Speaker
Description
‘Commoning mobility’ emerged as a prominent concept in recent scholarship on just mobility transitions. From this perspective, which redefines mobility as a ‘collective good’, mobility is social and shared: mobilities are co-produced in that people plan and perform mobilities together. Given the interdependence and materiality of mobilities, people shape each other’s lives as they move (or remain stationary) at various scales. This emphasis on co-production of mobility and people’s interdependency resonates with the feminist urban scholarship, yet these two bodies of literature have rarely been brought in dialogue. Both strands of literature present an alternative to the dominant, technocratic vision of mobility, which foregrounds direct individual journeys. One facet of mobility planning that remained underexplored in both debates is the role of knowledge, despite growing attention to the issue of epistemic injustice in planning broadly and in planning just mobility transitions, in particular. Drawing on feminist epistemologies, this paper makes an innovative contribution to the field of planning by developing the notion of ‘commoning mobility knowledge’. This approach entails questioning the basic assumptions that condition planning’s intersectional exclusions. It also involves de-centring dominant questions, categories, themes, methods of knowledge production, and ways of using knowledge. For planning practice, commoning mobility knowledge would mean reconstituting mobility planning knowledge from multiple vantage points, acknowledging and mobilising the embodied, situated knowledges of marginalised groups, and centring women and minoritised groups as legitimate knowers. The notion of commoning mobility thus helps conceptualise alternative approaches to mobility knowledges and urban imaginaries that are missing or are marginalised in academia and practice. The paper will offer some concrete examples of advancing scholarship and practice in this direction by focusing on urban care, mobilities of leisure as well as some methodological considerations.
References
knowledge; commoning mobility; feminist planning; care
