Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, Misinformation and Dissenting Publics: Crisis of Hyper Local Civic Democracy at the Metropolitan Scale
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Keywords: LTNs, social media, misinformation, social infrastructure, crisis, political struggle, civic democracy
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract
Authors:
Susan Moore, Bartlett School of Planning, UCL, UK
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Abstract
Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs), widely championed by government and lobbyists as optimum instruments for advancing sustainable communities via the Active Travel policy agenda have proliferated across London and other UK Cities, particularly in the post-Covid period. Yet, a series of recent high-profile reversals of several such LTN trials in London Boroughs via local referenda suggests that local publics are not so convinced and has resulted in highly volatile local anti-LTN campaigns. Much of the discourse has played out dramatically and aggressively over social media. Claims of misinformation are ubiquitous to these online debates, visibly dividing the communities into ‘for’ and ‘against’ and exacerbating pre-existing social divisions. But dismissing dissenting voices as ‘NIMBY’, 'misinformed' or 'unenlightened' to the progressive cause of sustainable or healthy communities is potentially as damaging to the agenda as the contestation itself. Dissent and the proliferation of misinformation signify an emergent and deeper political struggle (Farkas and Schou 2018) wherein certain social groups in the local areas feel marginalised and under-represented. In short, a crisis of hyper local civic democracy is unfolding at a metropolitan scale. By focusing on the lens of misinformation in social media discourse on LTNs, and understanding social media as infrastructure, this paper unpacks an ‘everyday’ crisis of the urban condition wherein contestations of the lauded imperatives of physical and social infrastructure change are occurring amidst entrenched patterns of marginalisation within neighbourhoods undergoing LTN-branded transformation.
Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, Misinformation and Dissenting Publics: Crisis of Hyper Local Civic Democracy at the Metropolitan Scale
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Paper Abstract