Justice without rethinking planning?: An appraisal of available frameworks of Transport Justice and discussing critical formulations
Topics:
Keywords: Transport Justice, Transport Planning, Mobility Justice, Urban Mobility, Capability Approach, Critical Theory
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Authors:
Nishant Singh,
Geetam Tiwari,
Reetika Khera,
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Abstract
Recent scholarly contributions have brought to the fore the need to embed a variety of mobility problems in the theoretical landscape of distributive justice. However, most contributions focus only on the ‘distribution’ of transport goods while ignoring the social processes and institutionalised relationships that guide this distribution. Moreover, the underlying values of what constitutes as justice in transport remain incoherent and unambitious. In this paper, I argue that analytical focus should be shifted to those power relations which bring about suffering in the matters subjected to transport planning. Furthermore, this paper critiques urban transport planning based on theory-free research of ‘applied variety’ and how the masking of theoretical underpinnings. Capability Approach (CA) has been mobilised to address some of these issues. Though it provides a normative understanding of inequalities as multidimensional, considers choice-making as social action performed by social actors and shifts the focus of measurement away from material resources (“means”) towards the degree (“conversion factors”) to which people can use those means to freely choose from the actually available choice sets (“capabilities”) to be or to do what they value (“functioning”), achieving a just rearrangement is only a latent objective. I argue in this paper that an individual-centric analysis of inequalities doesn’t sufficiently reveal the structural inequalities in a transport regime. As an alternative, I propose a relational-radical approach that frames travel pattern as an outcome of interaction between institutional rules directing mobility decisions, mechanisms of control over narratives, social identities, culturally mediated routine and hierarchical governance schematics.
Justice without rethinking planning?: An appraisal of available frameworks of Transport Justice and discussing critical formulations
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract