Speaker
Description
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 are promoted as environmentally friendly, social, efficient, healthy, cheap and space saving modes of transport, and shared solutions as flexible and efficient ways of reducing private consumption. The development is however also criticised, and shared schemes prohibited, restricted, downsized or replaced.
The paper focusses on the life course of shared cycle schemes, and asks a) what is “shared” in the systems, and b) how does these types of endings and new beginnings of shared schemes effect the inclusion and exclusion of different practices and social groups in the city? The analysis derives from a case study in the Swedish capital Stockholm, currently lacking a shared procured cycle scheme after the failure to replace an old system with a new, “smart” and more expanded, and electrified system. Through a narrative analysis of interviews and policy documents, and by a theoretical framework inspired by the new mobilities paradigm and mobility justice, the findings are discussed in relation to logics of neoliberal city planning and ideas of the productive travel. How the agency and value of the cycles evolve as the shared scheme is dismantled is also scrutinized.
Biography
Karin Edberg has a PhD in sociology and works at Linköping University, Tema Technology and Social Change. Edberg studies the climate crisis and related transition processes by investigating how and why energy-related everyday practices emerge, change, and are sustained, as well as how places for energy production are understood. Among other things, she explores mobility beyond the car, focusing on how and why mobility patterns are changing (or not changing) and what role municipal planning can play in the transition.
