Towards just transitions to low-carbon mobility

Professor Tim Schwanen

Professor Tim Schwanen, Director of the Transport Studies Unit (TSU) in the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford

The presentation is available on YouTube. You can watch and listen to it here.   Towards just transitions to low-carbon mobility

The need to rapidly move away from fossil fuels in transport is now commonly accepted. The myriad initiatives by governments, the private and third sectors and citizens, to transition to low-carbon mobility are now underway across the globe. One outcome of this is the rapid expansion of electric mobility. It seems, however, that in the rush to transition to low-carbon mobility the emphasis is usually on questions of efficiency, cost-effectiveness and speed of change. Concerns over justice are at best of secondary importance and, when considered, the focus tends to be equity or distributional justice. This is certainly an important dimension but justice in mobility transitions cannot be reduce to matters of equity alone. In the presentation I will offer a framework for thinking about justice in mobility transitions that builds on earlier work on energy, transport and mobility justice. I will also begin to explore how justice can be valued vis-à-vis efficiency, cost-effectiveness and speed of change in transition thinking and praxis. Throughout I will draw on recent and ongoing empirical research on multiple forms of mobility (e.g., cycling, electric vehicles, mobility services) undertaken in different places on the planet.

Speaker

Tim Schwanen is Professor of Transport Studies and Geography and Director of the Transport Studies Unit (TSU) in the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford. He is also Fellow in Geography at St Anne’s College, Oxford. He joined the TSU in March 2009 and became Director in September 2015. His research concentrates on the geographies of the everyday mobilities of people, goods and information, and analyses how these are changing in tandem with urbanisation, the unfolding climate crisis, technological innovation, and increasing socio-spatial inequalities

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