Social PolisSocial Platform on Cities and Social Cohesion

www.socialpolis.eu

EF4: Mobility Survey Paper

Konrad Miciukiewicz & Geoff Vigar Global Urban Research UnitNewcastle University

Historical overview

Chicago school

Time space analyses

Rise of engineering and economic methods

Social cohesion and transport

Basic needs Universal service provision

vs the entrepreneurial city Privatisation, marketisation

and social inclusion

Toward the splintered city: from individuals, to households, to communities & neighbourhoods

Exclusionary Forms (Church et al 2000)

Physical: barriers in the built environment, permeability Geographic: peripherality often combined with poor

public transport Facilities: dispersal of services Economic: job seeking, education Time: time poverty esp. for carers, transport policy often

reveals an ‘unequal politics of time’- Urry Fear/ security: in the city, on streets and transport

networks Space: deliberate & unintended exclusion of groups

Mobility rich and mobility poor

Hypermobility is taken for granted among high income earners, it is “normalised and unremarkable” (Bondi and Christie 2000: 340)

Contrast to small socio-spatial worlds of low income citizens

Thus, “mobility is rarely recognised as an issue except in its absence” (Bondi and Christie 2000: 340)

Class privilege is thus hidden, with low income households largely voiceless in policy and media debates

While the hypermobile (often unconsciously) maintain or increase the spatio-temporal reach of their daily lives thru calls for new infrastructure and resistance to demand-side measures such as road pricing

EU Research

A vast body of work from various directorates It exhibits a techno-determinism, research is often

technology-led Links to cohesion agendas often implicit Partly as a consequence, but also related to

(understandable) trend, the social has been displaced by the ecological in policy and research

Lots of best practice without much attention to the dynamics of context, transferability etc. (altho see work under FP6 Curacao and Civitas for rare exceptions)

Mobilising social cohesion in transport

Low salience of social issues, and more particularly of methods that give prominence to social issues

The challenge: To develop an alternative To promote it widely and build a platform

Issues: Attention to context Attention to motility: and by implication to suppressed journeys, ‘time-

space constraints and affordances’ Attention to the exclusionary factors present in the environment and

on networks and in wider society Attention to implementation of findings and of future policies

Towards a more progressive transport policy

‘Putting social cohesion back in’: methodologically; politically: Practical extant examples: power of using principles of environmental justice, social

cost auditing, accessibility auditing, assessing who benefits from policies and strategies?

Ontological problems in the discipline, some attempts to over come this e.g. accessibility auditing, but even these are fixes and are not fundamental

A people first, not technology first, approach in research commissioning: there are many practical initiatives, but these are currently disparate- beware the stigmatisation trap

Beyond the field embedding mobility issues into wider governance processes remains problematic in many places e.g. social cost auditing features rarely.

List of proposed topics:

EF 4 Research Agenda

Proposed topics

1. Understanding the role of privatisation in splintering the urban.

2. Political challenges in the implementation of cohesive policies.

3. Transferability of socially cohesive policy solutions across Europe.

4. Relationships between everyday life patterns in various spheres and social cohesion.