Cycling in the post-socialist city: On travelling by bicycle in Sofia, Bulgaria

There are many ways of moving through a city. Cycling is one which has received considerable attention from urban scholars. Yet it has remained largely neglected within the burgeoning literature on the post-socialist urbanisms of Central and Eastern Europe. This paper uses a case study from Sofia, Bulgaria to address this gap in urban research. By exploring the practices and affordances of cycling, we offer a discussion of everyday mobility, public life and urban space in post-socialist Sofia. This case study incorporates ethnography and in-depth interviews with regular cyclists. Through a discussion of bicycling spaces and practices, this paper complicates the notion of post-socialist cities as places defined by the decline of public sensibilities. </jats:p

Young people’s travel – What’s changed and why? Review and analysis

Young adults in Great Britain and other countries are driving less now than young adults did in the early 1990s. The Department for Transport (DfT) commissioned the Centre for Transport and Society (UWE, Bristol) and the Transport Studies Unit (University of Oxford) to carry out a systematic assessment of available evidence on the subject, both by review of UK and overseas published literature, and by new secondary analysis of existing UK data sets. The study sought to address the questions: In what ways have changes in young people’s social and economic conditions, and lifestyles and attitudes impacted on their travel behaviour? How might those drivers, or other anticipated changes, be expected to impact their future travel demand? The evidence has been evaluated on the basis of an extensive review of both transport-specific and wider social science literature in the UK (and other countries where, despite national differences, the trends show many similar patterns), and new analysis of data from the National Travel Survey (NTS) (1995-2014), the Census (2001 and 2011) and Understanding Society (five waves from 2009/10 to 2013/14)

Attending to the socio-material affordances of transport un/affordability

The affordability of transport is a long-standing concern of both transport and economic geography. However, despite the growing influence of relational and heterodox economic thinking in a range of geographic sub-disciplines, the cost of transport is still largely conceptualised in universalising, binary, and purely quantitative terms, as either affordable or unaffordable. The present paper proposes the concept of transport un/affordability to bring together perspectives from the geographies of everyday mobility, and research on everyday economic lives, in order to examine how affording transport takes place. The paper draws on interviews with public transport users in Sofia, Bulgaria, demonstrating how fares act as one type of socio-material affordance which enables, precludes, or transforms un/affordability in situated and contingent ways. The everyday spaces and times within which transport un/affordability takes place are examined through the three interrelated dimensions of transport un/affordability: transactions, journeys, and budgets. The paper considers the implications of conceptualising transport un/affordability relationally, particularly in the context of transport geography\u27s empirical and theoretical engagements with transport justice, and amidst processes of profound technological change within both payment systems and transport systems globally

Negotiating dignity in public geography: the ethics of public engagement in pandemic times

In this paper, I reflect on some of the ethical dimensions of public engagement with geographic research. The paper draws on my recent experience of a project entitled ‘Not working from home’, which sought to make visible the everyday experiences of essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The project was intended as a space for essential workers to document their daily lives using text, images and video, enabling them to engage with each other, while also informing the wider public about the everyday challenges of not working from home during the pandemic. The paper discusses some of the ethical implications and challenges of conducting this project, drawing on a critical engagement with dignity as an ethical framework for public engagement. I discuss the implications of calling workers ‘essential’, the role of collective and professional identities explored by the participants, and the impact of offering rewards. I also ask some broader questions on the role that the concept of dignity might play in the ethics of public engagement with research in human geography

Moving safely at night? Women's nocturnal mobilities in Recife, Brazil and Brussels, Belgium

This paper examines the links between women's un/safety and their night-time mobilities in Brussels, Belgium and Recife, Brazil. While the significance of women's intersectional identities to the construction of fear and safety in urban space has been well documented in feminist urban geography, we argue that the lens of South-North comparison highlights specific ways in which local urban spaces are implicated in women's experiences of un/safety. A comparative perspective draws out the spatial and temporal embeddedness of un/safety, while at the same time challenges the framing of particular cities and areas as either safe or unsafe (which is particularly damaging when it reproduces simple global North - global South binaries). The paper draws on mixed-method research combining a questionnaire-based survey and a series of interviews with women in Recife and Brussels. The four dimensions examined include transport modes; situated experiences of un/safety; the accumulation of unsafety feelings over the long term; and the work women perform in maintaining mobility. We find that while unsafety broadly limits women's access to cities at night, feeling unsafe plays out differently in specific and situated interactions, many of which are recognisable from both Brussels and Recife. Across the two research locations, women's mobility strategies at night are similar, in that they involve extensive planning, preparation, and drawing on financial and non-financial resources. We conclude with some reflections on the role of comparative research in the feminist geographies of gendered urban mobilities, particularly in relation to previously little-studied cities

The compulsive habit of cars

The car dependence of people living in contemporary cities is a major concern for policy makers, who often find it difficult to persuade people into more sustainable transport modes. By contrast, recent insights from neuroscience have shown that a broad spectrum of behaviors can become habitual and, thus, resistant to change. Here, we outline the potential of collaboration between neuroscience and human geography aiming at a better understanding of habits that determine everyday commuting routines

Beyond fare evasion: the everyday moralities of non-payment and underpayment on public transport

In attempting to understand and prevent fare evasion, existing research and policy have often categorised fare evaders based on passenger ‘types’ or profiles. However, such categorisations of ‘malicious’ or ‘virtuous’ behaviours rely on underlying moral claims which often go unexamined. In this paper, we study how different actors construct such moral claims as part of everyday interactions. We demonstrate that the everyday moralities of not or under-paying are diverse, locally occasioned, and emotionally charged. Drawing on social media and video data from Chile and the UK, we examine interactions between passengers, by-standers, transport workers, and transport operators. We highlight the diverse resources that actors draw upon to construct moral claims around fare evasion, including the mobilisation of alternative moral categories; attempts to produce exceptions to formal rules; and the foregrounding of moral emotions. The paper engages with an interdisciplinary body of work which reassesses existing policies and societal responses to fare evasion, while also contributing to a nascent literature on everyday morality and mobilities