Rethinking mobility planning knowledge: Gendered Mobilities project

Being able to move freely, safely, and comfortably is key to people’s well-being and ability to participate equally in society. Yet every day millions of trips are not made because using mobility systems is difficult, dangerous, or impossible for particular social groups. Although many people experience restrictions, discomfort, and even danger when travelling, this project centers gendered mobilities.

On average, women perform complex mobilities more often than men, travelling between multiple stops rather than proceeding straight to their destinations (Priya Uteng & Turner, 2019). They drive significantly less than men, relying on public transportation, walking, and, in some contexts, cycling (Loukaitou-Sideris, 2020). Yet around the world urban planning prioritises direct travel by car, which is more typical of men (Priya Uteng, 2021). Other types of mobility often receive less investment and are consequently inconvenient, risky, or even impossible. Crucially, harassment significantly impacts women and LGBTQIA+ individuals globally (Lubitow et al., 2020; Moreira & Ceccato, 2021). Exclusion through mobility intersects with other exclusions involving race, ethnicity, caste, income, and disability.

Contemporary urban mobility systems are therefore not gender-neutral, but gender-insensitive. Gendered Mobilities project (2023-2029) starts from the idea that the knowledge underlying urban mobility planning is a key source of this insensitivity. Examples include a lack of gender-disaggregated data, transport research’s overreliance on quantitative methods that obscure lived experiences of marginalised groups, little diversity among transport officers, a neglect of issues that frequently affect women and LGBTQIA+ individuals (e.g. safety on public transport and mobilities with dependent others), lack of interesectional approaches to data analysis, persistent use of gender binary in data collection etc.

The project focuses on three main questions:

In other words, the project seeks to understand: (1) what questions are not asked, what data is not collected, whose voices are ignored; (2) what the consequences of this ignorance, these gaps and omissions are; and (3) how this ignorance can be transcended for broader accessibility in cities.

The project’s theoretical framework is informed by feminist epistemology, social epistemology and intersectional feminist urban planning. We build on rich scholarship on the subject of gender, mobility and planning and engage with concepts such as interdependency, care, commoning and epistemic justice. You can familiarise yourself with this scholarship and our approach in the paper Moving towards gender-sensitive urban mobility planning: Unpacking the role of knowledge.

Our case studies are Amsterdam (the Netherlands), Barcelona (Spain) and Santiago de Chile (Chile). In these three cities Irene Gómez Varo and Anna Nikolaeva have interviewed more than 70 activists, policy-makers, politicians, planners, urban designers and researchers.

This project is led by Anna Nikolaeva, and the project team evolves throughout the years of the project. Our goal is not only to advance academic debate on the subject, but to disseminate the findings among practitioners. We have already presented this work in various non-academic settings and in the nearest future we will start organising events around relevant topics to bring together researchers, students, planners and activists.

We will be sharing the results in various formats on this website, and you can also follow us on LinkedIn to stay up-to-date.

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