Speaker
Description
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 infrastructure (under)investment in the post-communist East. However, research on mobility from just transition perspective from this specific geographic context are still lacking.
In this intervention, I examine the dynamics of urban governance in the context of recent mobility policy changes in Tbilisi, Georgia through the lens of just sustainability transitions. Drawing upon the concepts of climate justice (recognition, procedures, and rights) (Bulkeley et al., 2014) and dilemmas (institutional and spatial) (Chu et al., 2018) I attempt to uncover to what extent these changes provide conditions for a just urban transition. How does this transformation contribute to working towards socio-spatial justice in Tbilisi? Under what conditions does it enable fair participation, if any, at all? By exploring the spatio-temporal patterns of urban growth, accessibility to public transport network and policy documents since the start of the reform in 2018 up to the present day, I highlight the conflicting nature of current urban governance and mobility planning practices.
Against the backdrop of the neoliberal, post-communist transformation, this change gives the impression of a welfare project with a flavour of just urban transition. Indeed, the city has made significant progress towards more equitable, and sustainable future of urban mobility. However, I argue that still largely prevalent growth-oriented, speculative planning practices challenge the core ideas of such transition. Consequently, I problematize the technocratic, de-politicised nature of the reform as it may be at the heart of the growing public discontent. This, in turn, could have a delegitimizing power on the policy itself, and undermine the largely beneficial paradigm shift in urban mobility beyond urban and national scales. In this manner, the research contributes to ongoing discussions on just urban transitions from the perspectives of local lived geographies of the Global East.
Biography
I am a first-year PhD student in Technology and Social Change at the department of Thematic Studies at Linköping University (Sweden). My professional background lies at the intersection of critical urban geography, infrastructure studies and planning theory and practice. My research interests oscillate between power and knowledge production and transfer in urban mobility, everyday lived experiences of infrastructures, fluidities/multiplicities of technological artefacts, micromobility and just urban transitions to name a few. I keep an open mind about applying a variety of methods, from observations and immersed experience to hardcore GIS and spatial modelling.
