ABSTRACT
This chapter builds on field observation and experimentation in cities in developed and developing countries, and an ongoing collaboration between researchers in Chile, India, Canada, the United States and Europe. Our positionality combines experience with activism, planning, transport engineering and architecture, the fields in which we work.
Although urban transport systems are socio-technical hybrids, in practice they are seldom treated as such. Despite 50 years of contestation, transport engineers and planners have imposed a global system of “automobility” (Beckmann, 2001; Sheller and Urry, 2000) on cities in both the North and in the South. Perhaps the most evident result is the way that transport systems today reinforce exclusion, as highways segregate and isolate large communities of low-income families or slice through traditional neighbourhoods, expropriating current residents in favour of highways, subways and other transport infrastructure. Planning for the mobilities of a powerful minority traps the majority, generating multidimensional immobilities that threaten human, social and urban development.
This chapter explores a richer palette of definitions of “social” sustainability particularly as it relates to this (im)mobility paradox, highlighting the role of social agency for justice and equity as neglected, but crucial. We develop and use a framework to study how actions by “ecologies of actors” in specific niches of “transport mode ecologies” realize social sustainability through battles for social justice in transport policies, in Delhi (India) and Santiago (Chile).
In these experiences with transport-related conflicts, political agency emerges among grassroots organizations. As they interact with academic, governmental, public, other citizen and private actors, people challenge limited interpretations of economic or environmental sustainability, calling for new ways of co-creating sustainable mobilities for all, despite the global dominance of automobility.
