Mobility freedoms: Conceptions of freedom in contestations over urban transport

Abstract

The link between urban transport and freedom has long been recognised in academic literature and is drawing renewed attention in controversies over initiatives to reduce car use within urban areas and flying between cities. This paper analyses how multiple conceptualisations of freedom from across the humanities and social sciences are, and can be, implicated in public contestations over urban transport. It suggests that individualised notions of freedom are commonly invoked by adversaries of car- and flight-curbing initiatives, a dominance that reflects prevailing histories of systems of automobility and aeromobility across the Global North. It also proposes that those initiatives can be understood as applications of Mill’s harm principle by the (local) state seeking to reconfigure the co-evolution of mobility freedoms and unfreedoms. Yet, the harm principle is ultimately inadequate as legitimation for interventions in urban transport on a climate-constrained planet given its grounding in individualised freedoms. The paper therefore elaborates a collective, dynamic and non-sovereign conceptualisation of mobility freedoms as a framework for changes to urban mobility systems from above and below. The paper concludes that harnessing freedom’s descriptive and performative capabilities can enrich analysis of urban mobility contestations and facilitate practical action to transform urban mobilities at times of climate emergency.