2024 T2M Annual Conference | Mobilities and Infrastructures: Transitions and Transformations

23 Sept 2024, 08:00 → 26 Sept 2024, 22:00 Europe/Berlin

Leipzig, Germany

The 2024 annual conference of the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility (T2M), will focus on transitions and transformations of mobilities and infrastructures.

The registration for the audience is open until 20 September. We are excited to see you in Leipzig!

If you have any questions, please contact the local organising team via t2m@leibniz-ifl.de.

Final_Programme_t2m-1.pdf

Monday 23 September

12:30 → 14:30 Registration

Speakers: Bohdan Novoshytskyi (Leibniz IfL), Stella Köhler (Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography / CoMoDe)

13:00 → 14:30 Executive committee meeting - EC members only!

For executive committee members only.

Speaker: Carlos Lopez Galviz (Lancaster University)

14:30 → 15:00 Welcome and opening

Speakers: Carlos Lopez Galviz (Lancaster University), Lyubomir Pozharliev (Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography)

15:00 → 16:30 Infrastructural Time and Transformations of Mobility Regimes

Convener: Cotten Seiler (Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies, Dickinson College)

15:00 Detour ahead? Infrastructure turn and Transport and Mobility History since the Mobilities turn

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 has been the motivation for an examination of the politics, practices, and discourses that underly the current infrastructure push. Secondly, but more importantly, the infrastructure turn has formed the basis for grasping the significance of infrastructures within a changed ontology. At the heart of this shift is a relational ontology that incorporates the materiality of infrastructures (technologies, artifacts, and fluids) as participants in the constitution of durable social realities. Thus, for instance, as Steven Graham and Simon Marvin have shown in their influential book Splintering Urbanism, processes of globalization cannot be apprehended without first understanding its basis in particular fragmentary urban infrastructural configurations of linkages and disconnections. Adopting an infrastructural ontology in inquiry reveals facets that are otherwise not attended to – embeddedness, invisibilization and taken for grantedness, and visibilization during breakdowns. History as a discipline, with the exception of maybe urban environmental history has been largely immune to the attractions of this infrastructure turn. In this exploratory paper, I seek to consider how infrastructures have made their presence in transport and mobility histories. I then consider whether facets of the infrastructure turn offer any purchase in the field especially since the mobilities turn.

Speaker: Govind Gopakumar (Concordia University)

15:15 Queen Brunehilda's roads: transitions and transformations

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 landscape in a straight line. The Romans had built a system of roads in these areas, rectilinear and paved, partly based on older, pre-Roman Celtic roads. When, after the departure of the Romans in the 4th and 5th centuries, the roads partially fell into disuse, they turned into rectilinear cart tracks and as such formed lines in the landscape. Because people in the early Middle Ages had forgotten that they were built by the Romans, they attributed them, among others, to Queen Brunehilda. It is possible that she had parts of these roads restored; however, many 'Chaussées Brunehauts' are in areas where she was not queen.
One of the researched main roads bearing the name of Queen Brunehilda is the Bavay-Tongeren-Cologne road, known today as Via Belgica. It was the main east-west link in northern Gaul, connecting the port of Boulogne with Cologne. Villages, large farms, inns, baths and burial monuments, as well as later fortifications, appeared along this road. As the road gradually changed, so did the landscape. In the 5th century, when the Franks expanded their territory to the south, they kept a large part of this road as their southern border for a while. This created the language border that cuts across Belgium, as the area north of the road became Frankish, while the area south of it remained Roman. Thus, the road transformed from a connection between towns and territories into a dividing line between two languages, a dichotomy that has continued in today's Flemish and French.
These were the transformations that the construction of the road brought about in the landscape: from a pre-Roman cart track to a road with settlements and eventually a division between two languages.

Speaker: Cornelis Richard van Tilburg (Dr.)

15:30 Thinking about transport infrastructure in the 18th century France: institutional and financial issues

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 and bridges, navigable rivers, canals). The aim of this paper is to understand how the ambitious infrastructure policy driven by the French monarchy in the 18th century and its funding constraints contributed to the emergence of the notion of infrastructure, even before the term became established in language in the following century.
The extension of powers to the Ponts et Chaussées department was an important milestone in the formalisation of the concept of infrastructure. In addition to the bridges and roads that traditionally formed the core of its activities, in the second half of the 18th century this department gradually took on responsibility for the development of certain seaports and waterways. It was at the end of the 18th century that the term "inland navigation" was introduced, bringing together canals and navigable rivers in an integrated system. The extension of the prerogatives of the Ponts-et-Chaussées administration marked a significant shift in the objectification of the concept of infrastructure, at the same time as defining a fundamental area of State intervention and clarifying the legal status of major communication routes. The simple fact of grouping them together under a single competent authority enabled engineers to think globally about their functions and their relationships. In this way, the State promoted a logic of interconnection between these different elements in a communications network.
Depending on the mode of transport, however, the infrastructure has specific technical and functional characteristics. As the communications network becomes more complex, engineers are thinking about their specific timeframes, in terms of both construction times and maintenance management to ensure their longevity. In principle, the scale of the investment and the expected lifespan of the infrastructure could have justified borrowing, which would have allowed the costs to be shared between current users and those of future generations.
While infrastructure is largely considered from a technical point of view, it is also considered from the point of view of its political, economic and social uses. Communication routes are no longer seen simply as structuring elements of political control and military systems, but also as essential market infrastructures. These functional changes are accompanied by a reflection on the ways in which infrastructure is financed, by taxpayers or by users.

Speaker: Anne CONCHON (Université Paris 1)

15:45 On Donkey Trails into the Modern Age: Transport, Transformation and Living Technologies in Southeast Europe after 1945

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 entirely dependent on muscle power. Donkeys and mules in particular carried people, goods, news and ideas to and from Southeast Europe. It was only the diesel engine and the intensified road development with lorry traffic that very slowly put an end to the transport of loads on the backs of draft animals after the Second World War.
The importance of donkeys and mules for the reconstruction of agriculture, transportation and mobility in the Balkans was also recognized by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). From June 1945 to mid-1947, many thousands of animals were shipped from overseas to Europe and distributed to local farmers and businesses. However, the unfamiliar mustang mares and mules posed challenges for the local inhabitants in terms of handling and use.
Based on archival records, memoirs and visual material, I will focus on the transportation and distribution of donkeys and mules to Yugoslavia and Greece. Drawing on concepts of different temporalities of technology (H. Weber 2019), I conceive of donkeys and mules as a key technology in transportation and mobility in the Balkans. In doing so, I aim to provide a new perspective away from the overvaluation of machine work, large-scale infrastructure and “modern” innovations towards the persistence and polychrony of animal labour as living technology in times of transformation.

Speaker: Ruža Fotiadis (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

15:00 → 16:30 Smart Mobility and Digital Infrastructures

Convener: Karol Kurnicki (Leibniz-IfL)

15:00 Data Mobilities and the Material Geographies of Internet Infrastructures

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 example, anthropologist Corinne Cath recently demanded: "Internet infrastructure must be made visible as a force of political power, as it is transforming the social world, from the bottom up" (2023). Also in geographical research, there are growing calls for more research into the material dimension of data and data flows. Using two research vignettes on Internet interconnection infrastructures in the Mediterranean region and on data centres in the Philippines, we show how postcolonial dependencies are reproduced and transformt in current digital constellations. Building on this, we discuss questions of the resilience of digital infrastructures and the digital sovereignty of North African and Filippino (tech) companies, internet users and state actors.

Speaker: Finn Dammann (Institut of Geography, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg)

15:15 Material heritage and digital reality: data-managing the past and the sense of history

This theoretical contribution uses the concept of heritage to investigate possible cultural trajectories resulting from the convergence of two distinct but interconnected phenomena: on the one hand the establishment of a virtual dimension of social life, deeply interwoven with its physical counterpart; and the growing importance of the past as a cultural resource that can be consumed, commodified, or more broadly mobilized in identity alignements and place-making processes. Both dynamics seem to question the traditional sense of history, additive and progressive. According to Harvey (2008: 21) heritage is a discursive process that “overturns the traditional historical concern for imposing a supposedly objective chronology onto a linear past receding behind us, by foregrounding the importance of both contemporary context, and of concern for the future” (Harvey: 2008, 21). At the same time, the digitization of the socio-cultural infrastructure of contemporary life makes available much more information than those that traditional knowledge systems can manage. Within digital humanitites the treatment of digital cultural resources shifts the emphasis from their accumulation, to their rendition, retrievability and interoperability (Münster et al. 2016; IIIF Standard). The presentation aims to investigate heritage as an interface between physical and virtual reality, considered under the aspect of two respective constraints: on one hand the "body friction" of the material world, on the other hand, the cycle of continuous obsolescence that characterizes the life of digital cultural resources, which requires an ongoing mobilization of material energies in order to assure stability over time. Questions are raised about the reflections that debates on digital cultural resources can have on the perception of the past and on material heritage. In its discursive and processual dimension, heritage is also a space of representation and pertains to the imaginative dimension of the social production of space.

Speaker: Elena Tardivo

15:30 Understanding Marginalized Perspectives on Smart Mobility Transition in Hong Kong

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, researchers criticized the concept that mobility justice often remains neglected. While there is optimism surrounding smart mobility as a solution for achieving sustainability and addressing social exclusion, the current implementation seems to exacerbate social disparities, primarily due to the widening digital divide, which also magnifies the existing mobility challenges such as mobility poverty and transport inequity. Focusing on the contemporary era in East Asia, this study examines the smart mobility transition in Hong Kong as a case study. The data from a territory-wide survey conducted in 2023 is analyzed to understand the perspectives of preconceived marginalized citizens – namely older citizens, citizens with lower education levels, and citizens with lower incomes – towards the smart mobility transition. The findings reveal significant differences in how preconceived marginalized citizens perceive smart elements in their daily commutes, particularly concerning smartphone usage for route planning, data sharing related to digital mobility services, and the factors they prioritize when considering the usage of specific transportation modes. The results offer exploratory insights for decision-makers on implementing smart mobility initiatives that truly benefit marginalized citizens. Moreover, setting this study in Hong Kong can serve as a lens to illuminate the intersection between smart mobility transition and the perceptions of marginalized citizens in a metropolitan global city.

Speaker: Calvin Ming Tsun Lai (Technische Universität Darmstadt)

15:00 → 16:30 Unprotected Modes on Contested Ground: Histories of Traffic Activism and Politics

European Road Safety Observatory defines pedestrians and cyclists as unprotected road users, vulnerable amid modes of greater speed and mass. It also points out that walking as mode of mobility is particularly important to children and cycling to adolescents. This session focuses on the history of these so-called unprotected traffic modes and the politics, activism as well societal discussions that aimed at defining their place and role in the system of mobility during the 20th century.

The question of unprotected modes can be seen as one of the main unsolved problems during the entire history of motorized traffic. For example Peter Norton and Peter Cox have in their research demonstrated how pedestrians and cyclists were already in the interwar period disciplined to give way to the car traffic. During the post-war era the focus shifted more to the vulnerability of the cyclists and pedestrians. Children were seen as an especially problematic group among the road-users. Child fatalities and accidents were an important motivation behind new solutions for traffic mode separation or in some cases, for example in the Netherlands, also for improved cycling infrastructure and the establishment of slow streets in housing areas. However, children and other vulnerable groups were also increasingly restricted in their mobility, due to the danger from motorized traffic.

This session will look at different historical cases of unprotected modes as a political question. How did pedestrians and cyclists, as well as children, become defined as the vulnerable road users and what were the political reasons and implications of this definition? What political and activist means were used to challenge the system of automobility in the name of the unprotected modes? What was their role in political discussions and decisions about traffic? The session organizer will facilitate discussion between the presenters and the audience on the way in which unprotected modes can contest the dominant systems of mobility, based on the historical examples.

Convener: Yegor Muleev

15:00 “Anything that calls on people to fight against the growing brutality on the roads is a good thing”. A Pedestrians’ Association facing mass motorization in the Switzerland of the 1950’s: Motivations and strategies in an unequal political struggle

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 of David versus Goliath.
Based on archives from the The Swiss Pedestrian Advocacy Association (Fussgänger-Schutzverband) and from the main association of automobilists (Touring Club Suisse) in the 1950’s, my contribution aims to shed light on the motivations and strategies of defenders of pedestrians in a space increasingly dominated by the car. Who are the defenders of pedestrians? What were their successes and failures? Does the inequality of resources alone explain the failures? Did they co-operate with the automobilists or even accept their priority?
The political weight of the (professional, consumers, etc.) associations in the Swiss political system gives a good opportunity to assess the successes and failures of the pedestrian lobby during the 20th century. The archives of theses leagues provide rich source material to explore the motivations and strategies of the defenders of pedestrians. The Swiss case is interesting, as pedestrian leagues were already founded in the 1920s. The battle was unequal. When new road traffic regulations were passed by parliament in 1932, the members of parliament who defended pedestrians were outraged – in vain. The promoters of automobile considered a counterattack by pedestrian advocates quite inoffensive. An official of the Touring Club Swiss concluded: "They will be short of money".
In the post-war era, public space was completely transformed by the proliferation of cars. The authorities were constantly looking for solutions to the problems caused by motoring, especially fatalities. In the 1950s, pedestrians often died on pedestrian crossings and even on pavements. Fussgänger-Schutzverband reacted by trying to find solution to protect the life of pedestrians.

Speaker: Tiphaine Robert (UniDistance; EPFL)

15:15 Ways to school as subject of political and societal debate in divided Germany: A comparison between two cities

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 of (car) traffic. The place of pedestrians and cyclists in the mobility system was renegotiated, the “unprotected” road users have been identified as being in need of protection. But protected from whom and what? How was their counterpart constructed in the social discourse? Who was actually to blame?

Children, especially those on their way to school, played a special role in this debate. Apart from play mobility and the accidents that occurred there, the routes to school were an unavoidable necessity. As such they were much discussed. A comparison between two German cities, Dresden and Karlsruhe, shows how the discourse developed in both West and East Germany. Where was the discourse different or similar? What solutions were discussed? And what role did politics and individuals play in the description of the problem? Which actors took part in the debate and what was the role of civil society organizations?

To facilitate the comparison, Peter Norton's concept of road safety paradigms in the 20th century will be used to contextualize actors, measures and the question of guilt and liability. In this way, the inner German comparison can be situated and compared with the situation in other countries. Measures such as traffic education or school route maps can be evaluated in terms of their significance – both for the discussion and for the goal of protecting children.

Speaker: Silke Zimmer-Merkle (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)

15:30 The Transforming Transport System and the Everyday Politics of Urban Space: Children in/as Traffic in Eeva Rista’s Helsinki Photographs in the 1960s and 1970s

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 often juxtaposed in the public discussion were children and cars. During the same period, taking children’s perspective into consideration began to be discussed more as part of urban planning and education. We argue that this growing interest in children’s uses of space played an important role in challenging the car city, creating controversies with long-lasting influence.

In our presentation, we approach the changing image of the city, urban transport and children through the rich visual material created by the photographer Eeva Rista. Her photographs have recently become well-known as documents and illustrations of everyday life in Helsinki but they also open up many yet unused possibilities for historical research. We analyse Rista’s photographs not only in the framework of what they represent, but also as a form of urban activism - as the photographer’s systematic effort to try and change the car city through photography as a practice. Drawing from a wide body of Rista’s photographic material from the 1960s until the early-1980s, we discuss the production of the relationship between children and traffic in urban space from two perspectives: children in traffic and children as traffic.

By the former, children in traffic, we mean the different photographic ways in which children were presented as objects of various traffic policies and as victims during the time when motorized vehicles displaced children’s play from streets. The latter category, children as traffic, is characterized by the depiction of children engaging in self-directed and voluntary play and movement, portraying them as active participants who shaped their own urban spaces. These descriptions mirror the recognition of the importance of play and the understanding of children as urban residents with their unique needs, characteristic of that era.

Speakers: Tiina Männistö-Funk (University of Turku), Veera Moll (Aalto University)

16:30 → 17:00 Coffee break

17:00 → 18:30 Keynote Speech: Modernization through the Motorway: Neoliberal Transformation of Infrastructure in Poland

Conveners: Louise Sträuli (Tallinn University), Waldemar Kuligowski (Department of Anthropology and Ethnology, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland)

18:30 → 18:45 Walk to the train station

18:45 → 20:45 Dinner at the Historic Waiting Room

Tuesday 24 September

09:30 → 11:00 Electric Sparks: New and old perspectives of Electric Buses and Trolleybuses

In the course of the last decade the battery industry, the battery cars and buses, is ever growing. The topic is hot and the fascination is great. Multiple municipalities in Eastern Europe and elsewhere promote and advertise their progressiveness by willing to introduce (for now in the future) new battery buses wherever and whenever possible. On the other hand, the trolleybus technology is still widely spread throughout the post-socialist countries and offer an electric alternative to the battery bus. This session invites scholars interested into the introduction of the new technology from the perspective of the older, socialist one – the trolleybus. The host of the session will provide insights from local interviews and data from the capital of Bulgaria, where his paper will explore the potential of the decolonial perspective when addressing public transport developments in a post-socialist, Eastern European, supposedly backward context. I look forward to gather more insights on trolleybus and e-bus practices from other post-socialist countries and to create space to discuss the trolleybus technology from contemporary, as well as from historical perspective.

Convener: Wladimir Sgibnev

09:30 Electric futures and three wheeled pasts? Battery rickshaws in the discourse on sustainable transport in Bangladesh

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 been driven by the country’s informal economy. However, rather than being framed as a potential technology for “greening” public transport, electric rickshaws are subject to controversies, bans, and exclusion from policies for electric vehicles. This presentation explores the reasons behind the conflicts surrounding the proliferation of electric rickshaws. It shows how national-level policymakers and business elites mobilize imaginaries of sustainability against electric rickshaws and rely on strategies of “othering” them in (eco-)modernist narratives of social change. In these narratives history looms large, especially the country’s specific legacy of three-wheeled transport that contributes to the general framing of rickshaws as a “thing of the past”, standing for almost everything that the country wants to overcome on its modernization path – the unregulated, informal part of the economy; the congested cities; and the high number of road accidents. Based on the case study, the article points to open questions for the current decolonization agenda in global debates on sustainability transitions and infrastructure.

Speaker: Dr Jonas van der Straeten (Eindhoven University of Technology)

09:45 Techno-cannibalism or how to eat a Trolleybus. An Introduction

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 material.

The essay examines the various motivations for techno-cannibalism, including economic frugality, environmental concerns, and ideological desire to prolong the lifespan of a machine. The author argues that techno-cannibalism is a complex phenomenon with ethical, cultural, ecological, and philosophical implications.

The essay concludes by discussing the possible consequences of techno-cannibalism, such as the creation of "machine cemeteries" and the never-ending cycle of cannibalization. Finally, some examples of the benefits of this practice, such as conserving resources and extending the life of machines, are given.

Speaker: Lyubomir Pozharliev (Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography)

10:00 Technocracy, instinct of workmanship and authority of procedures in the restoration of Prague’s trolleybuses

The research for this contribution was prompted by the following question. If the management of public transport relies on technical knowledge, does it deserve to be called technocratic? For the tekhne, I draw on Thorsten Veblen's theoretical justification of the difference between engineers and financiers. For the kratos, I attract the anarchist critique of authority. This contribution argues that the epistemic superiority of a particular knowledge lies in the procedures of bureaucratically organised knowledge production. Empirical observations from the reopening of the trolleybus system in Prague show that the decision-making process was influenced by more than a century of tradition in building and maintaining transport systems and was supported by the available procedures. In addition, this contribution aims to draw attention to the need not only to dream of desirable futures, but to see how they can be realised under conditions of procedurally imposed power.

Speaker: Yegor Muleev

Technocracy, instinct of workmanship and the authority of procedures in the restoration of Prague’s trolleybuses(1).docx

10:15 Trolleybuses VS Electrobuses in Bishkek: how to survive between two investment banks

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 loan as citizens but the city hall started to desptroyment of nearly 75-year-old trolleybuses infrastructure. Beside this the City Hall announced that all trolleybuses will be replaced by Electrobuses by a loan from Asian Development Bank. This paradoxical situation is questioning how banks that have “development” strategies and having strict policies just jump out from their projects. What is banks’ responsibilities and how people can participate in the decision-making process, if freedom of association is limited, workers are depressed, and instead of participating in public sessions citizens goes to police office.

Speaker: Bermet Borubaeva (BishkekSmog)

09:30 → 11:00 Navigating Daily Journeys: Rules, Patterns, Infrastructures

Convener: Pierre Barrieau (Université de Montréal)

09:30 A gendered analysis of shopping mobility for older people in peri-urban areas

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 highlights the influence of generation and age on gender gaps. Research crossing gender and age does not seem to be very abundant. However, getting older and retirement from the professional world may provide an opportunity to rethink the division of labor within couples in older age, and could lead to a reconfiguration of social roles.
This communication proposes to combine age and gender as social relationships between people in order to analyze mobility. We focuse more specifically on mobility for shopping reasons in peri-urban areas. For this research, interviews were conducted in the peri-urban areas of two French intermediate cities. The words of 46 women and 24 men aged between 66 and 91, are analyzed. The sample is diverse in terms of former occupation and urban context of residence: from suburbs to polarized rural areas. Participants were mainly asked about the location of the stores they frequented and the meaning given to the shopping activity. Respondents were also asked about changes in their shopping behavior as they got older.
The results highlight that women's experiences of mobility are more restricted as they get older, due to economic and health conditions inequalities. Women are also more likely to adopt ethical consumption patterns as they age. Within older couples, advancing age leads to a new organization associated with shopping. For some couples, this division of responsibilities in old age is more egalitarian, while for others it reinforces gender norms that assign women to the domestic sphere.

Speaker: Angèle Brachet (LVMT - Université Gustave Eiffel - France)

09:45 Exploring Motorbike Constitutionalism: Informal Practices in Navigating Mobility Regulations in Urban Vietnam

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 of the motorcycle market in recent years, alongside infrastructural challenges, has led to pressing issues such as traffic congestion, air pollution, and a rise in road accidents. In response, major conurbations like Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City have proposed ambitious plans to phase out motorcycles from central districts by 2030, eliciting mixed reactions from the public and media. This paper proposes an exploration of "motorbike constitutionalism" in urban Vietnam, a term coined by legal scholar Mark Sidel (2008). Drawing on thirteen months of ethnographic research conducted in Ho Chi Minh City, this study aims to unravel the intricate web of informal practices and negotiations through which Vietnamese citizens navigate and interpret laws and regulations pertaining to motorbike usage and ownership. By delving into the everyday experiences of motorbike users, I seek to shed light on the ways in which individuals and communities construct their own understandings of mobility regulations, often in response to gaps or inconsistencies in the formal legal system. Through a multidisciplinary lens encompassing anthropology and urban studies, this research aims to contribute to ongoing debates on mobility, governance, and urban development in Vietnam and beyond. By uncovering the dynamics of motorbike constitutionalism, I hope to offer insights that inform more inclusive and effective policy interventions aimed at addressing the complex challenges of urban mobility in rapidly evolving contexts.

Speaker: Van Minh Nguyen (Université Libre de Bruxelles)

10:00 Having a child but not a car: mobility biographies and social practices of couples who do not increase their car use after childbirth

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 reduce it after childbirth, remain understudied, despite being a very policy-relevant category, with transformative and pioneering potential. It is crucial to identify and understand the conditions that make it possible to continue mobility with children without or with little use of the car, and the barriers that make it difficult or impossible to maintain.
To fill this gap, we describe the dynamics, drivers and challenges of pathways of mobility transitions into parenthood with a particular focus on the car-free parents. In response to calls to address more general shortcomings of the mobility biographies approach we analyse these pathways:
(1) In a life-course perspective to account for socialisation effects (Rau & Scheiner, 2020) and the intersection of individual mobility biographies with changing social and infrastructural contexts (Greene & Rau, 2018);
(2) As a product of competing meanings, skills and materialities, as well as social practices that are or are not linked to automobility (Kent, 2022; Sattlegger & Rau, 2016).
The presentation is based on a mixed-methods study conducted in 2023-24 in two Polish metropolitan areas (Poznań and Tricity), including a geo-questionnaire and individual in-depth interviews with both parents of children aged 0-6 years. Including both parents allows us to account for gender differences in the experience and pursuit of different mobility trajectories after the childbirth, as well as reciprocal influences between partners.
The study is funded by the National Science Centre in Poland (2020/37/B/HS4/03931).

Speaker: Filip Schmidt (Adam Mickiewicz University Poznan)

10:15 Towards the concept of Mobophilia: The River Tyne

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 above cases, it could be argued that transport infrastructure is just as important as destination. The understanding of the places of ‘movement’ is important to be able to improve and develop appropriate transport infrastructure that people value into the future. Acknowledging that, there has been decades of research on the embodied experiences of moving, yet very few scholars examine how place influences this experience. In addition, scholarship on transport infrastructure has primarily focussed on rail and road, despite many urban areas being placed on river banks for original purpose of access and mobility. To address this, the paper examines the River Tyne in the North East of England, as a transport
infrastructure, and a mobile place. Drawing on primary research, collected both whilst ‘on the move’ on the River and on its banks, this paper explores how the experience of place can be connected to mobility and expectations on river infrastructure. This paper develops the concept of ‘mobophilia’ in response to the meaning and connection which are given to River Tyne and propose it as a way forward and advance the scholarship on understanding the social value of mobile places. Further, contributing, to the increasing scholarship on urban transition, this paper aims to shed light on what the future is for mobility on rivers.

Speaker: Sorcha MacIntyre (Northumbria University)

09:30 → 11:00 Towards Urban Mobility Transitions

Convener: Tiina Männistö-Funk (University of Turku)

09:30 Recalcitrant infrastructures in the mobility transition – Two empirical examples

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 the reconfiguration of social practices towards social and ecological sustain-ability requires the social-ecological transformation of mobility infrastructures and con-comitant practices of infrastructuring. However, within the context of many countries of the Global North mobility infrastructures are ill-suited and sometimes even recalcitrant and thereby hinder the wide-spread adoption of sustainable mobility practices. In this contribu-tion, I will present selected empirical examples on this recalcitrant role of mobility infra-structures and processes of infrastructuring.
The first case is a real-world experiment on commuting. In this experiment we observed how the state of mobility infrastructures for sustainable commuting counteracts the uptake of sustainable commuting practices. However, by learning new competences and through the experience of new meanings it is possible to at least partially compensate for them. The second case is based on a study on the remodelling of train stations using virtual reali-ty. The virtual train station was specifically designed to reduce the infrastructural friction when changing between modes of transport. This had the effect that the train station was experienced more as an airport – a space of supposedly seamless mobility.
Both examples highlight the importance of infrastructuring practices. On one side, the concept of infrastructuring needs to expand to include the ways in which decay and ne-glect are dealt with by users of infrastructure. On the other side, practices of infrastructur-ing need to move from the sole building of infrastructures and focus more on the needs of mobile practitioners.

Speaker: Luca Nitschke (ISOE-Institute for social-ecological research)

09:45 Shaping urban mobility with city-centre Multimodal Hubs?

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 autonomous driving) and in view of the challenges of climate change, traditional car park concepts no longer appear to be suitable for meeting the mobility needs of the population in the future. For this reason, construction of existing car parks should use new architectural, traffic planning and building technology approaches in order to enable use up to the year 2060.

The research project "Mobility Centres of the Future" deals with precisely this topic and focuses on city centres of medium-sized cities. The guidelines conceptualize “Multimodal Hubs” as city centre infrastructure for the citywide promotion of sustainable and climate-friendly mobility. The transformation of existing or future car parks to Multimodal Hubs is discussed from the perspectives of mobility, civil engineering, energy and urban development.
The results illustrate strategies of implementation of multimodal hubs to municipal and private developers: what can a concrete local implementation look like - for example, for the energy supply of e-cars, with regard to flexible grid structures and the right choice of materials, for the future conversion of car parking spaces into bicycle parking spaces or for retrofitting a city logistics hub.
At the same time, the mobility transformation cannot stop at the "multi-storey car park" building type: The reduction of parking space is necessary in the course of the modal shift, both from a mobility and an economic point of view. In addition, multimodal inner-city infrastructures must be supplemented by services in the neighbourhoods.

Speaker: Benjamin Dally (HafenCity Universität Hamburg)

10:00 Keep moving: Better understanding joint pathway creations in urban mobility using reconfigurative multi-level analysis

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 mobility in Germany. The paper uses transition theory to develop a conceptual framework that analyses developments in urban mobility as reconfigurative multi-level pathways. The paper identifies key phases when considerable change took place and analyses structure, agency and situative factors to understand multi-regime and procedural knock-on developments, e.g., in infrastructures, local planning practices and cultural meanings. The paper systematically considers the role of „place“ as deeply rooted local characteristics provide additional explanatory value for better understanding locally-specific pathways. Framework application visualizes pathways and underlying structure-agency relations, interrelations across time and the role of agency for pathway creations. ‘Deep’ transitions require changes in values, perceptions and cultures that can be sensed in the cities analyzed.

Speaker: Miriam Müller (Wuppertal Institut)

11:00 → 11:30 Coffee break

11:30 → 13:00 Obstinate Automobility: Promise and Path-Dependency

Convener: Yegor Muleev

11:30 The post-soviet car-boom in Estonia

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 decades, doubling again to 620 by 2021. Despite surpassing all prognoses and despite concerns raised by critics and activists, the process unfolded with little resistance, with key institutions considering the process to be inevitable and even natural.
My paper aims to delve into the multifaceted dynamics propelling the widespread adoption of motor vehicles in post-Soviet Estonia. Acknowledging that this process can not be understood in the relatively limited context of the 1990s and the 2000s, I will take a longer-term perspective, tracing the origins of this phenomenon back to the Soviet era. I further contend that this process is not simply a product of economic, cultural, or ideological factors in isolation but rather a complex interplay of these and other elements.
To navigate this complexity, I draw upon theoretical frameworks from transition studies, such as Frank W. Geels' multi-level perspective and the deep transitions framework developed by Laur Kanger and Johan Schot. Transition studies offer valuable insights into socio-technical systems undergoing change and provide a useful toolkit for analyzing such intricate processes.
By adopting a broad temporal lens and a systematic analytical approach grounded in transition studies, I aim to offer a nuanced explanation that transcends simplistic interpretations. I seek to provide valuable insights and lessons that can inform future discourse on rapid automobilization and serve as a “cautionary tale” for possible similar societal shifts elsewhere.

Speaker: Tambet Muide (Tartu University)

11:45 What’s gone wrong with my road novel? A practice-based road trip through mobility, class and social trauma in contemporary England

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 to bring disparate social discourses into closer proximity.
This carnivalization of voices is counter-hegemonic, according to the literary philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, and the road genre has, historically, provided a means for writers to challenge dominant cultural narratives.
The road threads my identity, one that was moulded by radical shifts in the post-war mobility of my parents, but then fractured by divorce and my dad’s subsequent relocation to the U.S., the economic and gendered immobility of my mother, and my childhood navigating a space between the dead-end roads of post-industrial England and the seemingly limitless highways of Reagan’s America.
My thesis began as a road novel but the form quickly proved insufficient for my developing research interests, so I discarded it. My paper explores the challenges of writing road stories in a society which privileges expedience and destination over wandering and dialogue, on roads which alienate the traveller and render places invisible.
The project has become a multimodal assemblage of texts that better reflects our fragmented cultural landscape, drawing on Bakhtin’s chronotope and dialogism as conceptual frameworks, and responding to the call for interdisciplinary approaches in The New Mobilities Paradigm.
My writing explores the interplay between neoliberal ideals of mobility and individual social pain, the road acting as a literary nexus between subjective and collective experiences of dislocation and trauma that, perhaps, prevents us from driving to new, post-capitalist frontiers.

Speaker: Christopher Bogle (Northumbria University)

12:00 Parking Planning and Management History and Prospect on the Development Trend of China's Parking Industry

This paper provides an in-depth analysis of the key position of parking planning and management in current cities by systematically combing the evolution and development of parking lots in different historical periods and national contexts. On this basis, it further discusses its development trend and puts forward corresponding suggestions, aiming at promoting the healthy development of the parking industry and providing useful references for effectively alleviating urban parking problems.

With the acceleration of urbanization and the continuous growth of motor vehicle ownership, the problem of parking difficulty is becoming more and more prominent in China's major cities, and it has become a key problem restricting the sustainable development of cities. Aiming at this hot social issue, this paper discusses in depth the historical development of parking planning and management, with a view to understanding the essence and root causes of the parking problem in depth, and discovering the patterns and trends. Through extensive field research at home and abroad and the interpretation of parking-related historical materials in many countries, this paper clearly comprehends the origin and evolution of urban parking planning and management and its specific embodiment in different cities at different times; analyzes in detail the impact of its milestones on the parking industry and its role; and comprehensively summarizes the development of the on-street and off-street parking facilities planning and management strategies and their implementation effects. At the same time, this paper combines the current trend of parking industrialization, intelligentization and the new opportunities of the integration of parking industry and the financial field with a multi-angle analysis, to provide a scientific basis for the formulation and implementation of China's parking planning and management policies, and to provide a useful reference for the sustainable development of the construction and management of urban parking facilities

Speaker: Chao Zeng

12:15 Standardisation during the Great Acceleration: A case study on road standards in Denmark

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 McNeill 2007 date a Stage 2 of the Anthropocene from 1945, a period marked by significant growth in the world’s population, oil consumption, mobility and resource utilisation and thus termed “the Great Acceleration”.

Whereas most literature on the Great Acceleration emphasises the environmental impacts (Bergquist 2019), this article delves into the societal structures and occupational administrations facilitating the Great Acceleration. It examines the evolving complexity of today’s regulated societies by viewing standards as one of the many turning points. The number of different standards in place today indicates the acceleration of digital bureaucracy. Based on a detailed case study of standards issued by the Danish Road Standard organisation, the article focuses on the transformation of which, when closely tracked, reveals key developments and patterns indicating broader societal trends.
In 1943, administrators foresaw 100 km/h speeds, and, by early 2024, cars had increased from 100,000 to 2 million and a standard speed limit up to 130 km/h. Meanwhile, whereas the accompanying standardisation began with a 72-page standard in 1943, 1581 standards have been issued and improved in the past two decades, for a current database with 800 standards spanning 35,000 pages.

The analysis focuses on the last five decades, utilizing archives and interviews with key individuals shaping road regulations. The aim is to unravel the social dynamics within daily operations and explore the perpetual evolution of the concept. The study provides insights into technological advancements and cultural shifts in the knowledge organisation.

Speaker: Jørgen Burchardt (Middelfart Museum)

11:30 → 13:00 Transitions and Transformations of Urban Mobility Infrastructures and Practices in 20th Century East Asia

Convener: Peter Adey (Royal Holloway University of London)

11:30 Rewriting the “Software” of Service: Upgrading Mobility Experiences on Tokyo’s Railway Network, c. 1949-1990

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 service when discussing efforts to improve passenger experience. Highlighting this conceptual distinction, this presentation focuses on efforts to improve the “software” of service in the decades following the Second World War. While popular accounts often attribute the improvement of passenger experience aboard JNR trains to the organization’s 1987 privatization, this presentation challenges that narrative by demonstrating that efforts to achieve passenger-oriented transport design began much earlier. It examines the development of passenger comfort-focused organizational strategies and design interventions by drawing on Japanese primary (e.g., industry publications, newspaper reports) and secondary sources. By providing insights into the evolution of efforts to shape mobility experiences aboard public transport, this presentation contributes to the fields of mobility studies and the history of transport, infrastructure, and East Asian cities.

Speaker: Christoph Schimkowsky (University of Tokyo)

11:45 The Transformation of Lanzhou through Wartime Infrastructural Planning

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 Southwest environs (Howard 2004, Zhou et al. 2014, Rodriguez 2022). They have put less emphasis on the reimagination of the Northwest, including the rediscovery of the ancient “Silk Roads” transport route, that likewise occurred as part of the spatial reemphasis of the Sino-Japanese War (Lin 2008, Tai 2015).

Despite its richness in natural resources, various economic hurdles stymied the growth of the Northwest in comparison to the Southwest. Nonetheless, planners and travel writers imagined Lanzhou as the transport hub of the Northwest and the geographic centre of China proper. The city would connect with Xi’an to the West and Chongqing to the South and function as a portal to the Soviet Union via Xinjiang (Baker 2023, Pelzer 2024) and India via Qinghai and Tibet. In 1941, Lanzhou officially gained city status, resulting in a municipal government that started to publish a range of statistical data.

Research on Lanzhou’s urban growth is usually limited to the post-war era (Li et al. 2011, Guo & Liu 2022). The paper demonstrates that to properly explain its development, an analysis must consider the infrastructural planning of the 1940s. Apart from surveying statistical data that situate Lanzhou within the economic history of the region, the study uses GIS based on archival maps to understand changes in the city’s urban layout and its role within the national transport system. The paper argues that Japanese bombing and wartime spatial planning laid some of the foundations for modern Lanzhou.

Speaker: Thorben Pelzer (Leipzig University)

12:00 Nomadic Intellectuals and Wandering Bards: Itinerancy as a Metaphor for Creativity in 1960s Japan

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 (yugyō)" in medieval and early modern Japanese literature, and Kara Jūrō, founder of the "Itinerant Troupe" (Yugyō Ichiza—better known as the Situation Theater), I argue that conditions in postwar Japan allowed for a discourse of nomadism that had more nuance and higher political stakes than the one surrounding Deleuze and Guattari's nomadology. This was partially because it emerged within the Japanese critique of Western modernity, an intellectual tradition that provided some inoculation against primitivism. But it also represents an important stage in debates that took place after the failure of protests against the 1960 renewal of the United States-Japan Security Treaty, which sapped the left of confidence in its ability to create an "image of the people." While many intellectuals responded to this development by idealizing the "autochthonous (dochaku)"—a vision of indigeneity as static rootedness—Hirosue and Kara posited itinerant performers as major protagonists of Japanese cultural history, precursors to the intelligentsia and the anarchic counterculture. At the same time, they remained vigilant against romanticism, repeatedly reformulating their understanding of itinerancy as they came to terms with the rapid urbanization unfolding around them. Taken together with filmmakers and writers of the period who pursued primitivism in an ironic mode, these two thinkers provide a useful case study in the abstraction of mobility metaphors from historically specific realities.

Speaker: Andrew Kahn (Columbia University, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures)

12:15 Tax Exemption of Commuting Allowance and Urban Expansion in Post-war Japan

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 worker their commuting costs, including rail and bus fares. Known as “Tax Exemption of Commuting Allowance” (tsūkin teate hikazei seido), this system allowed workers to choose housing in the suburbs, which was more affordable and appealing than housing in the city centre. After its introduction in 1958, this system thus facilitated the expansion of metropolitan areas. Workers typically lived in areas where the allowance would cover commuting costs. The exempt amount was gradually increased as the economy grew, facilitating the continued expansion of urban areas. In the early 1990s, when the Japanese economy was at its peak, even daily roundtrips of more than 100 km by Shinkansen became possible and, though not necessarily welcomed, often accepted as necessary.
Government offices and large companies provided not only commuting allowances but also housing allowances for their workers, and in some cases even housing itself. While existing factory dormitories were one example of this, new company housing was built further away from workplaces. The government also built affordable housing for workers in the suburbs, often in the form of large apartment blocks (danchi) designed according to modernist architectural ideas. However, this movement came to a halt when the Japanese economy entered a long period of stagnation in the 21st century. In the city centers, redevelopment resulted in the construction of high-rise residential buildings, leading to a phenomenon known as the 'return to the city center'.

Speaker: Shuichi Takashima (Aoyama Gakuin University)

11:30 → 13:00 Wheels of Change: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives

Convener: Claire Pelgrims (Université libre de Bruxelles)

11:30 Rise And Fall of Cycling Policy in Indonesia: Jakarta Case of Struggle to Develop and Fund Bike Lanes

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 spanned 63 km in the city and the increase of the bike lanes network to 609.4 km in 2030 (Dinas Perhubungan Provinsi DKI Jakarta, 2021). However, this policy was not sustained as it was supposed to and the budget to expand the bike lanes was cut in 2022 and discontinued (Arbi, 2022; Untari, 2022; Azzahra, 2023). The main driver of this change is related to the political changes in the government of Jakarta around the end of 2022 and rising conflicts of interest in the usage of road space in Jakarta, as people went back to using motorized vehicles when the pandemic loosened.
The main goal of this work is to analyze political transformation and cycling policies in Jakarta and the conflicts that arose. To this end, qualitative methods are used. This work will analyze the publications made by ITDP Indonesia and regulations, publications by the government of Jakarta, and news from local and national media.
As a result, a detailed and broader understanding of the topic is expected. This would allow us to understand the creation and transformation of cycling policies and, therefore, can be a basis for creating and designing better and long-lasting cycling policies. This work is part of a research project regarding the economic benefit of cycling and cycling policy between Indonesia and Germany for the Alexander von Humboldt fellowship at the University of Kassel.

Keywords: cycling, bike lanes, policy, political changes, transformation

Speaker: Sukma Larastiti (University of Kassel)

11:45 Bicycle Boom of 1890s in Ukrainian Lands: Local Mobilities between Imperial Politics

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, social and gender politics influenced the social construction of
bicycle use. The article presents a scenario of technological progress in which local
enthusiasts were key drivers of innovation, while the states responded with regulatory
measures rather than commissioned technological change. Although Eastern Europe was late
in launching its own bicycle mass-production, the cultural phenomenon of the 1890s Bicycle
Boom, with its enthusiasm, public debate and new standards of bodily performance, took
place at the same time as in bicycle-producing Western societies.

Speaker: Olha Martynyuk (University of Basel)

12:00 “Happy as a cyclist – annoyed as a pedestrian” Negotiating walking and cycling in the COVID-19 pandemic

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 antagonists, competing for political attention as well as for space and respect on the road (or on what is left of it).
Intermodal and multimodal perspectives that relate to the comparisons, competition but also complementation of both modes and, thus, could illustrate the potential of promoting walking and cycling together, are, however, rare.
Walking and cycling, therefore, require a closer look, with regard to their integration with everyday life and the specific meanings they convey, and especially at the quality of their mutual relationship.
In order to explore this quality, we investigate how practices of walking and cycling are interacting and negotiated.
We take the disruptions of the Covid-19 pandemic as an analytical lens and draw on the perspective of social practice theories. Our analysis is based on focus group discussions on walking and cycling experiences during the pandemic in an urban neighbourhood in Frankfurt (Main), Germany.
We identify and explore four settings in which walking and cycling are negotiated: (1) identification, facilitated by routines of commuting practices and symbolic meanings of walking and cycling, (2) everyday optimisation, which encompasses meanings of time pressure, feasibility and physical exercise, (3) conflicts, centred on the lack of norms and competences of interacting on the street, and (4) policies, which determine the spatial restrictions and symbolic meanings attached to walking and cycling.
Our analysis raises further questions on hierarchies among transport practices, social norms and ambivalences of efficiency pressures and deceleration and discusses the value of social practices theories. The negotiations in the four settings demonstrate the challenges of joining forces in multimodality to propose an alternative vision to the current car-centred system. Set in the context of increasing polarization over the expansion of cycling infrastructure in Germany, the paper speaks to the conference theme of contestations around transforming mobility and infrastructures.

Speaker: Monika Pentenrieder (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt)

12:15 Assembling cycling practices through family rides: A comparative analysis of Bike Bus initiatives in Barcelona and Frankfurt

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 meanings in two distinct urban contexts: Barcelona and Frankfurt.

Utilizing mobile methods, including participant observation and interviews, the study examines how participants in these cities experience and imbue the Bike Bus with a purpose beyond its practical utility. In Barcelona, the Bike Bus movement has fostered an activist community and reinforced the city's emerging family cycling practices. In contrast, Frankfurt’s Bike Buses operate within an environment of consolidated cycling practices; their interest is to collaborate with the City Council to organize more Bike Buses that encourage families to cycle.

The findings reveal that while the Bike Bus is a practical solution for school commutes, it also plays a critical role in community building, cycling advocacy, and local mobility practices. This study contributes to a broader understanding of how community-led initiatives can influence urban mobility and foster a culture of cycling, particularly in diverse environments.

Speaker: Gemma Simon i Mas (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)

Leipzig paper.pptx

13:00 → 14:30 Lunch

13:30 → 14:30 Executive committee meeting - EC members only!

For executive committee members only.

Speaker: Carlos Lopez Galviz (Lancaster University)

14:30 → 16:00 Comparative Perspectives on Transport in the Post‐Socialist East

Mobilities and immobilities are not the same everywhere. Yet, the research area of mobilities in the post-socialist East took a while to emerge as a field. Despite the meaning and importance of collective modes of transport in that part of the world, public transport has until recently, played but a marginal role in scholarly literature. In recent years, we indeed have witnessed an increasing emergence of in-depth studies inspired by the influence of the mobilities turn in transportation research, and amply building on sociological and ethnographic scholarship (e.g. Shajtanova and Kuznetsov 2014; Vozyanov 2014; Kuklina and Holland 2018; Rekhviashvili and Sgibnev 2018; Weicker and Turdalieva 2021). These contributions have fostered insights into actor constellations, trajectories and practices in particular case cities and regions, and therefore constitute a formidable foundation for further research in the post-socialist East. Comparative studies, however, have remained few, and, moreover, are largely outdated, lack dialogue with theoretical innovations, and remain dominated by economistic and technocratic readings (e.g. Pucher 1999; Gwilliam et al. et al 2000; Gwilliam 2001; Finn 2008). Seminal edited volumes (Burrell and Hörschelmann 2014; Blinkin and Koncheva 2016; Duijzings and Tuvikene 2023) have significantly advanced our understanding of the width and depth of mobilities research in the formerly socialist space at-large, yet more, and decidedly comparative research is needed.
The question remains: How to account for local diversity and regional specificities of transport politics, meanings of local (mobility) history and culture? Should that history be treated as an increasingly vanishing memory, or something that has still the power to shape contemporary and future processes, such as the urgently needed mobility transitions? Are there elements of the past – even if they emerge from otherwise undesirable era in need to be moved away – that could be revived and be used for contemporary inspiration? Attending to continuities – of policy thinking, of public values, of infrastructures – is equally crucial in assessing future processes of moving or not moving towards sustainable mobility systems. Looking back to learn for the future might be of great value.

Convener: Lela Rekhviashvili (Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography)

14:30 Post-socialist public transport development trajectories: an overview

This contribution proposes a quantitative overview of post-socialist public transport system development trajectories. The goal is to offer a first attempt to define common patterns within the region, and in comparison to other world regions, with the intention to attend to diversities, specificities and commonalities in a comparative perspective.

The recent years have brought about many insightful and detailed case studies to the light, accounting for local actor constellations, decision-making processes, knowledge flows and market processes – so that, by now, the time seems ripe to take stock once more, and briefly adopt a decidedly zoomed-out perspective across countries, and across decades of public transport development. This is all the more relevant with burgeoning debates on mobility transitions, and the attention to the role of mobility cultures and long trajectories for pre-figuring mobility futures.

The data is largely based on transphoto.org public transport enthusiast community resources.

Speaker: Wladimir Sgibnev

14:45 Flying biographies in a post-socialist country

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 about how high-carbon practices spread and get embedded in societies.
In this article, we study the recent and ongoing changes in the social practice of flying through the lens of mobility biographies. We qualitatively analyze 38 in-depth interviews conducted in Poland's Poznan and Tricity urban areas. We analyze them using mobility links, i.e., the social networks, skills, dispositions, and social practices connected with flying. We situate their dynamic co-development in the context of broader socio-technical changes in aeromobility described using desk research methods.
The post-socialist context and its socio-political transformations provide a particularly interesting case to study such changes. The socialist and capitalist periods (and periods within them) had different travel regulations, international migration patterns, and levels of air travel access. In consequence, subsequent generations were socialized to mobility in markedly different conditions.
The study adds to emerging research on mobility biographies in long-distance travel and broader efforts to understand mobility practices and socio-technical systems dynamics. Contrary to previous applications, it focuses on long-distance rather than daily travel (following Mattioli, 2020) and goes beyond the individual perspective to use biographies as insights into the dynamics of social practice and related socio-technical systems (following Greene & Rau, 2018).
We close the presentation by reflecting on how this accelerated growth process and the further embedding of flying in society conflict with the need to mitigate climate change.
The presentation is part of a research project funded by the National Science Centre in Poland (2020/37/B/HS4/03931).

Speakers: Marianna Kostecka (Faculty of Sociology, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan), Michał Czepkiewicz (EUROREG, University of Warsaw; Faculty of Sociology, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan)

15:00 A longitudinal perspective on Moscow public transport system development and factors of change, 1985-2016

Moscow Public Transit Network: an overall description of system's evolution in 1985-2016:
• Peak development of the route network in the 1980s: the maximum number of routes in operation and vehicles assigned to these routes
• Analysis of changes in the Moscow urban transit network in the 1990s. The impact of the socio-economic crisis in the USSR/Russia on the route network
• Car-oriented development at the verge of 1990-2000 as the main factor of changes in the city's transit network, including removal of tram lines
• Сhanges in the route network in the 2000s to improve cost efficiency
• Change of public transit model in the early 2010s: from competition between the operators to the consolidated route network managed by the city government
• A summary of the further key factors influencing the route network after 2016

Speaker: Aleksandr Zelentsov

15:15 Towards a car-dependent society in Poland. Historical background, cultural change and its normative implications

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 highly dependent on the car, which is seen as essential for access to basic services and social networks. This societal transition has also fostered 'car culture', manifested in car-oriented mobility behaviours recurring as routine, tradition or social norm (Mattioli et al., 2020).
Our paper explores this transition by delving into its historical context and examining generational differences in both car use and perceived car dependency. We analyse the factors that contribute to this dependency, contrasting the influence of biographical experiences of transport exclusion with that of car-centred social norms and attitudes that can perpetuate a 'car culture' and foster a strong attachment to this mode of transport, even when alternative mobility options are available. We also examine how perceived car dependency correlates with environmental norms and societal attitudes towards different transport policies, revealing unexpected acceptance of car restrictions among highly car-dependent individuals.

The presentation is based on the results of a mixed methods project conducted in 2022/2024 in Poznan and Tri-City areas, Poland, involving a survey of around 3000 participants.

Speaker: Dawid Krysiński (Adam Mickiewicz University)

14:30 → 16:00 How to Publish with T2M Journals?

This is an insightful session with the editors of the T2M-affiliated journals. The round table will be chaired by Peter Adey and Claire Pelgrims, joined by the editors:
- Massimo Moraglio;
- Cotten Seiler;
- Peter Adey;
- Jinhyoung Lee.

Conveners: Claire Pelgrims (Université libre de Bruxelles), Peter Adey (Royal Holloway University of London)

16:00 → 16:30 Coffee break

16:30 → 18:00 Keynote Speech: Electric Mobility Transitions: A Global South and Social Justice Perspective

Conveners: Frauke Behrendt, Karol Kurnicki (Leibniz-IfL)

18:00 → 19:00 Dinner

Wednesday 25 September

09:30 → 11:00 Challenging Imperial Infrastructures from Below: Sovereign States, Local Entrepreneurs, and Workers

Ever since Daniel Headrick developed the theory that technological innovation served as a “tool of empire” in Europe’s massive colonial expansion in the late nineteenth century, historians have depicted colonial infrastructure as a guarantor of economic and political exploitation. In the past decade, scholars have challenged this top-down perspective on infrastructure as an omnipotent instrument of colonial rule. A burgeoning research strand has instead shed a spotlight on local and environmental factors, the colonized people’s engagement with these systems, disruptions in sophisticated logistical networks, as well as their interdependence with other infrastructure systems, both vernacular and imperial.
This panel further complicates the history of imperial infrastructure systems and their planned and unplanned uses. Studying the conflicting history of infrastructure construction, adoption, and contestation in the colonial world, the panelists are particularly interested in infrastructures in transition. Drawing on case studies from different world regions, they embed technological innovation – in particular railways and airplanes – in the wider histories of mobility networks of these regions and follow the expansion of infrastructure systems as much as their persistence and repurposing in the transition period from the colonial to post-colonial era. In this way, the papers explore joint efforts by imperial governments or companies to expand these systems as much as attempts by local actors to tap into infrastructure expansion with the aim of establishing local transportation networks to enhance regional interconnectedness. Zooming in, the papers also study the realities of infrastructure operation on the ground, that is disruptions and (environmental and technological) challenges as well as the workplace and day-to-day experience of those colonial subjects employed in maintaining infrastructure systems. Through this focus on the micro-level, the papers are able to reevaluate questions of dominance, power struggles, gender struggles, and the agency of people engaging with infrastructure as residents, workers, or users. With these case studies, the ultimate aim of the panel is to further decenter technology and infrastructure systems as “tools” and instead highlight the conditions and factors which enabled – or forestalled – their expansion and operation.

Convener: Jørgen Burchardt (Middelfart Museum)

09:30 Occupying imperial aviation infrastructure: Persia’s quest for global connectedness, c. 1930

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 South Asia and the “Far East”. Two years earlier, in 1926, the young Persian government had already invited the German Junkers company into the country and contracted Junkers to develop and operate three domestic air routes. However, by the mid-1930s, all these airlines had ceased operations in Persia with the Trucial States becoming the new stopping place for imperial air routes.

This presentation investigates the Persian state’s engagement with the new technology, aviation. Based on archival research in the company archives of Imperial Airways and Junkers as well as the national archives of the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, it argues that the Persian government embraced the new technology in an effort to both “modernize” the country and connect it with the nascent global network. To this end, the government not only provided subsidies but also exerted pressure on all imperial airlines, trying to force them to add scheduled stops in central Persia to their intercontinental air routes. Because Persia was persistent in this demand, the airlines eventually left the country. Primary sources and official communication document that it was Persia’s ambition to coopt the imperial infrastructure system in order to increase the country’s – and its capital’s – connectedness. The presentation thus provides evidence that – because they held sovereignty over their aerospace – comparatively smaller states were able to resist the pressure of world powers and to utilize imperial infrastructure to serve their own ends.

Speaker: Andreas Greiner (German Historical Institute Washington DC)

09:45 Imperial companies and railways between Angola and Belgian Congo, 1910-1930

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 facilitating the transport of trade and people, as well as establishing territorial connections. The expansion of these lines served the economic interests of both the colonial powers and the companies, while having a major weight on the landscape through the physical presence of the rails and the creation of new dynamics of mobility.

This paper will focus on the mining networks between Angola and the Belgian Congo, established under the auspices of the Societè Generále de Belgique, to question the wider and long-lasting socio-spatial implications of the construction of railway lines, considering the multiple agents and agendas involved. It will explore the roles played by Union Minière du Haut Katanga, Forminière and Diamang in planning, building, and using railways between the two territories. These were complex and multifaceted connections, involving the railway routes’ layout – from the decauville lines for local transport to the trans-imperial connections provided by the Benguela Railway between Katanga and Lobito –, the displacement and mobility of workers in the production of these infrastructures and through their use, the employment of new technologies and construction materials and the adaptation by local populations living near the lines.

The paper will unpack disputes, power struggles and messy paths to reevaluate the extension of railways’ power and impact on local and existing mobilities. By grasping these aspects, it aims to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the interplay between railways, imperial companies, and cross-border mobility in Africa.

Speaker: Beatriz Serrazina (Dinâmia'CET-Iscte)

10:00 Connecting the Nodes: Unpacking British and French Imperial Air Routes in the Middle East, 1924-1939

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 the enactment of the international mandates in the interwar Middle East, the enforcement of global border and mobility regimes. By combining the study of infrastructural (e.g. customs buildings, airports and aerodromes), material as well as discursive plans and devices displayed by imperial airline companies –Imperial Airways (1924-1939) and Air Orient/Air France (1927/1933-)– operating in and across the Middle East, the paper will probe how cooperation and transfers among imperial powers were mediated and ultimately institutionalized, thereby affecting the ways in which mobility regimes –including air spaces– were implemented during the interwar era. In the second section, the paper will show how these imperial plans faced diverse political, environmental and technical obstacles –i.e. multiple technical halts–, which led Great Britain and France together with their (national/imperial) respective airline companies– to strengthen cooperation and, ultimately, their interdependency. Finally, the paper will demonstrate that the
development of imperial intercontinental routes triggered the creation of domestic and regional ones, while relying on already existing infrastructure systems (railroads, sea-ports and land routes). In that regard, stops and overnight halts in Middle Eastern airports and aerodromes were not merely “technical” pauses of otherwise longer imperial services and journeys; rather, the interplay between imperial and domestic routes, between aerial and maritime as well as overland systems fed one another, making both the imperial and the regional possible.

Speaker: Jordi Tejel Gorgas (Université de Neuchâtel)

09:30 → 11:00 Ethics and Aesthetics of Mobility

Convener: Peter Adey (Royal Holloway University of London)

09:30 Transforming Transit: Integrating Mobility Aesthetics into Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan

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 encourage the use of public transportation and active mobility options over private cars. This not only addresses issues such as congestion and pollution, but also improves the overall travel experience for city residents.
Inspired by the concept of the Fourth Cityscape from the Research on Construction of Transport Aesthetics in Chongqing Urban District workshop, the paper introduces a novel classification of cityscapes that incorporates mobility aesthetics. Each cityscape is characterized by its unique features that reflect the integration of transportation infrastructure with the broader cityscapes.
In particular, the fourth cityscape introduces the concept of mobility aesthetics, which emphasizes the aesthetic value and performance of transportation infrastructure within the cityscape. By considering how transportation systems contribute to the visual appeal and livability of a city, planners and designers can create more attractive and engaging urban environments.
This classification framework provides a valuable tool for incorporating mobility aesthetics into sustainable urban mobility plan. By integrating aesthetic considerations into transportation planning processes, cities can enhance their cultural and historic atmosphere while promoting sustainable transportation options.
Overall, Transforming Transit offers a forward-thinking approach to urban mobility that recognizes the importance of aesthetics and the travel experience in shaping the cities of the future. By embracing mobility aesthetics, cities can create more visually appealing and livable environments that prioritize sustainability and quality of life for all residents.

Speaker: James Wang (Shared Mobility Laboratory)

09:45 Turning travel into an aesthetic experience -- based on a case study of trails in Chongqing

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 perspective into the daily travel experience, and discusses the changes in infrastructure positioning during the development of Chongqing's trails in a specific historical context, to explore its feasibility in sustainable transportation planning. Currently, the trails are one of the tourist attractions in Chongqing and a must-see spot for many tourists. The method of its renewal after the completion of the original task is discussed by comparing different landscapes of the mountain city trail. At the same time, through the improvement of aesthetics, the promotion of history and culture, and the update of equipment, the mountain city trail is closely connected with the history and history of Chongqing. It is better integrated with the urban landscape, endows it with public significance and aesthetic value, and provides a local case and a model of "beauty and sharing" for renovating mountain city trail facilities.

Speaker: Tao Wang (Chongqing Transport Planning and Research Institute)

10:00 Is There a Flight Shame in a Postsocialist Country? Social emotions associated with travelling and not travelling

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; Wormbs & Wolrath Söderberg, 2019; Doran et al., 2021; Andersen, 2022).

In Western Europe, aeromobility has become widespread earlier than in the East and may no longer be seen as distinctive. In addition, with the growing awareness of climate change, flying is not necessarily enjoyable, it can also be shameful. When it has become widespread in many post-socialist countries, what has been considered an aspirational and distinctive practice may already be considered embarrassing or even immoral (Lovelock, 2014; Di Paola & Nyholm, 2023). Do Poles feel ashamed of flying now that they have caught up with the West in terms of long-distance travel? To what extent is the “disenchantment” of the plane also taking place in the countries that have later embarked on the path of high mobility?

To answer this question, we draw on 38 in-depth interviews conducted in Poznań and Tricity twenty years after Poland’s accession to the European Union and the consequent liberalisation of the air transport market. We find that for many Poles, flying is still a distinctive practice and a unique experience that inspires pride. The embeddedness of flying in a diverse repertoire of benefits and rewards makes it necessary to add other notions, such as no-travel shame or travel pride, to analyze the social emotions associated with flying in the post-socialist context and to complement the concept of flight shame developed in the Nordic context.

Speakers: Marianna Kostecka (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland), Dr Filip Schmidt (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland)

09:30 → 11:00 Planning, Funding, and Using Mobility Infrastructures

Convener: Karol Kurnicki (Leibniz-IfL)

09:30 Chongqing River-crossing Ropeway: Decline to Rebirth

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 River and the Jialing River. In the 1980s, in order to facilitate the travel of residents on both sides of the rivers, Chongqing successively built the Yangtze River Ropeway and the Jialing River Ropeway. Currently, the Yangtze River Ropeway is one of Chongqing’s tourist attractions and a must-visit attraction for many tourists, while the Jialing River Ropeway was demolished after losing passengers as many cross-river bridges were completed. By comparing the different endings of the river-crossing ropeways, this paper discusses the methods of updating special transportation facilities after completing their original missions. At the same time, through improvements in aesthetics, historical and cultural promotion, and equipment updates, the cableway is closely related to Chongqing's history and history. The urban landscape is better integrated, giving the facility public significance.

Speaker: Zhengzheng Yang (Chongqing Jiaotong University)

09:45 Fare-Free and Carefree? Effects of Public Transport Fare (Infra)structures on Mobility Transitions and Experiences

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 financially successful, offsetting the lack of fare revenues with increased municipal tax income. However, public and political enthusiasm for FFPT has waned. Competition for tax revenues between the city and neighbouring municipalities has hindered sustainable and inclusive transport investment across city boundaries. Furthermore, the anticipated modal shift has not materialised and car ownership is on the rise again, particularly in peripheral and low-income neighbourhoods.
A decade after the introduction of the FFPT policy in Tallinn, I explore the potential of fare policies, and the effects of fare structures and related infrastructures on daily mobility experiences. Through policy analysis, expert interviews, and qualitative research with transport-dependent users, I outline the everyday experiences and practices of care mobility within a fare-free public transport system. In Tallinn, not having to pay a fare seems to increase passengers’ independence from private car ownership and use, as well as their activity spaces. I complement these findings with insights on fare policies and fare evasion in the city of Brussels, where fare structures and related infrastructures appear as mechanisms of control and exclusion that increase marginalisation at the urban and individual level. Thus, I frame fare (infra)structures as structuring devices of mobility regimes, which present challenges and potential for inclusive and sustainable mobility transitions.

Speaker: Louise Sträuli (Tallinn University)

10:00 Reducing urban space: establishment of parking space norms in Finland

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 Feenberg. While the knowledge is based on the idea that universal principles may be observed in transport activities, it also reflects the need to calibrate and contextualize transport engineering knowledge for the Finnish context. According to Feenberg, the process of creating technology involves the stages of decontextualization, reduction, and systematization. Decontextualization involves separating something from its original context and roles to be used as raw material for a technical artefact. Reduction involves processing the raw material to bring out the qualities that correspond the sought technical affordances. In systematization, the materials are assembled and re-embedded in the context of use, to become a technical artefact. Expressions of these stages can be identified within the transport engineering knowledge. Decontextualization takes place in defining transport as conducted by cars, and as a derivative activity enabling more valued activities. Reduction takes place by outlining the measurable quantities and measurement methods to collect data about (car) transport. The stage of systematization takes place through the collection of data about the Finnish context and provision of local estimations to inform parking policy. While the Critical Theory of Technology is gauged to analyze the production of technical artefacts and systems, here its applicability to analyze technical knowledge taking part in the creation of those systems is demonstrated. This application allows to identify the stage of decontextualization as crucial in the context of the historical establishment car-dependent transport systems. However, without the steps of reduction and systematization, such knowledge would have not been an authoritative and functional guideline for policy. In the process of establishing car-dependent transport systems, also urban space is processed from the space for many uses to a singular function such as parking space. This paper argues that this operation takes place through the processing of the concept of transport itself.

Speakers: Maria Käpyvaara (Doctoral student), Ms Veera Moll (AA)

10:15 Green Cities Program in Samarkand, Uzbekistan: Public Transport between Global Funding Trends and Neglected Infrastructural Maintenance

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 city. The first six electric Busses form a Chinese company Yutong arrived in May 2023 and drive since then on a newly established route as harbingers of the looming urban transport modernity, clearly standing out from the rest of the old vehicles.

As investment in the PT fleet renovation and corresponding infrastructure is long overdue, Uzbek administration proves to be successful in deploying the sustainability rhetoric to raise funds for transport and various other infrastructure development projects which are currently burgeoning all over the country. At the same time existing older infrastructures, which require investment into the maintenance and appear less glossy like for example a second-hand tram-system installed in 2017 in Samarkand, remain neglected.

Taking the example of the recent development in public transport system in Samarkand, the paper will discuss the challenges associated with implementation of the e-bus infrastructure and will argue that the global developmental funding programs along with climate change prevention and decarbonisation vocabulary provide Uzbek administration with a welcome excuse and incentive time and again to embark on new infrastructure projects, instead of maintaining the existing ones.

Speaker: Mariya Petrova (Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography)

11:00 → 11:30 Coffee break

11:30 → 13:00 Balancing Efficiency, Livability and Sustainability in Urban Mobility

Convener: Govind Gopakumar (Concordia University)

11:30 Keeping a Track: Women’s Location Sharing and Mobility in New Delhi

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 planners and policy makers. Women access the city and opportunities associated with the city through sanitised surveilled routes authorised and controlled by familial patriarchal control. The control is often justified by the patriarchal family structures, patronising state and internalised by women themselves as discourse of safety of women in an unsafe city. This leads to significantly different experience of the city among women. Women’s access to the city and its opportunities are limited by a patriarchal disciplining structure governing women’s mobility. Women are allowed to access the city through pre-approved predefined and predictable routes and modes of transport. The perpetual fear and surveillance translates into curfew times, restrictions on mobility or constant tracking of movements. Alternatively, in absence of a direct patriarchal control, the access to the city, its associated opportunities and freedoms are circumscribed by a mental calculation of risks and strategies to safely access the city. This allows for a reconciliation between patriarchal anxieties internalised by women and the desire to be more independent. Interestingly these same strategies could be utilised to subvert patriarchal control over women’s sexuality and labour. The use of GPS enabled apps to track one’s route, time mapping (sharing ETAs with origin and destination parties), trip sharing with friends et cetera appear as strategies women employ to get better control over their own mobility and to ‘safely’ access the city. This paper proposes to study women’s use of GPS enabled apps, trip tracking, time mapping and its impact on women’s relationship with the city. In an ongoing study on understanding women’s mobility patterns in the city of Delhi, we found that a majority of the sample reported sharing their locations with a family member or someone known to them. This proposed paper seeks to delve deeper into this phenomenon: what prompts women to share their locations- who do they share their locations with and how? When do they share their locations? How much of this is voluntary/forced in nature? Does this create a semblance of ‘safety’? Or do they feel stifled, inhibited and surveilled? Is this behaviour mediated by class, caste and residential location? Do technocratic solutions like safety apps and location tracking just create a semblance of safety and leave the structural constraints unaddressed? The paper could offer insights about how women reclaim their agency and control over their mobility.

Speaker: Smriti Singh (Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology-Delhi)

11:45 The Coloniality of Infrastructures: Understanding the Green Turn of Tbilisi's Public Transport Reform

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.

Speaker: Lela Rekhviashvili (Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography)

12:00 No way out? The challenge of diverging interests and trajectories in urban mobility transformations: The example of Leipzig’s public transport infrastructure 1989-2001 and its twofold transformation.

Often, ideas, needs and objectives regarding mobility infrastructures and their development diverge between users and planners or politicians. Under what conditions do transformations of mobility systems and transport infrastructure can be carried out, especially if there is a sharp polarization to be found between different stakeholders and how do overarching tendencies of political, societal and / or economic transformation like they followed the end of the GDR and the fall of the socialist system hinder or facilitate socio-technical transformations?

This presentation will explore these questions using the example of the public transport infrastructure system of the city of Leipzig and its turbulent recent history since 1989. For Leipzig’s transport infrastructure, this period has been characterised by a process of profound change in materialities, practices, technologies and ideologies that I conceptualise as a “twofold transformation”.

Between 1990 und 2001, two phases of change, each driven by different actors pursuing different goals, followed each other dependently: First, a shift in mobility practices of Leipzig’s citizens after the “Wende”, which turned away from public transport and towards cars had a significant impact on the infrastructure system of urban (public) transport. This development, an unintentional, non-teleological, rather spontaneous and unregulated “transformation from below”, was followed by a targeted set of transformative measures initiated by the city administration, urban planning department and infrastructure operators. This led to a second (partial) transformation “top down”. Together they resulted in a profoundly different urban transport system with regard to technologies, technical infrastructures, practices and ideologies compared to the system before 1989.
Both processes of change were fiercely contested and accompanied by discursive disputes between different stakeholder groups such as users, environmental activists, city administrators and politicians that mainly derived from West Germany.

For this presentation, I will refer to my dissertation on the transformation of urban infrastructures of the city of Leipzig between 1980-2000. I will make use of own conceptual conclusions on transformations of infrastructures and enrich these theoretical conclusions with empirical findings.

Speaker: Laura Höss

12:15 Urban conflict on the Chandless Estate; the impact of infrastructure development in postwar twentieth century Gateshead

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 the city. Newcastle was subject to further transport intrusions in the form of the Tyne and Wear Metro, one of the first rapid transit systems in Britain. Unsurprisingly, Newcastle has garnered attention, however it only resides on the northern banks of the River Tyne, what about the other city who shares the river,Gateshead? This paper seeks to create a conversation about Gateshead by investigating the impact of postwar transport planning on the city’s residents and its urban environment. This paper seeks to use the Chandless Estate as a micro case-study to chart the construction of Gateshead’s A1 Central Area Viaduct and the tunnelling of the Tyne and Wear Metro. Employing both traditional methods such as archival research with more novel, qualitative methods such as oral history interviews and interdisciplinary site visits; this paper will generate an urban, environmental, and socio-historical vignette of the influence ofaccretive transport development. The paper hopes to create a discussion around the uses of a range methodologies within transport research and question the value of qualitative research within transport history.

Speaker: Adam Dixon (Northumbria University)

11:30 → 13:00 Rail Imaginations: Weaving Tracks of Transformative Thought

This panel searches for new narratives to broaden our view of the human imagination and its possibilities through values, worldviews and beliefs, diverse and pluralistic imaginaries. It premises itself on the assertion that to optimise planning of future transport solutions, transport history needs to be understood.
We are especially interested in revisiting twentieth century railway imaginations. Much work on railways is either on the nineteenth-century origins and growth or else on our own era. The twentieth century is a sort of long second age in which the railways were challenged by the automobile and flight, ramping up the pressure on the planet towards where we are now climate-wise. These decades have witnessed a de-romanticisation of rail travel within contemporary mobility imaginaries, despite the railways being recognised as amongst the lowest-carbon, greenest modes of long-distance travel. Compared to the lure of space-time compression offered by air travel and the romance of autonomy and flexibility served up by car use, railway travel is likely to be seen as something more fixed, tied to matters such as the timetable or the budgets of state and private operators. The panel brings together sites, imaginations and methodologies that resist the more monolithic, techno-formal and insular conceptualisations of the railway, and emphasise it as a constitutive site that nurtures collective experiences, uniquely enables an engagement with political and geographical peripheries, and concretely offers modes of public care and resilience. By exploring railway genesis, routes and labour, and forms of collective life, social interaction and meaning-making, we intend to reinvigorate affective engagements with the railway and evaluate priorities for resilient rail futures. Some of the core panel themes/questions are:
1. How is human railway experience rewritten when the twentieth century seen across national and continental boundaries in a non-hierarchical way becomes the focus?
2. What does this new history of the railways bring to mobility studies?
3. How would this understanding contribute to critical debates and contestations in the twenty-first century, especially those related to climate change, equitable transport and contemporary social worlds?
The panel showcases early-stage work towards subprojects within the 2024–2027 research project ‘Twentieth-Century Railway Imaginations: Building the Mobility and Infrastructural Humanities’ (acronym: RAILIMAGE), supported by the H.W. Donner Funds and based in the department of English Language and Literature at Åbo Akademi University.

Convener: Hugo Pereira (NOVA School of Science and Technology - CIUHCT)

11:30 Langston Hughes and the Nickel Plate Road: African American Railway Imaginations, 1900–54

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 are a primary African American literary genre, stretching back to autobiographies by ex-slaves such as of William Wells Brown (1847), built around travel, some of it forced, between slave states and ‘free’ states in the period before the Civil War. From an account of African American residential patterns and experiences of longer-distance mobility at the beginning of the twentieth century reflecting on Henry Gannett’s map ‘Proportion of Negro Total Population of the United States at the Twelfth Census’ (1900), the paper moves to literary case studies: 1920s to 1950s poems, short stories and autobiographical pieces written by Langston Hughes which focus on journeys between the southwestern portion of America’s industrialised belt in the state of Missouri, where Hughes was born in 1901, and urban centres to its northeast, especially New York City, where he died in 1967 decades after playing a pivotal role there in the Harlem Renaissance. Rather than developing an identitarian critique, the paper contributes to understanding the possibilities of the human imagination as developed through values, worldviews and beliefs: diverse and pluralistic imaginaries. As such, it participates in an ongoing humanization of transport studies.

Speaker: Jason Finch (Åbo Akademi University)

11:45 Post-Imperial Agency of North Eurasian Rail Roads: Central Asia and Siberia.

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, the old Soviet infrastructure patterns were compared to the new ones in the main Central Asian cities. Comparing the people’s mobility within new patterns to the old ones the study shows differences in space usage and the knowledge production of the territories by changes in people’s movement. The comparison was made by studying old city plans in a spatial turn sense and observation of mobility patterns in modern history. Based on the analysis, the argument consists of reimagining railways as a national inheritance rather than a colonial legacy into the symbolic space of national regimes because the railway as a symbol of modernisation remains worldwide. Being divided by national borders despite the previous common czarist or Soviet railways the knowledge production of the territories connected via railroads is made in different ways. New knowledge over the reshaped territories in Central Asia is proved by different mobility patterns, choice of transport and human traffic.

Speaker: Pavel Demchenko (Scuola Superiore Meridionale)

12:00 Can I Meet the Stationmaster? Peopling the Railway in Postcolonial India

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 archival and organizational analysis with ethnographic insights from participatory research with retired and in-service stationmasters in India to trace the creation of the stationmaster’s authority and public persona across colonial enterprise and post-colonial nationalist imperatives (when India’s publicly owned railways endured as the prime mode of affordable long-distance transport for all classes of its people). It further situates stationmastering within techno-social worlds of mobility through the lived realities of everyday and ‘actual’ station-master work as entailed in interfacing the demands and expectations between technology-state-people. In so doing, it advances theoretical and empirical work on affective, embodied and peopled infrastructure advanced in contemporary human geography; and brings it together with the rich body of ethnographic work on street-level bureaucracy within anthropology of the state.

Speaker: Nirali Joshi (Abo Akademy Turku)

12:15 Building a track of shared dreams and memoirs: gleaning insights on collective transport financing from the Hejaz Railway project

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 work draws upon travel writing as a rich source for historical sociological research and examines diaries and memoirs of the Hejaz railway and the pilgrimage to Mecca. These firsthand accounts of the era will be interpreted in dialogue with Turkish scholar Hikmet Kıvılcım’s “Thesis of history", using the author’s exploration of the role of material and human productive forces and collective action to assist in the contextual interpretation of the travel records. Although the pan-Islamist vision of Sultan Abdulhamid II and the revered pilgrimage journey are key motivations behind the extensive support for the Hejaz Railway, this analysis seeks to explore the additional intricate mechanisms that enabled its collective financing. This effort aims to open the door towards the imagining of new and alternative pathways towards financing railway and other large-scale transport projects.

Speaker: Zeynep Correia (Åbo Akademi University)

11:30 → 13:00 Social Inequalities in the Cycling Experience

Cycling is an increasingly common mode of transport in urban areas (Goel et al. 2022), although the proportion of journeys made by bicycle varies considerably from one country to another and from one city to another. Active mobility is increasingly taken into account in public policies, but these tend to overlook the impact and persistence of mobility policies on social inequalities (Nogueira 2023). Recent work has highlighted the way in which new cycle infrastructure networks can reinforce socio-spatial segregation (Jahanshahi et al. 2021). The narrow framing of cycling's potential as a replacement technology for the car favours the utilitarian cyclist and reduces the diversity of cycling repersentations and practices (Spinney 2020; Valentini 2024). The issue of equity in utilitarian cycling is multifaceted and essential, whether in terms of access to infrastructure and to key destinations or cycling policies in general (differentiated knowledge of supply, road safety, etc.). Bringing together researchers in history, sociology, geography, urban studies, and beyond, this panel is dedicated to exploring the past and present of these social inequalities in the experience of cycling through consideration of the embodied and situated experience of cycling, as well as the meanings and imaginaries of bicycles within different social groups. Participants are especially invited to present papers on the spatiality, materiality and sensitivity of cycling infrastructure networks, the resulting accessibility of infrastructure and equipment, and the issues this raises in terms of the inclusiveness of the transition to sustainable mobility. The session seeks to understand these issues across urban and rural contexts with a wide range of case studies and plural approaches. The objectives are to discuss desirability differentials according to social class, gender, ethnic and socio-economic status, and their fluctuations over time. The session seeks to provide an overview of current cutting-edge research in this field.

Convener: Claire Pelgrims (Université libre de Bruxelles)

11:45 Experimenting with Cycling Experiences: Achieving the Compact City on the Outskirts?

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, Austria): Cycling is driven by strategic policies and infrastructure development as part of the Com-pact City Idea(l), but everyday life and mobility is still premised on car use. Framed by Social Prac-tice Theory and focusing on routinised mobility performances by way of ride-along-interviews, our empirical analyses are twofold: They aim for identifying social norms and embodied practises and competencies related to the meanings of both car use and cycling on the one hand and for taking issues of socio-spatial and also epistemic justice as part of the mobility transformation more seri-ously into account on the other.

Speaker: Carmen Kern (RCE Gra-Styria, University of Graz)

12:00 Exploring differential cycling experiences in South Yorkshire using wearable cameras

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 nature of mobility practices. Attention must also be paid to the role of identity in shaping or interacting with the physical, social, and cultural environments in which barriers to cycling are perceived.

Video methods in cycling allow researchers to be right there with participants, exploring the meanings arising within the context of movement (Brown & Spinney, 2009). The combination of elicited video recording with talking interviews generates a powerful “empathetic encounter” between participant and researcher (Pink et al., 2017) and facilitates rich reflection on mobile practice (Simpson, 2014).

This paper, drawn from ongoing PhD research into active travel equity and inclusion in South Yorkshire, reports on findings from a study of video elicitation interviews with 12 people who cycle in the region. Each participant was equipped with a GoPro to record one regular journey, and the video watched and discussed together in an unstructured interview. Based across the variable geographies of South Yorkshire, participants’ backgrounds vary in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, nationality, (dis)ability, and socioeconomics. While providing an account of a range of barriers to cycling across the region, findings explore how participants’ identities shape their mobility and their experiences of cycling through public space.

References

Brown, K. and Spinney, J. (2009) ‘Catching a glimpse: The value of video in evoking, understanding and representing the practice of cycling’, in Mobile Methodologies.

Pink, S. et al. (2017) ‘Empathetic technologies: digital materiality and video ethnography’, Visual Studies, 32(4), pp. 371–381.

Simpson, P. (2014) 'Video' in Adey, P.; Bissell, D.; Hannam, K.; Merriman, P.; Sheller, M. Handbook of Mobilities, Routledge.

Speaker: Mia Rafalowicz-Campbell (CRESR, Sheffield Hallam University)

12:15 So you live, so you cycle. An innovative mixed-method for analysing socio-spatial and gender inequalities in the daily experience of cycling in Bogotá.

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 generates deep inequalities when it comes to daily mobility (Guzmán & Bocarejo, 2017). Cycling and walking are mostly used by the working classes on the outskirts, while the use of car remains a strong social marker (Gouëset et al., 2015). Recent work has also highlighted the highly gendered nature of mobility of care, and the fact that care activities can hardly be carried out by bicycle (Montoya Robledo et al., 2020). To gain deeper insights into the characteristics of cyclists in Bogotá, we analysed data from the 2019 urban mobility survey (Steer & CNC, 2019). From this data, we developed a typology consisting of six cyclist profiles, and then mapped the profiles. Specifically, we focused on the 3,241 individuals who reported using bicycles as their primary mode of transport within the city on the day preceding the survey. We determined the profiles using variables such as gender, age, residential location, as well as the frequency, purpose, and distance of their journeys. The maps particularly highlight how residential location influences bicycle use in the capital of Colombia. The results are then compared with the qualitative information drawn from mobile and visual ethnography that we implemented in 2021 (Büscher et al., 2010; Fincham et al., 2010; Pink, 2012). This material illustrates the daily "embodied and situated experience of cycling" (Garfinkel, 1964; Cresswell & Merriman, 2011). The combination of visual and audio data provides access to the discourse and practice of cycling as it happens (Pink, 2012; Spinney, 2011). Their analysis confirms socio-spatial and gender inequalities in the experience of cycling in the city.

Speaker: Maëlle Lucas (Université Rennes 2 - ESO Rennes)

13:00 → 14:30 Lunch

14:00 → 14:30 T2M 2024 General Assembly - open to everyone!

All interested participants are invited to join.

Speakers: Carlos Lopez Galviz (Lancaster University), Claire Pelgrims (Université libre de Bruxelles)

14:30 → 16:00 Identity, Power and Justice in Mobility Transitions

Convener: Anna-Leena Toivanen (University of Eastern Finland)

14:30 Cycle Highways and Inclusive Infrastructure: New Imaginaries, or Old Frames of Reference?

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 Gomes Ribeiro, 2021). The first cycle highways plan in France was launched in the early 2010s in Strasbourg, but the aftermaths of the COVID-19 crisis and the pop-up bike lanes experiments led to the development of several plans in big French cities. Fast, safe, and “more inclusive” are terms widely used by the municipalities and cycling activists promoting these infrastructure schemes. But are cycle highways truly more inclusive? While several studies have pointed out that cycling policies contribute to the reproduction of inequalities through fundings or infrastructure provision (Psarikidou, 2020), does this new infrastructure contribute to the transformation towards more just cycling policies?

Building on an on-going research project on the diffusion and implementation of cycle highways infrastructure projects, this contribution will focus on the actors involved in the conceptualization, standardization, design and implementation of cycle highways, and their imaginaries and frames of reference (Jobert and Muller, 1987) that guide the conception of these projects. By focusing on three Metropolitan areas – Montpellier, Paris Region and Lyon – we explore how the increasing technicality and standardization of cycling policies might tend to reduce the notion of inclusiveness to specific age and gender issues, downplaying other important questions of spatial and social accessibility to cycling. These three cases will allow the reflection on the blind spots of cycling infrastructure policies, and their contribution to just and sustainable mobility futures.

References:
Cabral Dias, G. J. and Gomes Ribeiro, P. J. (2021) ‘Cycle Highways: a new concept of infrastructure’, European Planning Studies, 29(6), pp. 1003–1020.
Jobert, B. and Muller, P. (1987) L’Etat en action, Paris, PUF.
Psarikidou, K. (2020). Em-‘powering’ niche innovations: learning from cycling inequalities. Applied Mobilities, 5(3), 271–288.

Speaker: Manon Eskenazi (Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées)

14:45 Keeping socio-technical transitions equitable: freight vehicle electrification in and around North America’s largest inland port

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 might reduce not only carbon emissions, but local pollutants that are concentrated in low-income, minority communities. In this portion of the project, we use a socio-technical transitions framework to understand the sociotechnical regime, niche, and landscape that will structure this transition. We focus in particular on the location of freight electrical vehicle charging stations, arguing that care must be taken to position such stations so that truck traffic does not further concentrate in already-burdened communities.
We compare two sites within the distributed spaces of the inland port of Chicago: Little Village and Will County. Little Village is a predominantly-Latino neighborhood on the west side of Chicago, with a history of welcoming Mexican immigrants while also suffering the negative effects of Chicago’s industrial productivity. As the regional economy has transitioned from manufacturing to distribution, Little Village has remained at the center of pollution exposure, now in the form of heavy-duty trucks. On the southwestern fringes of the metropolitan area, Will County is home to one of the earliest major inland ports in the country. In this rural location, air quality is less of a concern, but truck traffic still threatens the small towns and farmers nearby. In both cases, siting freight vehicle chargers where trucks already go will further exacerbate the local impacts of the global logistics industry, which is why a more comprehensive, equitable transition is needed.

Speaker: Julie Cidell (University of Illinois)

15:05 No change in mobility transition without including the gender perspective

There is already a substantial scientific literature and practical implementation in the area of a climate friendly mobility transition. However, there is limited research detailing how important it is for such a mobility turnaround to recognise the links between transformation and gender issues. In particular, this also involves gender differences and their intersection with other structural inequalities regarding age, income, physical ability, sexuality, spatial realities, and care work. In addition, there are still gaps in research, particularly on the intersection of climate adaptation processes with possible associated forms of justice or injustice This paper wants to present initial findings from an evaluation of climate action plans on the question of how gender-equitable climate-friendly mobility measures are; which obstacles need to be overcome on the way to a gender-equitable and climate-friendly mobility transition; how the drivers are advancing the climate-friendly mobility transition and which measures are really suitable to achieve a gender transformative mobility transition.
After a brief discussion of a gender-sensitive concept of transformation, approaches to the mobility transition are categorised in the gender equity continuum. In the next step, further examples of mobility transition measures are scrutinised from a gender dimension, e.g. the symbolic dimension, the crisis of care economy, inequalities of growth economy or institutionalized androcentrism.
Finally, prerequisites are enumerated that are essential for the consideration of a climate and gender-just mobility transition.

Speaker: Brigitte Wotha (FH Kiel)

15:20 Some aspects of socio-spatial justice in urban mobility transitions in Tbilisi, Georgia

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.

Speaker: Giorgi Kankia (Linköping University)

14:30 → 16:00 Imagining and Conceptualizing Modernity through Mobility

Convener: Jinhyoung Lee (Konkuk University)

14:30 Diasporic designs as an embodiment of Cultural Mobility: Fashion Manifesting the Narratives of Transition

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 inconsequential. One of these scapes is “ethnoscapes” (“the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guestworkers and other moving groups and persons,”(297). Movement of people conditions their ideas and the ideas, in turn, affect their movement. This paper would cogitate the idea of “ethnoscapes” in respect of fashion and explore a specific form of fashion as an effect and expression of cultural mobility by showing examples of designs by certain fashion designers/artists living in diaspora. The term ‘diasporic designs’ is being used since these designs manifests the narratives of mobility/migration of them as well as their culture. Like all other phenomena, present fashion system cannot and shouldn’t be studied by alienating it from globalisation. First, the paper would discuss the narratives and the stories of diasporic nostalgia connected to the sense of rootedness, embedded in the fashion designs as well as the description (or the accompanying text, what Roland Barthes calls “anchorage”) of these designs.
Secondly, the paper would explore the cultural mobility manifested in fashion through a decolonial standpoint by discussing how the clothing which is essentially western or of the coloniser’s culture is being used and mutated by the colonised, hence becoming the very expression of resistance. Finally, the paper would examine if this form of fashion underscores eco- consciousness or if there are any designs with the motifs on the clothing that promulgates the motives of environmental concerns

Speaker: Gurpreet Kaur (Department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh, India.)

14:45 Soviet life through the eyes of locomotives. Ramona of Rezo Gabriadze.

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 also agrees to replace a sick trapeze artist, dying cause of a fall. The play shows the Soviet world through the prism of romantic and sentimental but at the same time ironical and even absurd view. The Soviet time is shown at the same time stable )everybody knows what to expect) and mobile (the protagonists are in constant move).
The main protagonist of the show is Ramona. If Ermon is strong, resilient, efficient, Ramona is graceful, tender and helpful, ready for everything for love.
The motive of Ramona’s help is similar to an American story “The Little Engine That Could”. But if the little engine makes something impossible just cause of his optimism and trust in itself, Ramona makes something similar cause of romantic and helpful nature. The little engine is a metaphor of an American dream, but Ramona is a metaphor of everything what was dear and precious in the Soviet world.
Another interesting parallel is between Ramona and the cartoon of the 1967 “The locomotive from Romashkovo”. If we compare them we can see similarity in the idea of animating everything and the the dialogue between locomotives and human beings and in the characters of the protagonists. Both are romantic, sentimental, helpful. The dichotomy children – adults is also seen in “Ramona”: Ermon and the station master are adult and the staff of the circus are children. Ramona makes a way from the protected child to a sacrificial loving woman.
The end of the show is at the same time tragic and full of hopes. After Ramona’s death Ermon destroys itself. But after melting two new locomotives were made. The death of Soviet culture metaphorically shown in the story was tragic for many inhabitants but the new life was giving some hopes to keep the best in a new way.

Speaker: Victoria Legkikh (Technische Universität München)

ramona.pptx

15:00 Everyday Mobility in Istanbul at the Turn of the 20th Century: Navigating a City in Flux

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 corpus of primary sources, including periodicals, diaries and memoirs to uncover narratives of everyday mobility practices. These narratives of journeys to work, school, leisure activities, social visits, and access to essential services, are then analyzed through the lens of "mobility studies." This approach recognizes that everyday movement is not merely functional but deeply intertwined with factors such as gender, class, age, and existing infrastructure and power dynamics.
By examining these interwoven layers, the research demonstrates how everyday mobility in late 19th and early 20th century Istanbul served as both a reflection of and a catalyst for broader urban transformations. Drawing on rich narratives of everyday mobility found in periodicals and ego documents of the time, this paper provides a nuanced historical understanding of Istanbul's transformation. It reveals how the daily act of navigating a city in flux became inextricably linked to the broader social and economic currents.
*This research is supported by Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) 3501 Project, “Everyday Mobility in Late 19th Century and Early 20th Century Istanbul”, Start Date: 03/15/2023- End date:03/15/2023, Kadir Has University, Istanbul.

Speaker: Müge Özbek (Kadir Has University)

15:15 Transport, mobility, and photography in Portugal (1870s-1910s)

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. The analysis uses a quantitative and a qualitative approach. Statistical analysis shows what transportation system, type of vehicle, infrastructure, etc. was the most or the least photographed, while a methodology combining Roland Barthes’ semiotics with discourse analysis in journalism searches for the meanings present in the photographic collection. This methodology is applied to a collection of images depicting different mobility-objects published in the illustrated press (namely magazines Illustração Portugueza and Occidente) or kept in several archives. The identification of the signifiers present in each picture (and their captions) supports the classification of the images in different categories, including infrastructure (engineering works, roads, railways, ports, stations, workshops) and vehicles (locomotives, coaches, wagons, automobiles, bicycles, trams, ships, boats). The contexts in which the mobility-objects are included offer another form of classification of the photographs. Those contexts range from construction, to use, assembly, repair, maintenance, special events (reception of kings, for instance), disasters, and landscape shots. The analysis of the photographs’ studium and of written sources accompanying the images paves the way for the identification of signifieds and myths present in the images, promoting the understanding of the creation of meaning and representations about Portuguese transportation systems. This paper adds to the field of history of transportation and mobility using the lens of visual culture. Moreover, it contributes to the ongoing discussion about the utilisation of photographs in historical research as a consistent primary source, much more than an ordinary graphic support.

Speaker: Hugo Pereira (NOVA School of Science and Technology - CIUHCT)

14:30 → 16:00 The Latest Mobility: Two centuries of Italian policies and tendencies regarding regional transportation and mobility

Transformations in mobility have occurred in the modern era through forms of coordination or competition between various means of transport. One need only think of animal traction or inland navigation, the main means of travel in the 18th century, which were replaced during the 19th century by the railway. The development of the automobile, especially in the post-World War II period, saw the railway assume an increasingly marginal role in transport compared to it. The aim of this panel is to analyse the forms of coordination and competition between various means of transport, from a regional perspective and with a diachronic outlook, that developed in various parts of the Italian peninsula from the 19th century to the present day.
Italy, also due to its particular socio-economic and morphological situation, has always been characterised by a multiplicity of means of transport and regional differences, which have always experimented with situations of coordination and/or competition between them. There have been times and places where it has been possible to implement greater coordination between these means, while in most cases the new means replaced, more or less promptly, the previous one, completely supplanting it. The result of this trajectory, often contradictory, has led mobility today to be almost entirely focused on private means, with serious environmental damage.
This panel intends to bring together regional contributions, chronologically included in the indicated period, from the numerous disciplines related to the history of transport such as, but not limited to, the history of transport, economic history, geographic sciences, tourism history and environmental history.
The panel will be divided into 3 fifteen-minute presentations, with questions grouped at the end of the third presentation. In conclusion the chair speaker will wrap up the panel with some closing remarks.

Convener: Massimo Moraglio (T.U. Berlin)

14:30 Steam and water: was rail transport the last nail in the coffin of inland navigation in Lombardy- Venetia?

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 Italy. Railways are often attributed to having replaced canals as the means of transporting goods and people.
For Italy, there are several particularities that complicate this answer. Firstly, the canal system already appeared to be in decline before the emergence of rail transport, then the restricted geographic space in which river navigation was able to manifest itself as a large-scale phenomenon, the same region was also the first to create a capillary railway network connecting the numerous medium-sized towns. At the same time the complex political situation of the Peninsula had a significant relevance in the missed investments in a large system of inland waterways transport, in which the many rivers, and above all the Po, were not only a mean of transport but also a frontier between different state entities. While in the first half of the 19th century the creation of the Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia seemed to give dynamism to river navigation. In the second half of the century there were projects pushing toward the direct substitution of the canals with railways or their covering such as the proposed Martesana-Metro line.
The sources used, in addition to the existing bibliography produced, among others by Bigatti, Ogliari and Della Peruta, will be the contemporary analyses of Cattaneo, the reports of the different transport companies and the statistical documentation produced by the various governments of the northern states of the Peninsula.

Speaker: Federico Meneghini Sassoli (Università di Pavia)

14:45 From infrastructure progress to transport service worsening: The case of transforming the Circumetnea railway into a subway and its impacts on historical and landscape heritage in the Simeto Valley inner area in Sicily.

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 economic development and identity of many communities that, in previous centuries, were peripheral to the main economic flows of Sicily. In the 20th century, the Circumetnea transformed from a line mainly used for transporting local products and goods to a passenger railway, particularly responding to mobility needs for work and study.
Starting from the 1980s, due to the heavy urban traffic and the lack of adoption of policies to improve the local public service in the city of Catania, it was decided to transform the urban section of the Circumetnea railway into a subway with a standard gauge. Recently, the project to extend the metro section to the municipality of Paternò (and later Adrano) has been funded by the European Recovery Fund (NRRP), foreseeing the dismantlement of 40km of the Circumetnea line.
The research aims at highlighting the repercussions on the mobility system and the historical landscape heritage of the inner area of Simeto Valley, crossed by the historical line, analysing the effects of the previous infrastructure upgrading works carried out in the period 2005-2011, with the undergrounding of the railway line in the towns of Santa Maria di Licodia, Biancavilla and Adrano. The interventions, carried out more to avoid interfering with private vehicle traffic, were not included in a broader urban regeneration plan, nor did they improve the service offered.

Speaker: Giulio Pappa (IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca)

15:00 Secondary railways and automobile competition: crisis and first transformations of mobility in the Tuscan inland areas (1930-1945)

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 inland areas. In the 1930s, in fact, automobile competition began to grow at an ever-increasing rate, and the secondary railways were the means of transport most affected by the new vehicle, given its greater advantages in transporting both goods and passengers over medium and short distances. The question to be answered is: what measures did the Tuscan secondary railways take to try to 'resist' the growth of road transport? In fact, not only were new measures introduced at a national level, such as Law Decree no. 1496 of 14 October 1932, by which part of rail transport could be replaced by car transport, but a number of transformations were also attempted on these railways, such as electrifications, staff reductions, increases in train lengths and speeds, and changes in tariffs. Through the analysis of the main texts of the time, such as those by Tajani, Capaccioli, Trevisani or Corini, and of archival documents, periodicals, journals and more recent bibliography, the debate will be reconstructed around the theme of competition and coordination between secondary railways and road transport, and the actions and interactions that occurred between the two vehicles will be highlighted using the Tuscan territory as a case study. An element of originality of this intervention is to focus the analysis on a transport infrastructure that has remained on the margins of contemporary Italian historiographical treatises, namely the secondary railways.

Speaker: Leandro Stacchini (Università di Firenze e Siena)

16:00 → 16:30 Coffee break

16:30 → 18:00 Contestations around Mobility and Infrastructures

Convener: Mariya Petrova (Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography)

16:30 Productive, inclusive and smart? (Un)timely endings of shared cycle schemes in Stockholm, Sweden

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.

Speaker: Karin Edberg (Linköping University)

16:45 Protest against new motorways in France and the myth of travel time savings

The growing protests against road projects in France reflect a changing attitude to mobility and speed. The high-profile case of the Toulouse-Castres A69 is just one example of the fifty or so local protests that have now come together under the banner of the national coalition "La Déroute des Routes".
As far as transport policy is concerned, these changes in perspective remain largely ignored. Socio-economic assessments of projects continue to place a significant monetary value on the benefits of speed, often to the detriment of environmental impacts.
In the most recent report (2018) on the reduction of the permitted speed to 110 km/h on motorways, the time lost represents a cost of €1,145 million to society. The environmental benefits (less fuel, pollution and CO2) are estimated at only €474 million . The balance is clearly in favour of maintaining the 130 km/h speed limit. In the opposite direction, the same logic applies to acceleration projects such as the western bypass of Rouen. The benefits in terms of time savings (€1,352 million) outweigh all other considerations and "theoretically" validate the merits of the project . The legitimacy of a transport infrastructure is therefore based almost entirely on the supposed time savings for the population. This is a real myth, a sleight of hand based on the magical transformation of speed into time savings .
In the long run, fast transport does not save time, but space. People use speed gains to travel further, not to "save time" . So, strictly speaking, neither time nor money is saved. The concept of the value of time used by economists, and the assumptions that underlie it, are thus at the heart of the controversies surrounding the benefits of high-speed transport infrastructure .
This paper attempts to deconstruct the monetary value attached to the supposed time savings made possible by transport. It will show that it is no longer 'scientifically' possible today, in the industrialised countries, to promote new transport infrastructures in the name of the 'general interest' (general appeal?) of time savings. This paper is based on the results of exploratory research on the slowing down of travel speeds and lifestyles , funded by ADEME (the public agency responsible for developing ecological transition policies in France), and on more than a year's work for the General Inspectorate for the Environment and Sustainable Development (the policy monitoring department of the Ministry for Ecological Transition) to update the values of time in France.

Speaker: Emmanuel Munch

17:00 Public Transport and the Right to the City in a Medium Sized West German Town

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 development caused a high degree of urban sprawl. Problems in managing the increasing traffic and the need for housing led to demolition waves in the city centre and the construction of a social housing block in the suburban area Blankenhagen.
French philosopher and city-sociologist Henri Lefebvre referred to such a development when reflecting on his idea of a “Right to the City”. Stating the loss of the city’s centrality function and the isolation of social classes and lifestyles. Applying this idea – and his further thoughts on the production of spaces in fordist cities – in urban history, public transport may play a decisive role. To what extend is public transport able to compensate the loss of the city’s centrality? What conflicts arouse around the offer and organisation of public transport and how were they mediated? How did contemporary city critique deal with public transport and what other social movements took it into account ¬– feminism, ecological movements, labour movement and unions? My work allows for an insight into such issues, studying an usually lesser recognized medium sized town.

Speaker: tim zumloh (LWL-Institut für westfälische Regionalgeschichte)

16:30 → 18:00 Mobility at the Checkpoint

Convener: Christoph Schimkowsky (University of Tokyo)

16:30 Contested mobility and temporality in the border of south-east Georgia

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 outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020. The border between Georgia and Azerbaijan suddenly “materialised” after the closure of the check-point with Azerbaijan in March 2020. This has affected the mobility of Azerbaijanis in both countries, including the maintenance of translocal family ties and inspired new migration trends (i. a Poland, Germany). The border as the transient and material phenomenon of division between states is still negotiated and contested as exemplified by its former and current state, also as boundary between communities and the state. I focus on the border in material, social, political and symbolic dimensions, using participant observation and conducting conversations with residents of the area who identify themselves as Azerbaijanis. In so doing I’m interested in contexts in which the border manifests and (dis)appears for them. What the border porosity means in this particular circumstance? Under what conditions the border is open and for whom still closed, and how it is materialised? What kind of infrastructures, strategies and narratives are used? To find answers to the research questions, I will also touch on challenges related to the dynamic status of the border.

Speaker: Klaudia Kosicińska (Institute of Slavic Studies PAS)

16:45 Cross-border Public transport in the trinational Euroregion Neisse-Nisa-Nysa. History and perspectives

The fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 triggered a development that led to a re-naissance of intensive interdependencies between Western and Eastern Eu-rope and thus also between Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic. The opening of the borders paved the way for the development of neighbourly ex-change relationships, which resulted in an immediate need for mobility.

On the other hand, the following system transformation, which was accompa-nied by deindustrialisation and mass unemployment, has further weakened the border regions, which were already considered structurally weak, and fun-damentally changed the mobility structure: While there was a significant de-cline in intra-regional transport volumes due to the loss of jobs and the result-ing exodus of the population, inter-regional transport volumes, i.e. exchanges between the regions, increased significantly: The remaining population in-creasingly travelled further to pursue gainful employment in the economically strong conurbations. The existing public transport providers, above all the state-run railways, were unable to meet the new mobility needs with a modern transport service at this time. On the other hand, there was strong growth on the roads: The population's desire for individual mobility had become much stronger and easier to fulfil after 1989.

With the increasing permeability of borders as part of the first EU enlargement to the east in 2004, followed by the expansion of the Schengen area in 2007, cross-border mobility has received an additional boost. This has increased fur-ther since the abolition of restrictions on access to the German labour market in 2011, whereby the continuing wage and price gap, in addition to the major shortage of skilled workers in many areas, represents a considerable incentive. For the population in the border regions in particular, commuting to the other side has become part of the reality of life in order to pursue gainful employment or take advantage of services of general interest as well as local amenities and recreation. While the car has been the dominant mode of transport of choice from the outset and remains so, local public transport is increasingly becoming the focus of attention for those involved. In recent years, cross-border services have been established that are increasingly in demand and require further ex-pansion.
The fact that there is no cross-border regulatory framework and that the border forms a dividing line between different political, economic, technical and legal systems also presents the development of local public transport with additional hurdles that have to be overcome and in reality lead to the services only partial-ly meeting the requirements of the population and the political objectives in terms of quantity and quality.

These ambivalent lines of development will be illustrated using the example of the tri-national Euroregion Neisse-Nisa-Nysa, which forms the core of the study presented here.

Speaker: Moritz Filter

17:00 Waiting at Giurgiulesti Customs: Borders, Bureaucracy, and Geopolitics in between Ukraine, Moldova, and the EU

Customs and geopolitics condition one another and are produced
on a transnational, national, and local scale. The Russian
war in Ukraine gives this interdependency a human face in the
form of thousands of lorry drivers waiting to be cleared at external
EU borders. This article explores the reasons and the inherent
power structure behind movement and stasis at the border triangle
between Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania. Flanking the
European Union, this border is a historically contested and infrastructurally
dense nodal point where corruption is rife. Analysing
EU policy discourse on border management, and combining
semi-structured interviews with customs officials, conversations
with lorry drivers, and border and office-space ethnography, this
article brings together different narratives of Moldova’s integration
into the EU customs space. All these perspectives articulate
cross-border bureaucracy through a geopolitical lens. Thus, this
article ethnographically debunks the techno-bureaucratic discourse
of customs regulation that emphasises efficiency, rationality,
and transparency by shedding light on the everyday
dimension of customs and geopolitics as a lived practice.

Speaker: Claudia Eggart

16:30 → 18:00 Narrative Representations of Mobility

Convener: Jinhyoung Lee (Konkuk University)

16:30 The Road in Contemporary Francophone African Narratives of Mobility

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 foreground contemporary global mobilities, approaching them through different literary genres: Oho Bambe’s slam novel focuses on Afroeuropean clandestine mobilities whereas Sarr’s travel chronicle maps out the author-narrator’s work-related journeys across the world. The texts attest to the “conspicuously uneven” qualities of contemporary global mobilities (Huggan 2009, 3) – on the one hand, clandestine migrants’ precarious “stepwise journeys” (Schapendonk 2013, 11) from Africa to Europe, and the effortless hypermobilities of the global kinetic elite, on the other. Despite the discrepancies between these categories of mobility, the texts share similarities in their uses the trope of the road (see Coulibaly & Agnessan 2023) and their formal explorations with the mobility theme. In Les Lumières, the road is invested with material and metaphorical meanings: it is both an infrastructure facilitating migratory journeys but also a symbol for the migrants’ precarious errantry. In La Saveur, the road is linked to modern modes of hypermobility as the author-narrator travels by car from peri-urban airports to the cities he is visiting. La Saveur contrasts the road with the street, associated with the urban space and slow mobilities. My reading focuses on the uses of the trope of the road in these narratives of mobility and pays attention to their poetics of mobility (Toivanen 2021, 18-20), namely their strategies of translating the thematic representation of mobility into literary form.

Speaker: Anna-Leena Toivanen (University of Eastern Finland)

16:45 Alien Encounters with the Past, Present, and Future: Mobility Justice in South African Science-Fiction

The proposed paper discusses representations of embodied mobility practices in recent South African science-fiction tracing the ways in which cultural representations of enforced mobilities are constructed. Engaging with Sheller’s theorization on Mobility Justice (2018) and critical Black Mobilities, the paper addresses the construction of (im)mobilities as well as their inherent potential to form decolonising counter-narratives. For this purpose, the paper analysis the depiction of mobility in a selection of recent South African science-fiction, such as the film District 9 (2009) as well as the short stories ‘Poison’ (H. Rose-Innes 2008) and ‘What Pushes Against This Moment’ (VH Ncube 2022). I argue that the aesthetic strategies of postcolonial science-fiction and Africanfuturism in South African representations of mobility have a distancing effect that allows for an intricate engagement with the real world’s past and present uneven mobilities (Cresswell 2014, 2016).
These texts problematise the mobility of racialised bodies by introducing aliens, time travel, and toxic environmental disasters that ask which privileges it takes to be considered (im)mobile and (un)free. The audiences are confronted with (physically) deteriorating whiteness that is too immobile to escape disaster and a black subjecthood capable of moving from the present through the past into a more just future thus turning established modern Western discourses on racialized (im)mobility upside down. South African speculative fiction alienates established perspectives of (post)colonial mobilities as a commentary on the long durée of mobile itineraries of transatlantic slavery and colonial conquest. The analysis shows how speculative aesthetics are used to embed narratives of subversive mobility into existing discourses of the racialisation of non-white bodies stressing the importance to envision more just mobility futures.

Speaker: Sophie Kriegel

17:00 Transatlantic Slavery and the “Ghostly Afterlives” of Black Im/Mobilities

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). The locomotive and automotive histories staged in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Percival Everett’s I Am Not Sidney Poitier point towards the long durée of mobile itineraries of transatlantic slavery and their subversive potentials. Readings of the protagonist’s fugitive journeys aboard the liberty train and automobile road trip show how mobilities are accelerated for some or stasis is enforced for others, particularly non-white people and bodies (Cresswell 2014, 2016; Sheller, 2018).
The physical rail networks (including abolitionist safehouses) and routes of the railway and roadway shape “critical infrastructure” (Korpela, 2016, p. 115) that is institutions, systems, and laws that structure movement for non-white bodies and disproportionately enforce surveillance to confine and control them. The paper demonstrates how the novels recentre captive and descendant voices and interrogates the persisting racialised mobilities which re-emerge from the aftermaths of racial slavery’s (im)mobile structuring. Moreover, the analyses show how slavery’s im(mobile) regimes produce persisting discourses and systems that codify and represent enslaved people and their mobile itineraries as non-sanctioned and transgressive and how this, in turn, shapes their embodied practises and identities with transgenerational consequences. In so doing, the freedom flight and the adventure travel on the open road challenge assumptions of mobility that imply an equal free flow of people, and in the context of slavery, linked to freedom.

Speaker: Marian Ofori-Amoafo (University of Bayreuth)

17:15 Unified Segregation on the American Interstate: Comparing Civil Rights Era Road Narratives by John Williams (This is My Country Too) and John Steinbeck (Travels with Charlie)

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 slick travel writing and tourism magazine, Holiday, which had nearly a million subscribers, regularly featured road trip pieces. Both John Steinbeck, who is white, and John Williams, who is black, wrote American tour serials that were later compiled into books, Travels with Charlie and This is my Country Too, respectively. Both texts start with the same premise, the writer setting out to (re)discover America, and both grapple with the intersectional problems of racial injustice and mobility. While Steinbeck’s text would become a classic of American literature, Williams’ book fell out of print and has gone largely forgotten. This presentation will center Williams’ text, yet read it against Steinbeck’s, in order to map out these two writer’s divergent experiences of the American landscape. Whereas Steinbeck makes some effort to bear witness to the ugly backlash confronting school integration efforts in Louisiana, among other instances of racial discrimination, his progressive nostalgias speed past any sustained reflection on the scale and complexity of America’s legacy of civil rights abuses. Williams, however, is not able to avoid the issue. As he travels he is profiled, intimidated, threatened, and terrorized. While he thoughtfully examines American promises and problems, the anxieties over his safety build toward visceral consequences. For Williams, America remains brutally segregated in spite of the labor towards unification through personalized mobility. A close comparison of these two texts sheds light on blind spots (pun very much intended) within the American progressive political agenda of the 1960s, and it thereby contributes some historical context for confronting persistent mobility-justice concerns within the urgent contemporary need to address both the social and ecological consequences of our travel infrastructures.

Speaker: Andrew Vogel (Kutztown State University of Pennsylvania)

18:00 → 19:00 Tranfer to the cinema - Schaubühne Lindenfels

From Augustusplatz, take tram line 14 to Karl-Heine-Str./Merseburger Str., or from Hauptbahnhof train stop, take tram line 3 to Felsenkeller.

19:00 → 20:00 Dinner at Schaubühne Lindenfels

20:00 → 21:30 "Corridor #8" screening and Discussion

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/

Speakers: Boris Missirkov (AGITPROP Production), Lyubomir Pozharliev (Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography)

Thursday 26 September

10:00 → 14:00 Excursions