The potential for a just transition to electric urban mobility: a study of four European cities

Abstract: Rapid and comprehensive electrification of transport is essential to limiting the sector’s contribution to climate breakdown, but it is increasingly recognised that electrification should also be socially just. It is also clear that policy and local governments have key roles to play in achieving just electric mobility transitions, even though the policy and governance processes that shape and condition transition trajectories remain poorly understood. This presentation will introduce an analytical approach for studying the role of local policy in just electric mobility transitions and use that approach to examine the ongoing transitions in four medium-sized European cities – Oslo in Norway, Utrecht in the Netherlands, Bristol in the UK, and Poznan in Poland. Using detailed analysis of policy documents, the presentation will show that the problematisations, rationalities, instruments and imagined behaviours in local policy processes consider some aspects of justice in relation to electrification. However, in each city there are significant risks that the causes of (future) maldistribution of electric mobility are misunderstood and that certain mobility-related needs, concerns and lived experiences will be misrecognised. The presentation will conclude with recommendations about how policy and governance can enhance the realisation of just transitions to electric urban mobility.

About the Speaker:

Tim Schwanen is Professor of Transport Geography and Director of the Transport Studies Unit (TSU) at the University of Oxford. He holds a PhD from Utrecht University (2003, cum laude) and held various research and teaching positions at Utrecht University and the TSU in Oxford before becoming the Director of the TSU in 2015. Tim has held Visiting Professor positions at the Universities of Gothenburg in Sweden (2016-2019) and Ghent in Belgium (2022) and is a Fellow of the UK’s Academy of Social Sciences. He is one of the editors of the journal Environment and Planning F (since 2021) and was editor-in-chief of the Journal of Transport Geography in 2013-2015. Tim’s research interests are broad and include the relationships of urban mobility with the climate emergency, technological innovation, social inequality and justice, wellbeing, and urbanisation and demographic change. He has published widely in geography, transport studies, urban studies and interdisciplinary journals.