilities.
| Keywords | commoning; cooperative; post-growth; materiality; expertise |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
