Commoning Mobility

Discussion

Emil Beemer, Gijs Diercks, et al.  :

The notion of ‘commoning mobility’ has been put forward by Nikolaeva et al. (2019) at the intersection of commons and mobilities research. While largely synonymous with mobility commons, the alteration of the term aligns with their meaning of commoning as a politics and logic intent on democratizing the movement, meaning, and practice of mobility (ibid, p.7). Movement refers to the physical act of transportation, meaning to the cultural images and representation of different forms of mobility, and practice to the embodied sense of everyday practices (Cresswell, 2010). Nikolaeva et al. (2019) demonstrate empirically how communities engage in commoning across these three dimensions. In Chile, for instance, citizens created a non-hierarchical coalition to challenge the construction of highways around Santiago, highlighting issues of mobility injustice, creating sufficient pressure on the regime to reroute the highways, and permanently establishing the right to public participation in planning processes (Nikolaeva et al., 2019, pp. 10–11). Their work depicts commoning as existing in direct tension and conflict with automobility regimes, where searching for a ‘pure’ commons is less valuable than identifying concrete steps towards democratization. In her work on mobility justice, Sheller (2018) similarly concludes that ‘mobile’ commons are essential for just mobility transitions. She further emphasizes commoning as a transformative logic, which “means protecting the capability for human and more-than-human shared mobilities and free spaces for movement by regulating excessive mobilities, limiting unnecessary speed, regulating corporations, pricing the externalities of transportation, and preventing its harms” (Sheller, 2018, p. 169).

Within this logic, mobility cooperatives can be understood as more distinct instances of commons. Schramm et al. (2024) discussed the French railway cooperative RailCoop, which seeks to offer an alternative to the state-owned SNCF and the paradigm of high-speed commuting by providing slower railway services across less connected areas of France. These authors are interested in both the specific socio-spatial context and the cooperative as a force for producing ‘difference’ that generates new ways of thinking and doing – what we would term its transformative potential (Schramm et al., 2024, p. 17). Glover (2016) argues that urban mobility systems, and many constituent elements like public transport and roads, ought to be conceptualized as commons. He includes cooperative carsharing as a noteworthy example of community-owned transport in practice, drawing on examples from San Francisco, the UK, and Switzerland (Glover, 2016, p. 185). Community-owned transport as a term is strongly linked to cooperatives for commoning mobility and tends to include community initiatives that provide transport services for marginalized groups based on an ethics of care (Ravensbergen and Schwanen, 2023). Taken together, these works demonstrate that cooperatives are seen as valuable means for commoning mobility, which can include a variety of transport modalities with a community committed to social and/or ecological goals. We add to this body of work by outlining more specifically the practices of mobility cooperatives and how these practices establish alternatives and challenge automobility regimes.”

(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2210422425000784?)