— by Anna Nikolaeva & Irene Gómez Varo
This blog post based on the presentation (to be) given at World Planning Schools Congress, Helsinki. June 29-July 3, 2026. It can be cited as
Nikolaeva, A. & Gómez Varo (2026) Challenging the epistemic foundations of mobility planning from an intersectional feminist perspective in Amsterdam, Barcelona and Santiago de Chile. World Planning Schools Congress. Helsinki, June 29-July 3, 2026. Available at https://commoning-mobility.org/challenging-the-epistemic-foundations-of-mobility-planning-from-an-intersectional-feminist-perspective/
The Epistemic Foundations of Persistent Gender‑Insensitivity
Urban mobility scholarship has long shown that travel patterns, needs, experiences and burdens are structured by gender and intersect with class, race, disability and other axes of inequality. Yet, despite decades of research and activism, most urban mobility plans continue to be designed as if mobility planning were a neutral, technical problem rather than a deeply social and gendered one. (Castañeda, 2024; Nikolaeva and Shakthi, 2026; Sánchez de Madariaga, 2013).
The Gendered Mobilities project (2023–2029) takes this paradox as its starting point. Our concern is not only with the existence of injustice but with its epistemic foundations: how particular forms of knowledge production and use underpin and stabilise gender‑insensitive mobility planning. Building on feminist epistemology, social epistemology and intersectional feminist urban planning, we aim to understand what the gaps, omissions and distortions in mainstream mobility knowledge are and their possible impacts on people’s daily life.
Within this broader programme, this paper for the World Planning Schools Congress introduces a new concept into debates on planning and mobility: the regime of ignorance. The aim of this post is to outline this concept and explain why it is helpful for understanding the persistent absence of an intersectional gender perspective in mobility planning. Empirical results from our case studies in Amsterdam, Barcelona and Santiago de Chile will be discussed in more detail in future publications.
From Knowledge Regimes to Regimes of Ignorance
Research on gender and mobility often connects gender-insensitivity of planning to a lack of data: missing gender‑disaggregated statistics, insufficient information on harassment, or a shortage of qualitative accounts of complex mobilities of care. Such gaps are certainly significant. However, they do not fully explain why, even where new data has been gathered, it rarely transforms mainstream planning practice in a sustained way.
To address this, we draw on science and technology studies and ignorance studies, which argue that it is necessary to examine not only what is unknown but how non‑knowing is organised. The notion of a knowledge regime captures the structured ways in which institutions define legitimate evidence, trustworthy expertise and relevant questions. These regimes, as scholars have shown, inevitably bring forth ignorance: they contain implicit assumptions about what “does not need to be known” and which lines of inquiry are considered dispensable (Wehling, 2023).
Extending this reasoning to urban planning and drawing on the work of Wehling (2023) and Kirsch and Dilley (2014), we propose to use the concept of a regime of ignorance in order to understand the persistence absence of (consolidated and institutionalised) intersectional gender perspective in planning. This concept foregrounds the idea that ignorance is not simply a residual category – the remainder after knowledge has been produced – but a patterned outcome of specific norms, methods and power relations within planning institutions. In this paper, we introduce this concept to the field of planning and argue that it offers value for understanding epistemic obstacles to transformation across multiple arenas. Our own empirical focus lies on the persistence of gender-insensitivity in mobility planning.
Defining the Regime of Ignorance
We define a regime of ignorance (in mobility planning) as a historically specific configuration of interrelated assumptions, epistemic norms, everyday practices, procedures, institutional architectures and power relations that:
- prioritises particular problems and framings;
- governs which forms of knowledge are recognised as relevant and legitimate;
- and thereby systematically generates and maintains forms of ignorance, omissions and distortions in the field.
Importantly, such a regime has social consequences. It contributes to determining whose mobility experiences are centred or marginalised, which issues qualify as “problems” in official discourse, and how resources, risks and responsibilities are distributed across different groups in the city. Our definition both builds on and further elaborates the definitions proposed by Wehling (2023) and Kirsch and Dilley (2014).
In the context of gendered mobilities, the regime of ignorance does not simply overlook women’s and LGBTQIA+ people’s experiences. It generates and maintains planning processes in ways that make those experiences difficult to capture, easy to discount, or seemingly outside the remit of mobility policy.
Studying the regime of ignorance of mobility planning in three urban contexts
Our empirical work investigates the regime of ignorance in three cities with distinct trajectories of engagement with gender and mobility: Barcelona (Spain), Santiago (Chile) and Amsterdam (the Netherlands). Barcelona represents a case where feminist movements and gender‑sensitive expertise have long been present, leading to guidelines and policy measures that explicitly address gendered mobilities, though these gains remain contested. Santiago illustrates a context where strong civil society and academic actors have secured important initiatives and gender-focused institutional mechanisms particularly in public transport through legal requirements in public tenders, within a market‑driven and institutionally fragile environment. Amsterdam, by contrast, has until recently devoted little attention to gender in mobility planning, with more systematic interest emerging only in the last years in response to public debates and political initiatives.
Across these sites, we conducted seventy interviews with policy‑makers, planners, activists and researchers. Using thematic analysis, we identified eleven subthemes that we grouped into four main “building blocks” of the regime of ignorance: technocratic epistemic norms; assumptions; key priorities and problem framings; and power asymmetries and institutional architectures.
While the concrete manifestations differ by city, the overall pattern is remarkably consistent: technocratic norms, implicit assumptions about default users, productivist priorities and unequal institutional arrangements interact to stabilise a regime in which intersectional gender perspectives remain (relatively) peripheral to mainstream mobility planning.
Analytical Utility of the Regime of Ignorance Framework
Conceptually, the regime of ignorance shifts attention from individual gaps or oversights to the systemic organisation of non‑knowing in mobility planning (see also Nikolaeva, 2025). Rather than treating each missing dataset or disregarded experience as an isolated failure, the concept allows us to analyse how multiple elements – methods, professional cultures, territorial inequalities, participation procedures – work together to produce and reproduce ignorance over time.
This has several implications for research and practice. First, it suggests that simply adding more data or piloting participatory processes may be insufficient if the underlying regime remains intact and other elements are not challenged. Second, it invites closer scrutiny of how knowledge generated with the intersectional gender perspective circulates within planning institutions: when and how it is taken up, translated, confined to specialised projects or excluded altogether. Third, it offers a framework for comparing different urban contexts and tracing both convergences and divergences in their epistemic configurations.
In the Gendered Mobilities project, this conceptualisation serves as a foundation for subsequent work. Our current paper introduces this concept to urban planning and elaborates the regime of ignorance empirically across the three cities while future publications will focus on transformations: how regimes of ignorance can be challenged, what strategies, knowledge instruments, concepts and forms of organisation can be mobilized to incorporate an intersectional gender perspective into planning.
Anna Nikolaeva
Anna Nikolaeva is Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam. In her research, writing, teaching and public speaking she engages with a variety of themes in urban planning and human geography, and her current priorities are: nclusive mobilities and the politics of knowledge in planning; gendered mobilities; intersections between low-carbon and just transitions; the role of mobility as social infrastructure of the city; commoning mobility.
Irene Gómez-Varo
Irene Gómez-Varo is a Visiting Scholar at the University of Amsterdam, where she has held a postdoc in 2024-2026 working in the Gendered Mobilities project. In Spring 2026 Irene will start her project “Toward Just and Caring Mobility: Epistemological Tools for the Planning of Care-Full Cities” as a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute of Urban and Territorial Studies of the Pontificia Universidad Católica in Chile. She holds a PhD in Human Geography from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). Her doctoral work investigated proximity-based environments and daily life dynamics, focusing on mobility and gender. She has been a visiting researcher at Université Pantheon Sorbonne in Paris, the University of Tokyo, and RMIT University in Melbourne. Her academic background includes a BA in Sociology (University of Barcelona) and a Master’s in Population and Territorial Studies (UAB).
References
Castañeda, P. (2024). Gender and mobility: Engaging womens mobile lives. In L. Peake, A. Datta, & G. Adeniyi-Ogunyankin (Eds.), Handbook on Gender and Cities (pp. 356–365). Edward Elgar Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781786436139.00048
Kirsch TG and Dilley R (2015) Regimes of Ignorance: An Introduction. In: Dilley R and Kirsch TG (eds) Regimes of Ignorance: Anthropological Perspectives on the Production and Reproduction of Non-Knowledge. Berghahn Books, pp. 1–30.
Nikolaeva, A. (2025). The politics of non-knowing, smart technology and just mobility transitions: A case study and research agenda. Environment and Planning F, 4(4), 429–452. https://doi.org/10.1177/26349825241228591
Nikolaeva, A., & Shakthi, S. (2026). Moving towards gender-sensitive urban mobility planning: Unpacking the role of knowledge. Urban Studies, 63(2), 205–224. https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980251340871
Sánchez de Madariaga, I. (2013). From Women in Transport to Gender in Transport: Challenging Conceptual Frameworks for Improved Policymaking. Journal of International Affairs, 67(1), 43–65.
Wehling P (2023) In die Normalität ‚zurückimpfen‘? Das (Nicht-)Wissensregime der deutschen Coronapolitik. In: Gesellschaften in der Krise. Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden, pp. 235–258.