Mobility & Development

Question 1

What are the responses to too little mobility?

Answer 1

Cities:
Infrastructure construction and expansion – mostly roads, but also bus rapid transit (BRT)
Often sponsored by foreign donors, incl. development banks

Rural areas:
Road building programmes, often sponsored by foreign donors
Long-standing academic debate but increasing consensus that:
- Roads can facilitate economic activity and access to services
- Effects are socially differentiated, often smallest for the poor
- Road investment alone is not enough; other conditions need to be in place

Question 2

What are the consequences of too much mobility?

Answer 2

Excessive congestion
Urban sprawl
Air pollution
Health problems & poor quality of life
Intensified social inequalities

Question 3

What are the consequences of mobility which is too long/far?

Answer 3

Urban:
High land prices in central areas push out poorer households who relocate to periphery and then have to travel extensively to employment, education, healthcare in central areas (Cervero 2013)
High dependence on informal (mini)buses, taxis and walking

Rural:
Long distances / travel times to education, healthcare and markets
Effects are often gendered – in part because of gender roles and constraints imposed by patriarchal gender norms (Porter 2011)

Question 4

What are the consequences of dangerous mobility?

Answer 4

Representation and experience difficult to disentangle:
Porter (2011): discourses about lack of safety drawn upon to constrain mobility of women and girls in Sub-Saharan Africa
Lucas (2011): experience of minibuses (kombos) as unsafe for women [alongside them being expensive, unreliable and uncomfortable] in the Pretoria area in South Africa
Other research: lack of personal safety used as one argument to justify regulation and formalisation of various informal transport systems

Question 5

How can we decolonise transport research?

Answer 5

Complicate, slow down and disrupt expert knowledge:

• Open up ‘western’ worldviews, theories, concepts, methods & research practices re geographies of (urban) transport – this includes rewriting their genealogies
• Explore effects of their invocation – what is rendered in/visible? What power relationships are enacted?

New circulations and dialogues: new theories, concepts, methods & research practices that move beyond universalising understandings of urban transport and do not posit ‘western’ transport as the norm