The presentation addresses a current desideratum in critical research on the digital transformation: The foundational infrastructures of digital communication - such as physical cable connections, backbone infrastructures, internet exchange points or content delivery networks - have so far remained largely outside the scope of critical research on digital infrastructures. This is why, for...
In recent years, several fields of humanities and social sciences have responded to a so-called ‘infrastructure turn’. The infrastructure turn is particularly prevalent in fields of urban studies and global development studies that have taken infrastructure seriously and interrogated the enormous significance that they have acquired in the current moment. At one level the infrastructure turn...
In Europe, the priority of motor vehicles on the road was decided in the interwar period. Confined to the sidewalks, the pedestrians became "other road users". Throughout the 20th century, pedestrian leagues sought to defend the safety of pedestrians in a motorized environment. In the context of motorization, the battle of the pedestrian leagues from the 1920s to the 1970s is similar to that...
In this presentation, I have the aim to discuss the effects of the pre-Roman, Roman and post-Roman roads in southern Belgium and northern France on the landscapes.
In southern Belgium and northern France, there are roads named after Queen Brunehilda of Austrasia, who lived in the 6th and 7th centuries. Where does this reference come from? These are roads that predominantly pass through the...
Walking and cycling are seen as “vulnerable modes of transport”. Children in particular are - and must be - seen as vulnerable road users. Because of their own limited competences and their sometimes erratic behavior, “children in traffic” to a large extent means children as road victims. How has this understanding evolved? In the 1960s and 70s there was a lot of discussion about the dangers...
In the 1960s and 1970s, the rapidly growing personal motorisation changed the urban environment in Helsinki, as elsewhere, to an unprecedented degree. Having been considered earlier as a neutral and/or desirably modern phenomenon, growing passenger car traffic was now turned into a topic of political debate and conflict, and also increasingly treated as an urban problem. Two groups that were...
Since the 19th century, the term "infrastructure" has encompassed all the physical supports and technical structures (which are "infra", i.e. "below") underpinning transport. Prior to the emergence of this all-encompassing term in the 19th century, in connection with railway infrastructure policies, transport 'infrastructures' were conceived according to compartmentalised modal logics (roads...
When discussing mobility transition, the term “smart” frequently appears as a focal point for policymakers and practitioners. Nowadays, many mobility transition policies heavily rely on technological interventions within mobility networks and infrastructures, assuming that smart mobility is the sole trajectory of the current mobility transition. However, amidst this plausible narrative,...
Mountain ranges cover most of Southeast Europe. They reach heights of over 2,500 metres and form a rugged relief of jagged rocks, deep gorges and isolated plains. This natural structure has always made transport within the region difficult. Until well into the second half of the 20th, the connection of high mountains, plains and coast — that is local, regional and global exchange — was almost...
The importance of studying daily mobility from a gender perspective has been highlighted for many years. Gendered differences can be explained by a gendered division of labour, making the mobility of domestic work a task attributed to feminine values. In peri-urban areas, the differences in practices and experiences of mobility between women and men can be exacerbated. The literature also...
The transition from fossil fuel-powered to electric mobility is widely discussed as a trajectory towards more sustainable transport infrastructures. Widely ignored in academia, this transition has occurred earlier, faster, and more profoundly in Bangladesh than in Europe or the US but under conditions almost diametrically opposed. Without any national policy to support it, the transition has...
Infrastructures are an important determinant on how the challenges of the climate crisis can be met. Mobilities with their large ecological (and social) impact in particular highly depend on various infrastructures from roads and train tracks to trans-atlantic fibre optic cables - these provide the material arrangements on which the performance of mobility practices depends.
It is clear that...
Motorcycles have emerged as the quintessential mode of transportation in urban Vietnam, offering affordability and maneuverability unmatched by cars or public transit. With over 65 million registered units in 2020, equivalent to two thirds of the population, their omnipresence shapes not only the physical landscape but also the socio-legal fabric of Vietnamese cities. However, the saturation...
In view of the fact that car parks have a useful life of 40 years, many cities are faced with the decision of what the mobility centres of the future will look like in view of the mobility transformation. With the increasing heterogeneity of mobility demand (e.g. multimodality, e-bike boom, "sharing" services), ever shorter innovation cycles in vehicle technology (e.g. electromobility or...
This essay introduces the concept of "techno-cannibalism," a metaphor used to describe the practice of cannibalizing parts from one machine to repair another. It explores the potential of the concept through the examples of trolleybus cannibalization in Bulgaria and other former socialist countries with trolleybus networks. It is based on anecdotes, personal encounters and visual...
Childbirth is regarded as one of the key events which transform mobility in the life course (Lanzendorf, 2003; Müggenburg et al., 2015). Although it tends to increase households’ car use (McCarthy et al., 2017; Oakil et al., 2014; Prillwitz et al., 2006), it is not a universal pattern (Lanzendorf, 2010; McCarthy et al., 2021). People who don’t increase their car use, and especially those who...
The paper presents the methodological approach to map, describe und better understand urban mobility pathways towards sustainability with a focus on urban modal shift. The approach is developed to better understand “why” (success mechanisms) and “how” (dynamics) the three German case study cities Bremen, Karlsruhe and Leipzig have developed into frontrunner cities for sustainable urban...
After almost two decades of the ‘New Mobilities Paradigm’ it seems that a new direction in scholarship is emerging, which considers places as mobile. The focus of this paper, is understanding how individual experience can create meaning for places which are on the move. We are living through a time of mass movement, be it for leisure, work or across borders seeking refuge from war. In all of...
The trolleybuses system in Bishkek was opened in 1951 as a gift for citizens for Independence Day and this year - 19 June 2024 - trolleybus wires were started to dismantle. Citizens started a campaign against this and appealed to the court.
There was a loan from the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development that funded the procurement of almost all trolleybuses and we still pay the...
This presentation examines the history of efforts to enhance passenger experience and comfort on Japan National Railway (JNR) and JR East trains in Tokyo during the second half of the 20th century. Japanese public transport professionals have long distinguished between the “hardware” (i.e., physical transport infrastructure) and “software” (i.e., passenger-staff interactions) aspects of...
The rise of Jakarta's cycling policy can be attributed to the consensus "Jakarta as a Bike Friendly City" initiated by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) Indonesia (ITDP Indonesia, 2019) and the bike boom during the COVID-19 pandemic. Participatory-based consensus influenced stronger political support for the installation of the first pilot bike lanes network that...
The 1990s and early 2000s witnessed a swift rise in automobile ownership across Eastern Europe. The inhabitants of former Soviet states were keen to obtain passenger cars that were now freely available. In Estonia, the number of passenger cars skyrocketed during the early 1990s, doubling from 154 per 1000 inhabitants in 1990 to 307 in 1997. The number of cars continued to rise in the following...
The first comparative study of the 1890s Bicycle Boom in Ukrainian lands, at that point part
of the Habsburg and Romanov Empires, introduces a world of bicycle producers, retailers,
advocators, consumers and riders. It focuses on local agency in adopting Western
technologies. A comparison of bicycle clubs in Ukrainian lands of the two empires illustrates
how distinct imperial ethnic,...
When Japanese forces launched their full-scale invasion of China in 1937, they set in motion a large westward mobilisation. Not only did the Nationalist government move from Nanjing to Chongqing but immense parts of industry, universities, and expert personnel relocated to the Chinese hinterland (Huang 1994, Yan 2018). Historians have retold the subsequent reconstruction of Sichuan and its...
This paper provides a snapshot of my practice-based PhD, in which I am using the road as a leitmotif in a collection of texts about cultural identity, class, and social trauma in post 1980's England.
Since the development of the 18th century British turnpike network, road narratives have provided a means for cultural interrogation, utilising the radically shrunken space-time of speedy travel...
Deleuze and Guattari's "nomadology" has been subject to withering criticism on the grounds that it constitutes a form of primitivism. In this paper, I explore "another" set of nomadologies that arose in postwar Japan, independent of Western critical theory, at a time of infrastructural transformation. Focusing on the late-1960s encounter between Hirosue Tamotsu, a scholar of "itinerancy...
Mobilities and transport research frequently condense both walking and cycling under the label of active travel, that positively associates with a low-carbon transition, a healthy lifestyle and physical exercise. Treated as almost interchangeable alternatives for certain distances and purposes, however, within the context of the automobile system of European cities, they are also positioned as...
The Bike Bus initiative, which involves families cycling together to school along predetermined routes, has gained traction globally to promote active mobility among children and reduce reliance on cars for school commutes. While previous studies have primarily focused on quantitative outcomes like modal change potential, this research explores the Bike Bus's deeper social and cultural...
In 2000, in response to the expanding discourse on climate change, Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer developed the concept of the Anthropocene as signifying a shift from the geographical epoch of the Holocene. Their conceptualisation places the beginning of the new epoch in the late 18th century, when human actions began fundamentally reshaping Earth’s systems. Steffen, Crutzen and...
This paper traces the linkages between a system of employer-sponsored commuting allowances, company and state housing, and the normalisation of growing commuting distances in post-war Japan. Facilitated by a tax exemption system, it became common practice for employers to cover the transport costs of their workers after the Second World War. In addition to regular salaries, employers paid each...
In the last two decades, flying has become relatively widespread yet unequally distributed in Polish society. Passenger numbers rebounded after the COVID slump and will soon reach record highs. At the same time, flying is increasingly problematized due to the carbon emissions it generates. Resolving the tensions between the growth dynamic and the need to reduce emissions requires knowledge...
Poland has one of the highest car ownership rates in Europe, with almost 600 cars per 1,000 inhabitants, a figure that has tripled over the past three decades. In parallel, the accessibility of public transport in post-communist Poland has declined, exacerbated by the financial challenges faced by many Polish transport companies (Olejniczak et al., 2019). As a result, Polish society has become...
This paper discusses the changing role of Chongqing's characteristic means of transport - the river-crossing ropeway, discusses the city's changing positioning of infrastructure under a specific historical background in the development process, and thus considers the feasibility of sustainable development transportation plans.
Chongqing, as a megacity in China, is surrounded by the Yangtze...
Around 1930, Persia was an important nodal point in the growing global network of air routes. Because airplanes could only fly for comparatively short distances, they were not meant to immediately connect two distant cities but made many scheduled intermediary stops. In 1928, Persia became such a stopping place for French, Dutch, and British airlines on their way to their colonial outposts in...
This paper presents a compelling argument for rethinking our approach to urban mobility. By emphasizing the importance of travel experience and aesthetics alongside traditional infrastructure considerations, the paper advocates for a more holistic understanding of sustainable urban mobility plan.
The proposed paradigm shift calls for prioritizing the creation of smart city environments that...
In 2013, the city of Tallinn implemented a fare-free public transport (FFPT) policy for registered city residents. The policy was introduced as part of a local election campaign with the aim of promoting sustainable mobility and improving social inclusion. Initial studies found an increase in transport usage among members of low-income households, young and elderly people. The policy was...
During early 20th century European colonialism in Africa, mining companies were set up as key vehicles for the exploitation and extraction of the interior regions. The colonial powers granted large concessions to these enterprises, giving them control over resources and trade in exchange for investment in infrastructure. Within the scope of these operations, railways played a pivotal role in...
Chongqing, a city built along the mountains, is famous for its unique architectural height differences. Here, trails play an important role in residents' daily travel. In the process of travel, the unique visual changes of trails that locals take for granted give people a sense of beauty, which deeply attracts tourists from other places. This paper attempts to integrate the aesthetic...
Recent scholarship has challenged previous interpretations on Franco-British rivalry and cooperation in the Middle East by way of suggesting notions such as “frenemies”, “competitive collaboration” or inquiring about the shared production of an “imperial cloud”; that is, a sort of material and immaterial reservoir of imperial knowledge that came to be reflected in schemes and practices such as...
For many years now, we have seen a rapid increase in the number of people who fly. Flying can be associated with very different narratives, ranging from social mobility, cultural enrichment and personal development to overconsumption and carelessness in the face of climate change, and very different emotions, from pride and joy to shame and guilt (Mkono, 2020, 2022; Gössling et al., 2020;...
This paper studies the knowledge the new discipline of transport engineering produced for posing and solving “the parking question” in Finland during the 1960s. This involved estimating parking space needs in cities through vehicle observations and applying trend estimates in car ownership. This paper analyses the production of this knowledge using the Critical Theory of Technology by Andrew...
In 2022 the city of Samarkand was the first, and so far, the only one in Uzbekistan to be included into the Green Cities Development program of the EBRD. The first loan-package of 49 million $ is planned for the purchase of 100 battery-busses and for construction of the necessary infrastructure and is framed in terms of reducing the carbon emissions and raising environmental resilience of the...
While there are attempts to claim the public space, modern Indian cities continue to be hostile for women. There are myriad limitations imposed on their access to public space, say in the form of active harassment or lack of sanitary toilets (to name a few). Fear and insecurities persist and their ‘right to loiter’ (Phadke 2007) is severely inhibited and discouraged by patriarchal norms, urban...
Black Americans in the period labelled the First Great Migration (c. 1910--40), when car travel was financially less accessible than later and often fraught with danger for Black motorists, most often established larger-scale imaginations of the nation they were citizens of through long train journeys. Accounts of such mobilities build on the personal narratives of long-distance journeys which...
In recent years, the 15-Minute City idea and its reliance on cycling as standard means of transport has been established as a major pillar of a socially inclusive and healthy transformations towards sustainable urban mobility. Against this backdrop, we elaborate in this paper on questions of equi-ty and justice in the context of low-density settings on the fringes of a medium-sized city (Graz,...
The research studies the railway net as a postcolonial agent in terms of reshaping the Central Asian space. The author questioned whether the railways still have the colonial or imperial agenda, or it was reimagined by the national states after 1991 and now the Central Asian railways are bearers of a new agenda. To analyse the changes in railways as the instrument of shaping the territories,...
In 2018, the city hall of Tbilisi declared that it was working on a sustainable urban mobility plan and reorienting urban mobility policies towards pedestrians and public transport (PT) users. Over the past six years, the city hall has indeed implemented a number of significant changes. It has pursued two pilot projects for the redesign of road infrastructure, widened pedestrian and public...
Through the figure of the stationmaster, this paper explores the complex embodiment of the system within a role/character; and how it helps us think relationally about the co-constitution of human agency and technicity in the production of infrastructure as technosocial worlds, as public good and as sites of care. With an empirical focus on the postcolonial railway in India, the paper combines...
The multiple and intersectional benefits of cycling are well-documented, yet in spatially and socially inequitable regions like South Yorkshire, UK, increasing uptake is about more than overall magnitude. A pursuit of equitable and inclusive cycling requires the recognition of the variability of human experience, which points to a research programme that foregrounds the nuanced, contextual...
The late Ottoman-era Hejaz Railway project, connecting Damascus to Medina, stands as a testament to the power of collective financing with its extensive mobilization fuelled by individual donations. The current work aims to explore this phenomenon and open a historical window into discussions on social/solidarity economy by addressing the challenges of scaling up such efforts. To do so, the...
In the late 2010s, local authorities in Bogota declared their ambition to transform their city into the "world's bicycle capital" (Peñalosa, 2019). The steady increase in the modal share of cycling, currently estimated at approximately 7%, bears witness to this political commitment to a real momentum. However, Bogota remains a highly spatially segregated city (Mayorga Henao, 2023), which...
Historians have focused on the development of road and railway transport infrastructure after Second World War in Newcastle upon Tyne. Names such as T. Dan Smith, Wilfred Burns and Derek Bradshaw have become forever associated with the disastrous plans to make Newcastle into the ‘Brasilia of the North’ by proposing vast urban motorway schemes which would have sliced and diced the urban core of...
All interested participants are invited to join.
In the recent years, the concept of “cycle highways” has been increasingly popular among French cycling activists and experts. First introduced in the 1970s in the Netherlands, cycle highways are a specific kind of cycling infrastructure designed to provide safe and fast cycling trips connecting residential areas to work and study places, especially in the outskirts of cities (Cabral Dias and...
Stephen Greenblatt has elaborated that “a vital global cultural discourse (then) is quite ancient" (6) and not a recent phenomenon. Furthermore, Arjun Appadurai’s theory of global cultural flows proposes the idea of different “scapes”. All cultures and societies manifest these “scapes” and the fluidity of their flow indicates a new face of the world where geographical boundaries becomes...
This research aims to analyse the complex relationship between two means of transport in part of the Po Valley region of northern Italy in the mid-19th century, observing how the new mode of transport, railways, interacted with the centuries-old river and canal navigation. The question it seeks to answer is to identify the role played by railways in the decline of inland waterway transport in...
The narrow-gauge railway Circumetnea is today unique of its kind in Italy, both for its technical railway characteristics and for the specificity of the landscape it crosses (from the sea to the mountain territory of Etna volcano and then back to the sea) as well as for its historical value with its 130 years of existence. The 113km railway line, created for commercial reasons, has influenced...
The Chicago region is the largest inland port or dry port in North America, handling as many containers as Rotterdam in a year. While freight trains in the U.S. remain diesel-powered, there is considerable potential to transition to electric trucks for the many local trips that are part of the inland port. This paper is part of a larger research project that investigates how such a transition...
In 2012 Rezo Gabriadze performed “Ramona”, a new version of his puppet show “The Locomotive”. This is a tragic romantic story about love between to locomotives – Ramona and Ermon. In the performance locomotive Ermon departs and Ramona remains at the station. But in spite of prohibition to leave the station, Ramona agrees to help the circus and not only bring them to the desired place but...
This paper investigates everyday human mobility in Istanbul during the late Ottoman period, a time marked by profound demographic, social, economic and infrastructural transformations. It aims to move beyond simply charting physical movements to explore how daily movements intersected with and shaped by the city's evolving infrastructure, social fabric and power dynamics
The study uses a rich...
The object of this paper is the transformations that occurred in the secondary railways of the Tuscan inland areas in the period from the 1930s to the Second World War. This represents the first period in which we observe not only a strong growth in automobile competition but also an awareness of the 'danger' of this new means of transport for the traffic of railway companies, especially in...
This paper examines the construction and dissemination of representations of Portuguese mainland transportation systems by photography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries before World War I. It shows how photography naturalised mobility-objects (vehicles and infrastructure) and how it created a new mobilityscape associated with abstract concepts, like progress or modernity....
Mobility planning can be seen as one of the key contributing sectors to achieve fair and just transportation in cities around the world. Scholarship on urban sustainability and transition has seen contributions from indigenous perspectives challenging mainstream assumptions in the field. Studies have previously focused on aspects of informality or the political economy of mobility...
In this paper I will analyse the transformation of mobility patterns and translocal practices among the Azerbaijani minority in south-east Georgia next to the border with Azerbaijan and Armenia. Drawing on the field research conducted in 2018-2023, I look at transformation of mobility patterns among the Azerbaijani community and the process of re-thinking about the border after 1991 and the...
During the last few years, an expansion and diversification of personal transport using small, lightweight, and slow electric or muscle powered vehicles is taking place world-wide. The development implies more vehicles of different types (e.g e-scooters, cargobikes and e-bikes), diverse ownership structures and rhythms, as well as increased electrification. Such so called micromobility options...
This paper explores the trope of the road in two contemporary Francophone African literary texts, Marc Alexandre Oho Bambe’s Les Lumières d’Oujda (2020) [The lights of Oujda] and Felwine Sarr’s La Saveur des derniers mètres (2021) [The taste of the last metres]. Both texts revolve around the theme of mobility that also has a role in structuring the narrative (cf. Peterle 2016). The texts...
Within the “variants of change” in the West German contemporary history, the medium sized town Gütersloh in Eastern Westphalia stands for economic success and urban growth. Its economic flagships Miele and Bertelsmann backed a stable development. The city grew in inhabitants and extent because of the influx of workers and due to a municipal district reform at the beginning of the 1970s. This...
The paper adopts a critical Black mobilities paradigm and argues that contemporary Afro-diasporic historiographic metafictional novels, through speculative re-narration of slave history, contest racialised, hegemonic, and gendered mobilities. Their aesthetic manoeuvres enable captive characters and their progeny agency to map alternative routes towards freedom and mobility justice (Sheller)....
Curiously, America’s mid-twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement unfolded concurrently with the construction of its extraordinary interstate highway system. Today, these parallel events represent massive social transformation initiatives that might contradictorily both inspire and disappoint as their real results and destructive consequences are thoroughly enumerated now. At the time, the...
We will be joined by the member of the production team of the film - Boris Missirkov - and will have a discussion after the screening.
Read more about the film and our guest on our website: https://comode.leibniz-ifl-projekte.de/corridor-8-movie-screening/
In my presentation, I would like to focus on the great transformation that began—first in Poland, and later in other socialist countries of Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe—in June 1989. This transformation led to political, economic, social, and infrastructural changes.
Today, we know that new entrepreneurship was accompanied by new poverty, that great opportunities went hand in hand...
