In this episode we talk with author Mimi Sheller on her book, "Mobility Justice: the Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes," and how mobility justice transcends beyond just transportation access to include broader aspects like the right to the city and freedom to move between countries.
We also explore its intricate connections with urbanization, migration, and climate change. Ranging from women's rights to movement and unequal access issues faced by minority populations, our conversation crosses the boundaries of nations, delving into the power dynamics embedded in passports and the global freedom of movement. We'll make you question how cities approach mobility and its justice in the new mobilities paradigm.
Show Notes:
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In this episode we talk with author Mimi Sheller on her book, "Mobility Justice: the Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes," and how mobility justice transcends beyond just transportation access to include broader aspects like the right to the city and freedom to move between countries.
We also explore its intricate connections with urbanization, migration, and climate change. Ranging from women's rights to movement and unequal access issues faced by minority populations, our conversation crosses the boundaries of nations, delving into the power dynamics embedded in passports and the global freedom of movement. We'll make you question how cities approach mobility and its justice in the new mobilities paradigm.
Show Notes:
Episodes Artwork: by Max Bender on Unsplash
Follow us on social media for more content related to each episode:
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Since 1937, JEO has provided engineering consulting services unmatched in skill, creativity and cost efficiency. From their modest JEO, has grown into a highly skilled and respected consulting firm serving communities throughout the Midwest. JEO's team of professional engineers, architects, planners and surveyors all work in concert with skill technicians and support personnel to exceed their client's expectations. At JEO, they're engineering a world where everyone thrives. You're listening to the Booked On Planning podcast, a project of the Nebraska Chapter of the American Planning Association. In each episode we dive into how cities function by talking with authors on housing, transportation and everything in between. Join us as we get Booked On Planning. Welcome back, bookworms, to another episode of Booked On Planning. In this episode we talk with author Mimi Sheller on her book Mobility Justice: the politics of movement in an age of extremes. This was a really interesting follow-up to our conversation with Veronica Davis. Check out that episode if you haven't listened to it yet, because Mimi really takes the concept of mobility justice as transportation focused and expands on it quite a bit yeah.
Jennifer Hiatt:I would have to agree. Mimi really did expand my idea of what the term mobility really even means and how important the concept is to the human experience in general. As you'll hear in this episode, reading mobility justice really blew my mind and gave me a new lens from which to view many of the things that I've spent so many years studying and still take an interest in today.
Stephanie Rouse:As we get into the episode we pick apart the idea of the new mobility's paradigm that she talked about in the book, which I learned was very different from the new mobility paradigm in the singular. It really highlighted the difference in the academic world that's thinking about this topic and what's happening in the professional world who are actually the ones implementing projects. The new mobility's paradigm is relational and complex, focused on how to theorize mobility more broadly. The new mobility paradigm is more about new ways of approaching transportation in the field, such as returning to active transportation and transitory development and shared and connected vehicles and so on.
Jennifer Hiatt:Maybe because I spend a lot of my time thinking in the more theoretical level. I will admit, readers, I did struggle at first to get into it. By the time I finished it I really felt like I had advanced my understanding in transportation. I know, stephanie, that that's kind of the world that you live in, but I had been struggling a little bit with some of our other transportation books and said that I think this one kind of brought it to a theoretical level that I was a little more familiar with engaging with. Sorry to all of the people who actually implement transportation.
Stephanie Rouse:Yeah, I think it helped once I figured out that we were in more of an academic world. Reading this book, I went into it thinking of it as more how we're implementing projects, how we're increasing mobility options. But it's really an interesting perspective because I think as practitioners we're always focused on how do we get things done. It's interesting to flip into that academic world and think more about how we talk about it in an academic way.
Jennifer Hiatt:I still feel the most comfortable in the academic world, so I don't know why.
Stephanie Rouse:I think that's why we balance very well. That's a good point. Towards the end of the episode, I thought that you asked a great question on the mobile commons that she ends the book with, which prompted a whole discussion on the tragedy of the commons, which we're actually going to cover in our follow-up episode later this month. So stay tuned for more on that topic.
Jennifer Hiatt:Yes, thank you, stephanie, for the opportunity in our next episode to nerd out about the tragedy of the commons. It's actually one of the things that I focused and studied on in a law and economics class and it just I think it's very fascinating. So before we jump into the episode, we wanted to quickly tell you about another podcast we enjoy, called the Parking Podcast. I came to find out about the Parking Podcast from Lincoln's parking manager, who recently retired, and we will miss him dearly. Parking and planning often go hand in hand, which is why we've had people like Donald Shoup on our podcast. Some recent episodes we think you'd really enjoy include episode 102 with Tony Jordan talking about the Parking Reform Network, or episode 96 with Jonathan Hurth, where he talks about removing parking minimums in Fayetteville. They've also interviewed people like Gabe Klein with the Department of Energy, henry Graber about his book Paved Paradise and, of course, donald Shoup. Check out the Parking Podcast wherever you get your podcasts or visit parkingcastcom.
Stephanie Rouse:All right, let's get into our conversation with Mimi Scheller. Well, mimi, thank you for joining us on Booked on Planning to talk about your latest book, mobility Justice the Politics of Movement and an Age of Extremes. When I read the title of the book, my mind went straight to the advocacy movement around equal access to transportation and the right to the city. But you say that we need to think more broadly. What else does your concept of mobility justice include?
Mimi Sheller:Well, I like to think about mobility justice, starting with things like the right to the city and transportation, and those movements go back decades right Like the efforts to build more equitable cities and transportation systems, to overcome what some people have called transportation apartheid in the United States, and you know the concept that driving while black or brown or indigenous can be fatal, where black drivers and pedestrians are stopped and searched or sometimes killed by police, and that sparked the Black Lives Matter movement. So all of that is really core to the idea of mobility justice, and you know, of course, that dates back to this country's founding in slavery and segregation, from the Fugitive Slave Act up to the Ku Klux Klan. But I also like to add other dimensions to how we think about mobility justice. One aspect that sometimes gets forgotten about is women's rights to movement, and the feminist take back the night marches going back to the 1970s. More recently, things like the say her name protests and the movements against the murder of indigenous women and girls, but also gender nonconforming folks.
Mimi Sheller:All of those were about the way in which people's freedom of movement is circumscribed by fear and violence. So it's not just access to transportation, it's, it's like, much more than that and those kinds of discriminatory controls over movement have affected Native Americans, hispanic Americans, some Asian American communities, and a lot of social movements have worked to increase our understanding of those kind of intersectional mobility injustices. And that led me to sort of also look at these broader issues around not just the urban scale and the infrastructure but the question of transnational migration and borders and the way in which mobilities are controlled and policed in other ways. Right, who can cross a border? Who is free to move? You know, a tourist going on vacation versus a migrant who's been displaced by climate change, and so that in my mind connects back to the big scale kind of global issues around freedom of movement, also as a mobility justice question.
Jennifer Hiatt:As I was actually reading through your book. One of the things in the news that came up was how US tourists are now going to have to have different paperwork going into the UK. And I thought about that because people were throwing such a fit about how well, what do you mean that US citizens are going to have to get paperwork when every other nation has had to get the same paperwork to come into the United States for years? And it just kind of came back down to that justice of being able to move freely and we haven't allowed that into our country forever. And now all of a sudden it's being imposed on us and it's just like the worst thing in the world.
Mimi Sheller:Yeah, definitely. I mean, there's the idea of, like, some passports are more powerful than others, right, and the US passport always allowed a lot of movement across borders that other passports did not enjoy, and it's definitely an uneven, an unequal system.
Jennifer Hiatt:Yeah, maybe we can level that playing field a little bit soon. One of the overarching points of your book is that we must look at mobility at a scalular level. You do this by showing the relationship between the urban crisis, the migration crisis and the climate crisis in your introduction. Can you share the connection with our listeners between these three crises and mobility justice?
Mimi Sheller:Yeah, so I think of what I called in the book the urban crisis, as all of the pressures on cities around things like traffic and pollution and the sort of financing of public transit systems and how would we shift to a kind of post-carbon, you know, more sustainable mobility. That was a lot of urban planning at the time that I was writing was looking at this idea of a kind of more healthy and equitable city. And then at the same time, the migration crisis was happening at our borders and there was like a discourse around the fear of being flooded with migrants, the building of walls and fences and all of that going on in US politics which really connects to this, as I said, this kind of multi-scalar question of who has access to mobility, who has access to livable spaces and who is kept out. So that kind of takes our thinking beyond just the urban crisis to the sort of border crisis. And then the climate crisis really concerns how pollution is created by our high energy consumption in the United States.
Mimi Sheller:Right, our way of life is actually driving climate change and environmental crises and displacement in other parts of the world, and so the policies that kind of protect our fossil-fueled way of life to describe, you know, the American sense of the right to drive and have a car and have cheap fuel prices. That's causing climate disasters and droughts and flooding and stronger hurricanes, but also contributing to violence and war and displacement of people from Central America and South America and across the world. So I see those things as connected. If we can sort of solve the urban sustainability crisis, maybe we would have a better impact on the climate crisis and maybe that would help dampen down the migration and border crisis. So it's all kind of connected.
Stephanie Rouse:Yeah, it was really interesting reading the connections, as you noted in the book, because I think as planners, we've been focusing a lot on the climate crisis and we understand that transportation has an impact on that, and then urban crisis as well, but I think we were missing the key piece of how this is impacting the population globally and the migrant crisis and how it's all connected. So it was really interesting pulling that all together and the planning field recently started to recognize mobility justice as a priority in the ways that transportation decisions negatively impact certain populations unequally, and work has begun in many cities to understand the harms of the past and to begin to undo them. Under the new mobility paradigm that you discussed in the book, what changes should communities be making in their approach to this work?
Mimi Sheller:That's such an interesting question because what I call the new mobilities paradigm using the plural isn't specifically about urban planning so much, as it was a new way of understanding mobilities as relational and complex, and it was a change in sort of academic theory and social science approaches.
Mimi Sheller:At the same time that that was happening, there was also talk of a new mobility paradigm in like how cities did mobility right, like promoting transit-oriented development and active transportation, like walking and biking, and then the whole emergence of connected and shared and electric vehicles and a lot of disruptive technologies like autonomous cars or platform mobility networks.
Mimi Sheller:There's this big idea of like there's a change in mobility happening, and then there's this how do we theorize mobility more broadly, which is what we call the new mobilities paradigm. And then maybe there's also this very disruptive techno-futurist idea that we're shifting to mobility as a service and we're sort of technologically changing, so like. I would say there's at least three different ways of using the concept of a new paradigm, and all of those I think are important for planners to be thinking about and for like communities who are approaching the whole question of mobility to be thinking about how do we think about it, how do we do it or implement it or plan it, and then how are new technologies changing or disrupting it? And for me those are all connected but have different ways in which we might bring in, like equity or fairness or greater social inclusion in the decision-making processes.
Stephanie Rouse:So you talked about this a little bit in the introduction question. So, before getting into transportation and urban form, you start with bodily movement in the ways that we move or we're restricted from moving, and stress the importance of the history of movement, including slavery, as you mentioned before. Why is it so important to start with an understanding of the history of movement?
Mimi Sheller:The story, especially I mean when I think about the United States, the story of America is a story of the frontier, it's the story of migration.
Mimi Sheller:It's also what some would call the story of settler colonialism and genocide and displacement and, of course, of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. All of those things are all about mobility and bodily movement and the politics of movement and what I sometimes call kinopolitics, which is that kinomens, movement and the political, the polis, the political sphere is always involved, struggles over movement, and it's so much part of our American history. So I think the history it's really important to put that history in the long term perspective, because it's not just something that comes up today in our cities but it's grounded in all these deep processes around racial distinctions and boundaries and ethnic distinctions and boundaries and gender and sexuality all around how we can be in space and how we come together in not just as like urban inhabitants but also as citizens, and in non-urban spaces too, I should say. And so all of that history for me informs how we should be thinking about what kind of policies we have today, including policies for kind of reparations.
Jennifer Hiatt:So Stephanie is the transportation planner in this group. I am actually a historian and a lawyer along with planning. So as I was reading through this, honestly the politic of movement stopped me cold and it kind of made me pull out a few of my favorite history books and reconsider how we were moving through. And you see that now too, that in chapter two you talk about how it's important because if you can't have mobility, you can't have political protest in many ways. And you think about even the patriots or the runaway slave, or even right now what's going on in Ukraine, or even more oppression, israel and Gaza. How, if you don't have that freedom of movement and that mobility, are we ever supposed to be able to affect change so important to the entire history of not just the United States but really global perspective?
Mimi Sheller:Yeah, definitely, and I started out in my graduate work as a historical sociologist and I worked with a sociologist named Charles Tilly who was my dissertation advisor. And Charles Tilly, or Chuck Tilly he was a great professor, but he taught all about social movements and social mobilization, and social change was at the center for the study of social change, and so my whole thinking about all of this begins in a way, from that. So if you think of what he used to call repertoires of contention things like marches or demonstrations or strikes, picket lines, blockades they all involve either mobilizing groups of people or stopping mobilities. And that continues in the world today. When people are doing a protest or doing a march or doing a demo, they're mobilizing as a group and they're showing that freedom of democratic participation requires people to come together in movement and to claim a public space in the streets. Often, or it could be at an airport, or it could be blocking a pipeline somewhere. So a lot of what we think of as just political action is about mobility or occupation of a space that would otherwise have things or people flowing through it.
Mimi Sheller:So that's a really important basis for thinking about mobility, justice, and also I mean the law and the legal aspects of it are also really important. I think of lawyers, in particular, having an important role to play in supporting, for example, frontline communities who are mobilizing against environmental harm or climate injustice and are fighting for their rights. And there's cases proceeding in various jurisdictions that are, for example, suing fossil fuel companies for loss and damages or trying to stop new infrastructure. Sometimes it's even green infrastructure. Right, it might be trying to stop solar farms or wind farms, but all of those actions are about both the movements and protests in the streets, but also the legal cases that proceed through the judicial system.
Jennifer Hiatt:Yeah, I kept thinking about the hashtag let the lawyers in during the fans in what was that? 2017. And I actually work, or previously worked, in green infrastructure, helping to bring wind farms and solar farms into rural communities in Nebraska, and so I never thought about how the way those protests or support happening was through, like bringing and gathering of people and making sure that communities could come together. So obviously this book really opened my eye to a lot of things Great.
Mimi Sheller:I should add on that front that what we also study in the study of social movements is counter movements. Of course there's many pro car, pro fossil fuel movements of truckers and coal rolling and all these different things that are trying to stop those who see themselves as promoting green or sustainable transportation.
Stephanie Rouse:So, speaking of sustainable and greening, you talk in the book about needing to move beyond the individual choice and place-based local attempts to make our communities more sustainable and focus instead on the global inequities that make our way of living unsustainable, and you touched on this already once in the episode. So what professionals should be doing this kind of work? I mean, we gave some examples of lawyers getting involved, but should planners be getting involved on a more global scale or focusing still on kind of cityscape initiatives that help try and reduce carbon impacts?
Mimi Sheller:Yeah, I mean, I think for planners whether it's urban planners or transportation planners, people who work in cities it's really important for all of us to think about where materials come from, and so we might make a plan and sort of just go with what's the norm.
Mimi Sheller:But if we kind of want to connect the dots whether it's cement or the metal that we use for cars and trains, or the elements that go into batteries all of these elements are part of long supply chains that reach around the world, and there's a lot of conflicts everywhere over mining, over oil drilling, over like putting in high power electric lines, and planners, I think, really need to think about the cityscape as what we sometimes call an extended operational system.
Mimi Sheller:The city is not just that blob of dense urbanism, but it's also got these long tentacles that reach out all around the country and around the world in different regional configurations, and it's our responsibility, given the issues around how we're going to make the kind of low carbon transition that, for those who believe in climate change and that we need to reduce our CO2 emissions, it's going to affect not just your everyday choice of like well, how are you getting around today? Are you going to ride a bike or take a bus, but it's also affecting these big infrastructure systems. So the study of infrastructure is an important part of planning and transitioning towards a less car dependent future.
Stephanie Rouse:I think that's a good point because as cities, we have so much power on the built side of the environment, whether it's projects that we're leading up for infrastructure and road building or just design reviews for new buildings. And we're reading our next book for the last episode of this year, and it's all about the architecture and building in a sustainable manner and talking about trying to source locally instead of bringing in materials that might be cool and make your project look neat but actually are pretty unsustainable and cause more harm than good. So it's an interesting way for listeners of this episode to think about their impact and how small decisions can actually have a bigger global impact.
Jennifer Hiatt:So Mobility Justice was published in 2018, and you use the 2006 to 2013 data, which show that there was a decline in auto mobility, as fewer people drove or even got driver's licenses and, of course, we all know what falls between 2006 and 2013. The first financial crisis, so some of the potential reasons cited were like poor economic times and high gas prices, as well as new mobility options and ride sharing. But it's been a crazy decade since 2013. We've seen the economy rebound and then we've seen the pandemic, and then we've seen inflation happen again. So I was wondering with current data, is auto mobility still kind of trending downward and, if it is, are we seeing like an increase in mobility opportunities where the decline is highest?
Mimi Sheller:Right. So it's not declining anymore and it became really clear even by 2014,. It was really clear that that decline that happened after 2007,. 2008 was temporary and it started going back up again and soon returned to its previous levels. And what we see is a kind of bifurcated shift where there were certain desires of, like, a younger generation to live in city centers where they had access to walking and biking and public transit. Many of them were college graduates and they were not getting driver's licenses. But at the same time those city centers were very expensive and we see a much bigger population trend overall of people not being able to afford to live in those kind of accessible, walkable, nice, high density, good transportation city centers. And those waves of people were being pushed out to areas that were what we call car dependent because of the built landscape of the United States. And so we see both growth in those smaller places like ex-urban, suburban and smaller towns was happening and people still driving cars.
Mimi Sheller:When the pandemic came, it layered onto these shifts that were happening a massive disruption of all kinds of mobility, a steep decline in public transit usage, and that has not fully bounced back, and we also saw this disruption of office work and sort of the office commuting pattern, and that led to the emptying out of many city center office buildings and those have also not fully come back and so it's really badly affected a public transit usage in cities like New York, especially in Philadelphia, boston.
Mimi Sheller:But San Francisco has become the sort of poster child of this dynamic. That really undermines what seemed like a trend towards much more like investment in public transit and transit oriented development, and it's made it really difficult. And another really sad impact of the pandemic was really big increase of people dying in car crashes. What had been the 2020 deaths, which already seemed high, in 2021, it increased to almost 43,000 people in the United States dying in car crashes similar numbers in 2022. And it was like more than 10% increase over before the pandemic. There's like a lot of negative loop feedbacks happening here which make it then scary for people to ride bikes because then they're scared of fatalities on the street, and so there's a lot of push and pull factors and the pandemic has driven more growth in smaller towns and people moving away from the most dense metropolitan areas. So a lot of interesting kind of turbulence going on right now, I would say, in our mobility patterns.
Jennifer Hiatt:Yeah, I was so excited. In 2018 and 2019, omaha, which is not known to be the most walkable or alternate commuter friendly city, finally decided to invest in a rapid bus transit and just as it was getting started and we had the potential to show that Omaha could be an easier commuting city, the pandemic happened and shut down almost everything and the ORBT was still out and you could ride it, but no one was, because you had to wear your mask and people were terrified to be around other people and it really stunted the rollout of that bus system and I don't think that it's recovered.
Mimi Sheller:Wow, so it still hasn't come back. No, I mean, I still hope that in the next three to five years some of those transit systems will start to recover again, and I think one of the questions is how much opportunity there might be to convert former office buildings into residential uses and that would then change, hopefully, like the kinds of patterns of transit use and walkability in some of these city districts.
Stephanie Rouse:Yeah, it's definitely been interesting kind of tracking how transit has been changing over the last couple of years, because I know the American Planning Association just had an article that they published recently and is talking about those major systems like the same Francisco, New York, that they're struggling and having to funnel in excessive capital to try and maintain those systems.
Stephanie Rouse:But some of the kind of midsize cities are actually doing some unique things that are really helping and making their systems more self-sustaining. So I think it'll be interesting to see how the different scales of transit systems across the US kind of bounce back. Thank you. So towards the end of the book you wrote, when urban planners speak of moving beyond mobility via placemaking, they're simply not thinking of these extended operational landscapes of movement that support urbanization. The operational landscape is being infrastructure for energy, tourism, telecommunications, transportation, resource extraction and it goes on. All of these fields are generally siloed, with planners focusing mostly on these place-based mobility options and other departments focusing on these other forms of operational landscapes. Should our field really be learning more about these other fields to try and implement more comprehensive approaches, or is there kind of an opportunity for more information and kind of networking amongst these different silos?
Mimi Sheller:I think when the idea of placemaking first came out, it was very like attractive and enticing and like who doesn't like a good you know little pocket park or you know a nice bench to sit on and food out on the city streets? And it seemed like a really good thing and placemaking was a good idea. But when I started to sort of read more about the idea of placemaking being a replacement for mobility, for actually thinking beyond mobility and instead emphasizing placemaking, that was at the very moment when a lot of communities were actually feeling that they were being displaced by gentrification and so in my mind placemaking got very much linked to displacement and who gets to make a place, who gets to claim a place, who gets the investment in their placemaking and who doesn't. And that again goes back to those kinno-political struggles who has the decision-making power, who determines the investments, which neighborhoods will get them and which will not. But also just that when you make those improvements it does have the potential to drive up rental and real estate prices and then taxes and then lead to displacement through gentrification. And, given you know the histories in American cities of redlining and segregation, when placemaking comes to certain neighborhoods it kind of echoes those past traumas of the way in which urban renewal right in the 60s and 70s displaced a lot of poorer communities of color in particular. So I had my suspicions of going too far down the road with placemaking without understanding those histories.
Mimi Sheller:The link, as you were saying, to those bigger scale effects is that also cities rely on water, energy, food, construction materials and goods coming from all over the world, and so if we are just thinking about placemaking, we're putting kind of blinkers on and we're saying we're not going to think about all that other stuff and where it comes from, and so that's a problem also. I think and I think the pandemic actually made us much more aware and sensitive to the fact of all of those logistical systems can be stopped and wow, what happens then. And also things like the war in Ukraine. You know how it affected supplies of things like natural gas from Russia or the fertilizer that's needed to grow food in Africa. We're all connected. So placemaking to me is just not a big enough understanding of how we're all connected.
Jennifer Hiatt:It always does take that like once in a hundred year event to make us all realize like, oh, we're so much more connected, and it's maybe a sad statement to society that it's because we couldn't get our easy bake ovens. But if that's what it takes, I guess, to realize we're connected. Speaking of that connection, you end your book with a chapter on the mobile comments and of course my mind went to the tragedy of the commons and the ability to absolutely deplete all of our common needs and common resources. So what is the mobile commons and what steps can we take to reclaim that area?
Mimi Sheller:So I'm glad you mentioned the tragedy of the commons, because that's a classic essay by an economist named Gareth Hardin and it was challenged by an economist named Eleanor Ostrom. And Eleanor Ostrom decided to study commons and to see like wow, is it really that tragic? Like does everybody just like take everything and there's nothing left? And what she argued is that there's certain kinds of commons or a commoning where people actually create rules for limiting their use and for sharing sort of somewhat equitably. And we have social ways like people, societies, we have social ways of kind of divvying up access to commons. Now that kind of work depended on what was called like a common pool resource, right, so it's like the oceans or the forest or like lobsters in the Gulf of Maine and like fishermen and foresters and people kind of came up with these ways of sharing it. And recently, this other idea of commoning with a sort of verb, like of action it's a verb is something you can do and that we can all find ways of commoning and we do it all the time. It's not just these rare special common pool resources, and one person who wrote about that was this thinker named Ivan Illich in the 1970s and he said that the road, you know, like the street, the road used to be a commons but it has been degraded from a commons to become a simple resource for the circulation of vehicles. So this space, where people used to share it, used to come, move through it but allow others to move through in different ways, but also just to use it to be there to sell stuff, for children to play, for people to talk, to sit on benches. That was like a commons and a form of commoning and by having vehicles just circulating through it as fast as they can and engineering plans for like level of service and like how much traffic, that destroyed the commons. So that was a kind of tragedy of the commons. But the argument is that we can reclaim that. And of course there have been movements like reclaim the streets, which was all about reclaiming the street as a commons for bicycling and critical mass bike rides, which we're kind of trying to take the streets back from cars, motorized vehicles and be there. But also like when we think of how, like Amsterdam has so many bikes and bicyclists as famous for it. Well, that came about through a movement of mothers who were got upset about their children being killed by cars and they took back the streets and they said we're going to stop the car traffic and the mayhem and we're going to reclaim this space between our houses as a commons.
Mimi Sheller:And so that idea of a kind of commons lens has been picked up on in this field of mobility research and the study of, like the politics of mobility to think about how can we allow for fairer, more sustainable, more equitable, more just mobilities, and commoning would be a way, I argue, to do that.
Mimi Sheller:That is, we need to think not just about transportation equity as like access to transportation, and we need to think not just about sustainable mobility as electrification or something like that, but we need to think about the social sharing of our spaces of mobility and our streets and our transit systems and all of the different ways in which we use energy and resources to move around.
Mimi Sheller:And as soon as you start thinking about that, about mobile commoning, you also begin to think beyond humans and you can begin to consider what we call the more than human. So animals also need mobility and to move around to live, and our mobility systems have interrupted a lot of animals and killed them. So there's a sort of environmental justice aspect to mobile commoning also and in particular, it brought me into thinking more about indigenous ways of thinking about the world and indigenous commoning and the ways in which private property itself restricted mobility of native peoples who used to be able to move around in America North America or what they call Turtle Island and make use of waterways and rivers and woods and woodlands and grasslands and all of that. So fences and streets became part of a disruption of that kind of commoning also.
Jennifer Hiatt:So that just set my brain in like five different directions, not the least of which is one of the things that irritates me the most. In downtown is impeding traffic Can actually be a civil infraction. It's downtown. People should be able to walk freely and I understand that we're trying to protect people and save lives. But slow cars down Like why are we prioritizing cars and creating civil and even sometimes criminal infractions for that? It's just very irritating. But you also tied in perfectly. We just read Accidental Ecosystems, which is a book that focuses on how habitat has been destroyed in many ways and we're really segmenting out wildlife, animals and moving through cities.
Stephanie Rouse:Yeah, it was really interesting. There were so many examples of how animals are coming back into cities but our transportation systems are making it really challenging for them to survive, and there's a great story about I can't remember which kind of cat it was, I think it was a Puma but making its way across like two different interstate systems to get into the park area and the urban core of the city and how it was just kind of miraculous that it survived the journey to even get there. But it's fun seeing all these new projects that are planned or there's a couple, not in the US, that have actually been built of overpasses, wildlife overpasses to allow wildlife to move through our communities without being endangered by the freeways. Oh, that's great. So to wrap up, after all of our listeners get through reading your book, of course, what is one other book, or a couple of other books that you would recommend that they check out?
Mimi Sheller:Well, let's see, I really enjoyed, as I said, like understanding the history of mobilities better. And so there's a great book by Genevieve Carpio, who's a historian of mobilities. It's called Collisions at the Crossroads, and Collisions at the Crossroads is a kind of history of different restrictions on mobilities in the Western United States and the interactions of indigenous people and Latinx and Asian-Americans. So it's like a view I guess. I'm an East Coaster and so I always like I've learned my history kind of from the East Coast over, but she kind of really starts from the West Coast and it gave for me, it opened up my mind to like a whole different history of mobilities and mobility, struggles over mobility, justice that took place out West.
Mimi Sheller:And then the other thing I mean I'm always really interested in learning more about Native American and indigenous understandings, and so I really enjoyed Robin Wall Kimmerer's book Braiding Sweetgrass, indigenous Wisdom, scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants. And you would think that's not a mobility-related book or planning or anything like that. She's a Batsanist and also an indigenous thinker, but she really gives an amazing entry way into thinking from different perspectives. And what does it mean to? She calls it like awaken our ecological consciousness through our reciprocal relationships with the rest of the living world, and that idea of reciprocity with the world is very much part of the mobile-commoning idea and it brings me to think about what I call an ethics of care in mobilities. So that work's been really inspiring.
Jennifer Hiatt:I'm not sure that this really fits in the podcast. So you discussed the fencing in of Tracks of Land and such, and it made me think of the idea of the closing of the frontier. And so we've got this idea that was based on Frederick Jackson Turner, that there's just no land available anymore in the West. It's all fenced off and closed off, and so the frontier is closed and America is done. I mean, that came in like the 1890s and we're still having conversations about fencing and property and meanwhile over in the UK they have common paths and if you can walk on the common path, you can walk there. It's no big deal. I just think that it's very interesting how America thinks of itself as this like transportation and mobility-friendly country, when really we are closing off every aspect of mobility that we possibly could except the car.
Mimi Sheller:Yes, totally. I mean, ironically, even walking across like a suburban landscape that's very green and pleasant. Everybody's patch of lawn is their patch of lawn and you can't really cross it. You're not really supposed to cut across those backyards. And I lived in England for a long time and I loved the public footpath system. I got really used to that. They left these public footpaths so you could get around, but people had to fight, I think, for those because there had been enclosure movements in like the 18th century in England and Scotland and so it took people walking and fighting to keep open those footpaths, and I think we could do with a little more of that in the United States. Yeah, I agree.
Stephanie Rouse:If anyone's interested specifically in that topic, those are really great 99% invisible podcast episodes. That dives into that and the history of how they got there, which is really interesting. But I want to thank you so much, Mimi, for joining us to talk about your book Mobility Justice, and it's been a really great conversation. I'm glad you're able to join.
Mimi Sheller:Thank you, stephanie, thank you, jennifer, it's been great talking with you.
Stephanie Rouse:We hope you enjoyed this conversation with author Mimi Scheller on her book Mobility Justice the Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes. You can get your own copy through the publisher at islandpressorg and check out the other great titles we've covered. While you're there, remember to subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts and please rate, review and share the show. Thank you for listening and we'll talk to you next time on Booked. On Planning.