Speaker
Description
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 transport spaces, removed underground passages, installed zebra and traffic lines, renewed the municipal bus fleet and the marshrutka/mini bus fleet, effectively returning the mini bus sector from private to public hands, and developed the plan for the restructuring of public transport routes. This radical shift from almost three decades of private car-centred mobility policy to what appeared to be a socially and environmentally responsible mobility policy represented a major shift in urban planning, which had been dominated by exclusively neo-liberal approaches, consistently privileging private-led development over regulation, planning or state responsibility of any kind.
In this article, I draw on the analysis of in-depth qualitative interviews with Tbilisi's urban planners, urban and transport scholars, transport practitioners and activists, as well as public speeches and media articles, to take stock of Tbilisi's public transport reform. I suggest that on the one hand the reform should be analysed in the light of the coloniality of infrastructures, illustrating how public transport modernisation efforts are colonial and dependent on external expertise and capital. On the other hand, I illustrate that despite coloniality, the reform has had significant consequences towards more spatial justice in the city. Although the green or decarbonisation ambitions of the reform have been significantly watered down in the face of continued car dependency in Tbilisi, the reform has led to significant improvements for transport dependent urban dwellers living on the periphery of the city.
Biography
Lela Rekhviashvili is a researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, specialising in political economy and regional geography, with a regional focus on post-socialist Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Broadly speaking, she is interested in transformations of capitalism and its contestation, especially in peripheral economies. Her research focuses on contestation over infrastructure-led development and the role of infrastructure in imagining and (re)claiming socialist and capitalist modernities. She has also published on informal economic practices, urban transport and mobility, marketization and social embeddedness, contentious action and the politics of public space.
