ABSTRACT
From ‘smart growth’ in the 1990s to ‘smart cities’ today, the challenge of reducing car dependency and improving social equity and access has raised crucial questions regarding the social dimensions of sustainability, particularly given a new international consensus regarding Sustainable Development Goals.
Although there are many important synergies, there are also major conflicts among these diverse agendas. Nowhere is this more evident than in concerns about gender and other forms of equity, inclusion/exclusion, access, and (im)mobility.
For cities in Latin America, this situation is compounded by the high percentage of daily trips that women make on public transit, walking, and, where perceived as viable, by taxi, collective taxi, private bicycle, cycle-taxis, public bike share, and other para-transit and non-motorised services. These modes are often neglected within smart city approaches: ‘big’ data generated by sensors, for example, may not provide gender-disaggregated data, and Mobility as a Service may not consider walking, cycling, and intermodal walk-bike-bus strategies as central to IT platforms.
Are ‘smart’ cities really smart enough to improve social justice? New information technology platforms could play a major role in improving intermodal walk-bike-bus combinations. But in a region where even modes are typically planned individually by decision makers in different ministries or city government offices, integrating gender, health, security/safety, and other components into already beleaguered transport systems poses a major challenge.
Based on interdisciplinary studies combining planning, geography, transport engineering, and other methods in a small regional city, Temuco-Padre Las Casas, and a major metropolitan region, Santiago, Chile, this chapter reflects on how smart city strategies could potentially neglect or, more hopefully, activate powerful interactions between gender and transport to achieve sustainability with equity.
