Social Polis Social Platform on Cities and Social Cohesion .
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Transcript of Social Polis Social Platform on Cities and Social Cohesion .
Social PolisSocial Platform on Cities and Social Cohesion
www.socialpolis.eu
EF4: Mobility Survey Paper
Konrad Miciukiewicz & Geoff Vigar Global Urban Research UnitNewcastle University
Historical overview
Chicago school
Time space analyses
Rise of engineering and economic methods
Social cohesion and transport
Basic needs Universal service provision
vs the entrepreneurial city Privatisation, marketisation
and social inclusion
Toward the splintered city: from individuals, to households, to communities & neighbourhoods
Exclusionary Forms (Church et al 2000)
Physical: barriers in the built environment, permeability Geographic: peripherality often combined with poor
public transport Facilities: dispersal of services Economic: job seeking, education Time: time poverty esp. for carers, transport policy often
reveals an ‘unequal politics of time’- Urry Fear/ security: in the city, on streets and transport
networks Space: deliberate & unintended exclusion of groups
Mobility rich and mobility poor
Hypermobility is taken for granted among high income earners, it is “normalised and unremarkable” (Bondi and Christie 2000: 340)
Contrast to small socio-spatial worlds of low income citizens
Thus, “mobility is rarely recognised as an issue except in its absence” (Bondi and Christie 2000: 340)
Class privilege is thus hidden, with low income households largely voiceless in policy and media debates
While the hypermobile (often unconsciously) maintain or increase the spatio-temporal reach of their daily lives thru calls for new infrastructure and resistance to demand-side measures such as road pricing
EU Research
A vast body of work from various directorates It exhibits a techno-determinism, research is often
technology-led Links to cohesion agendas often implicit Partly as a consequence, but also related to
(understandable) trend, the social has been displaced by the ecological in policy and research
Lots of best practice without much attention to the dynamics of context, transferability etc. (altho see work under FP6 Curacao and Civitas for rare exceptions)
Mobilising social cohesion in transport
Low salience of social issues, and more particularly of methods that give prominence to social issues
The challenge: To develop an alternative To promote it widely and build a platform
Issues: Attention to context Attention to motility: and by implication to suppressed journeys, ‘time-
space constraints and affordances’ Attention to the exclusionary factors present in the environment and
on networks and in wider society Attention to implementation of findings and of future policies
Towards a more progressive transport policy
‘Putting social cohesion back in’: methodologically; politically: Practical extant examples: power of using principles of environmental justice, social
cost auditing, accessibility auditing, assessing who benefits from policies and strategies?
Ontological problems in the discipline, some attempts to over come this e.g. accessibility auditing, but even these are fixes and are not fundamental
A people first, not technology first, approach in research commissioning: there are many practical initiatives, but these are currently disparate- beware the stigmatisation trap
Beyond the field embedding mobility issues into wider governance processes remains problematic in many places e.g. social cost auditing features rarely.
List of proposed topics:
EF 4 Research Agenda
Proposed topics
1. Understanding the role of privatisation in splintering the urban.
2. Political challenges in the implementation of cohesive policies.
3. Transferability of socially cohesive policy solutions across Europe.
4. Relationships between everyday life patterns in various spheres and social cohesion.