Constructing Users in Urban Planning and Transport: identities, exclusions and power

Session Proposal
Meeting of Society for Social Studies of Society, 4S
Tokyo
25-29 August 2010

Session organizers: Vasilis Galis, vasilis.galis@liu.se and Jane Summerton, jane.summerton@vti.se

From sidewalks to subways, from busses to bicycle lanes, our urban environments increasingly constitute sociotechnical zones of mobility through which a large number of people transport on a daily basis. These growing levels of transfer do not only stand for a technical challenge for planners and policy-makers, they also generate behaviours and
identities among travelers. We witness the evolution of highly complex transport infrastructures that radically construct the practice and experience of urban mobility. Currently, the role of travelers in designing transport systems is receiving widespread attention. The role and identity of “the traveler” is at the very centre of the dynamics of
contemporary cities and their transportation infrastructures. This situation has been acknowledged by a series of developments in the fields of urban studies, geography, sociology, anthropology, and others related areas in which the study of urban mobility appears as is main subject.

In this context, the aim of this session is to bring together STS researchers to present and discuss empirical or theoretical work about the role and engagement of travellers in transport planning, the ways that planers and policy-makers construct travellers’ identities while planning transport networks, how planners engage users/travellers in transportation planning and how transport networks generate/prescribe (mobility) behaviour. We welcome contributions covering the following and related aspects of urban transport design and development:

•    user-producer interactions in transport planning (or urban planning more generally)
•      identity/mobility formation during the design of transport systems
•      the performative role of expectations and hope in shaping urban mobility
•      the connected understandings of design inequalities and mobility (in)justice
•      social and cultural forms implied in designers/decision-makers blueprints
•      planners’ constructions of various users’ identities when planning transport systems.
•      The role of travellers as both users and co-producers of transport systems.

If you would like to take part in our session please send an abstract to vasilis.galis@liu.se before the 1st of February. You can also visit the 4S official website at http://www.4sonline.org/meeting.htm