The potential for a just transition to electric urban mobility: a study of four European cities - by Tim Schwanen

Electrification of transport is essential to limiting the sector’s contribution to climate breakdown, but it is increasingly recognised that electrification should not only be rapid and efficient but also socially just. It is also clear that policy and local governments have key roles to play in achieving just electric mobility transitions, even though the policy processes that shape and condition just transition trajectories remain poorly studied and understood. In this lecture, I will first outline an analytical approach to studying the role of local policy in just electric mobility transitions that builds and integrates thinking on policy assemblages, governmentality and mobility justice. I will then use that approach to consider the potential for just electric mobility transitions in four medium-sized European cities at different stages of the electrification process – Oslo, Utrecht, Bristol, and Poznan. Using policy documents analysis, I will analyse the working arrangements of problematisations, techniques, technologies, logics and knowledges of which electric mobility policy in each city exist, as well as the multiple effects these generate. Implications for the realisation of just transitions in urban mobility will be identified and discussed.

Mobility

For the Mobile Lives Forum, mobility is understood as the process of how individuals travel across distances in order to deploy through time and space the activities that make up their lifestyles. These travel practices are embedded in socio-technical systems, produced by transport and communication industries and techniques, and by normative discourses on these practices, with considerable social, environmental and spatial impacts.

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