Speaker
Description
Introduction and Research Problem
As municipalities struggle to meet national climate goals, urban mobility has become an increasingly critical frontline for sustainable transitions. However, mobility planning remains largely conceptualised, debated, and analysed as a zero-sum allocation of urban space. When policies propose removing parking spaces to establish bicycle lanes, or widening sidewalks at the expense of car traffic, the ensuing political friction is instinctively framed around who gets to control the asphalt.
Planning professionals are well-equipped for this spatial battle; they have GIS mapping tools, zoning regulations, and street-redesign models to physically reorganise the street. Yet progressive mobility plans frequently encounter profound political resistance and civic friction, often resulting in watered-down compromises or outright policy abandonment. This paper argues that the spatial lens, while necessary, is insufficient for understanding this friction. Cities are planned in space but lived in time. The conflicts generated by sustainable mobility policies are, at their core, structural collisions over time (Crang, 2001; Moran, 2013).
Interventions like limiting car parking or slowing down car traffic to prioritise active mobility and traffic safety, actively changes the temporal rhythms of the street. Following Flaherty (2003), this can be understood as planners implicitly acting as macro-level "time workers" engaged in the deliberate manipulation of temporal experience. Empirical material from a mobility-planning process in Odense, Denmark, indicates that planning professionals already possess a coherent and sophisticated temporal vocabulary. A vocabulary capable of articulating an alternative to the dominant discourse of speed and efficiency. Yet this vocabulary rarely translates into institutional legitimacy. It circulates unevenly across governance levels from professional planning practice into municipal politics and public discourse. It is often dismissed as "soft" or anecdotal at the point where decisions are made, and struggles to compete with the harder currencies of cost-benefit calculation and traffic modelling. This produces a structural gap between competing forms of temporal knowledge and data, shaping how urban time is valued and which temporal claims are seen as valid.
This paper investigates that gap. Not a vocabulary gap, but a legitimacy gap.
Drawing on a case study of Odense Municipality's Green Mobility Plan (Grøn mobilitetsplan, 2023) and the constellation of actors involved in shaping it this paper investigates how time, power, and institutional legitimacy interact in municipal planning, examining why visionary policies collapse when their temporal vocabulary has no institutional pathway to travel. Ultimately, it argues that to successfully manage the temporal conflicts inherent in sustainable transitions, the planning profession must understand the structural mechanisms and institutional friction through which temporal rationalities gain or lose cross-level legitimacy; and must work to develop institutional pathways capable of carrying qualitative temporal claims into arenas of political decision making.
Conceptual Framework
To unpack time and the institutional friction between different temporal claims in mobility planning, the paper operationalises a synthesis of the sociology of time and the mobilities paradigm. It treats standardised "Clock Time" not as a neutral or natural given but as a historically produced, institutionally embedded temporal order mechanically diciplining the body (Thompson, 1967; Zerubavel, 1982), contrasted with what Urry (2000) calls "Glacial Time": a slower, cyclical temporality tied to biological rhythms, care, and everyday dwelling. Following Lefebvre (2004), the paper treats the city as a polyrhythmic ensemble in which the mechanical time of infrastructure interacts with the cyclical rhythms of everyday life; when these fall out of sync, the result is what Lefebvre terms arrhythmia. Freudendal-Pedersen's (2022) concept of structural stories: entrenched cultural narratives that legitimise particular mobility regimes, helps identify characteristics of the epistemology and valuation of time.
To operationalise these ideas empirically, the paper develops a four-lens analytical framework:
Epistemology of Time: whether a document or argument treats time as a linear, scarce resource (Clock Time) or a cyclical, embodied rhythm (Glacial Time);
Valuation of Time: whether success is measured and articulated through quantitative efficiency (cost-benefit logics, Value of Travel Time Savings) or qualitative well-being, proximity, and meaning;
Time Work: following Flaherty (2003), it examins the spatial, discursive, or institutional strategies actors use to reprogram or defend the city's temporal rhythm; and
Governance of Time: reconceived here not as a question of formal jurisdiction, but of cross-level legitimacy: which temporal rationalities are recognised as valid political inputs as they move between governance levels, and which are filtered out.
This fourth lens is the paper's central theoretical contribution. It distinguishes formal temporal authority (who legally controls the rhythm of the street) from temporal legitimacy (whether that authority can actually be exercised, because the reasoning behind it is institutionally recognised). Clock Time rationalities, the paper argues, possess cross-level legitimacy because they are already embedded in the "mainframe" of governance and planning prctices through cost-benefit calculations, traffic-flow metrics, and transport modelling, and therefore do not need to argue for their own validity. On the other hand, Glacial Time rationalities, however coherent, largely lack institutional legitimacy.
Methodology
The paper applies the four-lens framework as a coding matrix to a set of empirical documents and qualitative interviews from a mobility-planning process in Odense, Denmark. The corpus includes: a 2023 economic policy analysis published by a market-liberal think tank opposing municipal speed reductions; three independently commissioned planning proposals addressing the same mobility plan; and the tracked-changes version of the final political agreement adopted by Odense City Council, which records the edits and deletions made to the plan between its initial drafting and its political adoption.
Each document is read through the four lens framework, which makes it possible to compare how differently positioned actors frame, value, and act upon time, and to trace which temporal framings survive, which are revised, and which are filtered out as proposals move toward binding policy.
Results
The analysis suggests a consistent pattern. The three planning proposals all take on different strategies of time work. One grounds its argument for the reorganisation of the street hierarchy around children's rhythms, one develops an iterative, experiment-based approach using temporary "Living Lab" interventions to build civic trust before permanent change, and one attempts to reframe travel time discursively as a source of "mobility joy" rather than lost efficiency. All three planning proposals appear to share a Glacial Time epistemology and a qualitative valuation of time. However, none appears to possess strong cross-level institutional legitimacy.
The economic policy analysis, by contrast, operates strictly within a Clock Time epistemology and quantitative valuation, translating reduced speed limits directly into monetary loss. Despite originating from an actor with no formal governance authority, its vocabulary appears to travel easily into municipal political discourse, because it speaks the grammar, ie. cost-benefit calculation and travel-time value, that is already institutionally recognised at multiple governance levels.
Tracing the edits in the final political agreement lends some support to this picture. vocabulary invoking children's rhythms, neighbourhood synchronisation, or mobility joy tend not to survive into the adopted text, while language invoking efficiency and "an everyday that works" is retained. Read through the framework, this pattern looks less like an outright rejection of the planners' arguments than a process of institutional filtration with a structural difficulty translating temporal claims into a governance grammar built around a different temporal paradigm.
Discussion and conclusion
The paper argues that sustainable mobility transitions are not merely technical or infrastructural projects but are also, fundamentally, contests over which temporal knowledge counts as legitimate at which scale of governance. Where transition literature often asks whether incremental change is accumulating into transformation, this paper suggests that the answer depends significantly on whether informal, practice-based temporal reasoning can be translated into forms recognised by higher levels of governance, without being reduced to metrics that strip it of its original meaning.
For planning practice, this points to a need for deliberate institutional mechanisms that allow temporal knowledge to circulate upward without losing legitimacy. For instance, formats for evidence that accommodate qualitative and experiential temporal argument alongside quantitative appraisal. For planning theory, the paper contributes a vocabulary: epistemology of time, valuation of time, time work, and governance of time, for analysing why some transition efforts remain locked at the level of local legitimacy while others succeed in reshaping the institutional logics that govern mobility planning more broadly.
References
Crang, M. (2001). Rhythms of the city: Temporalised space and motion. In J. May & N. Thrift (Eds.), Timespace: Geographies of temporality (pp. 187–207). Routledge.
Flaherty, M. G. (2003). Time work: Customizing temporal experience. Social Psychology Quarterly, 66(1), 17–33.
Freudendal-Pedersen, M. (2022). Making mobilities matter. Routledge.
Lefebvre, H. (2004). Rhythmanalysis: Space, time and everyday life. Continuum.
Moran, C. (2013). Time as a social practice. Time & Society, 24(3), 283–303.
Odense Municipality. (2023). Grøn mobilitetsplan 2023 (med synlige rettelser fra juni 2023).
Thompson, E. P. (1967). Time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism. Past & Present, 38, 56–97.
Urry, J. (2000). Sociology beyond societies: Mobilities for the twenty-first century. Routledge.
Zerubavel, E. (1982). The standardization of time: A sociohistorical perspective. American Journal of Sociology, 88(1), 1–23.