Social Polis Social Platform on Cities and Social Cohesion

1. Social PolisSocial Platform on Cities and Social Cohesion www.socialpolis.eu

2. EF4: Mobility Survey Paper Konrad Miciukiewicz & Geoff Vigar Global Urban Research Unit Newcastle University

3. Historical overview • Chicago school • Time space analyses • Rise of engineering and economic methods

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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)

8. 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

9. 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.

10. EF 4 Research Agenda List of proposed topics:

11. Proposed topics • Understanding the role of privatisation in splintering the urban. • Political challenges in the implementation of cohesive policies. • Transferability of socially cohesive policy solutions across Europe. • Relationships between everyday life patterns in various spheres and social cohesion.