Innovations in urban transport

Tim Schwanen organised four paper sessions on ‘Infrastructure in Practice and in Flux’ during the 4s/EASST conference in Barcelona on 31 August – 3 September. The sessions were organised as part of the ‘Conceptualising Infrastructures, Innovation and Demand’ project in which CIED and DEMAND collaborate. Tim Schwanen also presented a paper at 4S/EASST titled ‘Infrastructure’s allure’.

From 1-4 September 2015, Dr Tim Schwanen gave a presentation entitled ‘Inovationscapes in urban mobility: can cities lead the way in sustainability transitions in passenger transport’ during the Annual International Conference of the Royal Geographical Society, in Exeter.

In August 2015, Dr Tim Schwanen gave a presentation on entitled ‘Sustainability transitions and geography: the role of cities in low energy urban mobility’ during the Fourth Global Conference on Economic Geography, in Oxford.

On 20th and 22nd July 2015, Dr Tim Schwanen gave a keynote presentation entitled ‘Cycling and walking the city: an assessment of transport research on active travel’ in a workshop on ‘Active travel and physical activity – bridge the gap’ at the IATBR 2015 conference in Windsor.

On 20th May 2015, Dr Tim Schwanen was the keynote speaker at the ‘Sustainable Transport: Drivers for Change’ event in Oxford, organised by Low Carbon Oxford. The event was targeted at reps from businesses and other organisations in/around Oxford, and saw about 30 people attending. The presentation slides are available for download here.

On 14th May 2015, Dr Tim Schwanen organised a seminar/workshop with Cyclox, a cycling campaigning group in Oxford, to discuss findings from his research that was conducted on a high profile retrofit project in Oxford. The event was attended by appprox 40 people and received very positive feedback from both attendees and  organisers of Cyclox, who considered the debate highly encouraging for everyone hoping to see Oxford become a beacon for bike use.

Dr Tim Schwanen attended two meetings in the context of the ‘Oxford OLEV Fund Steering Group Meeting’ – this comprises staff members from Oxford City Council, Oxfordshire County Council, Energy Savings Trust and University of Oxford (TS) and will oversee and develop bids for three Office for Low Emission Vehicles (OLEV) programmes – a bus scheme, a taxi scheme for which Oxford has been admitted to the second round. For more information on the scheme, please refer to the Department of Transport’s press release here. Further meetings and proposal writing over the next few months are planned as deadlines for the three schemes are likely to be in August and September

On 21-25 April 2015, Dr Tim Schwanen travelled to Chicago to attend the ‘ Socio-Technical (Sustainability) Transitions in the making: emerging geographies of eco-innovation and green industrial change 2’ meeting where he will present his paper on:  Geographies of eco-innovations in urban mobility: how state restructuring complicates sustainability transitions in passenger transport. During this 5 day event at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Dr Schwanen was also a panellist in a session on ‘Unlocking Low Carbon Mobility’, and in the session on ‘CITY Debates: Can resilience as a concept be saved?’.

On 18^th March, Dr Tim Schwanen gave a seminar on ‘Reducing energy consumption in urban transport’ at the DEMAND centre. Read more about the seminar.

On 17th March 2015, Dr Tim Schwanen was invited as one of the speakers in a seminar in the Hilar term 2015 Transport Studies Unit seminar series ‘The Scalar Politics of Transport’. Tim’s talk was called ‘A new regional élan? Transport investment in the re-scaling competition state’ and formed part of the seminar on 17^th March which had as its title ‘Politics of Infrastructure: Spineless Development?’

On 16th April 2014 Dr Tim Schwanen gave a presentation at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) in Tampa Florida. Download the presentation Understanding low energy innovation in urban mobility AAG presentation [PDF 133.68KB]

Dr Tim Schwanen gave a keynote presentation during the International Time Geography Days conference May 14-16 2014 which took place in Linköping, Sweden. Download the presentation slides Revisiting socio-technical ecologies of innovation [PDF 328.53KB]

On 12th May 2014, Dr Tim Schwanen gave a lecture at the University of Gothenburg ‘Beyond Automobility’.

With the publication of the Fifth Assessment Report of the IPCC it is more evident than ever that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions need to be curbed drastically and as soon as possible. Transport is widely regarded as one of the difficult sectors in which to reduce energy consumption and GHG emissions. Attempts to do so typically rely on technological fixes, economic measures and ‘soft’ behaviour change programmes; engineering, economics and psychology are the academic disciplines that have the greatest impact on public policies and other interventions aiming to reduce emissions from transport. In recent years, however, sociologists, geographers and cultural theorists have begun to elaborate a range of complementary and alternative perspectives on energy consumption and GHG emissions in transport and other domains of society. Focusing on the land-based mobility of people (i.e. excluding freight, maritime and air transport),Tim’s lecture outlined one such perspective. This built on , and also engaged critically with, the previous and ongoing work of a range of mainly UK-based social scientists. It located the difficulty of reducing GH emissions in the nature of automobility, which is – in line with recent thinking on object-oriented ontologies and the speculative realism movement in continental philosophy – conceptualised not as a system or regime but as an object.

Tim went  on to discuss how and under what conditions this object can be changed. Urban passenger transport was discussed, with a particular focus on UK cities. The lecture  concluded that ongoing developments in those cities are in alignment with expectations that can be derived from an object-oriented conceptualisation of automobility. This raises the question whether the numerous innovations in and experiments with sustainable transport will be sufficient to reduce GHG emissions and energy consumption on the scale that is required to drastically limit transport’s contribution to anthropogenic climate change.

On Thursday 28^th May CIED convened a research workshop with key members of Brighton and Hove City Council as part of CIED’s endeavours to ensure that its energy demand research relevant, accessible and policy focused. With a first round of research projects already underway CIED is starting to develop ideas for a second round of projects. The aim of this workshop was to discuss opportunities to match projects where possible to city priorities where there could be a mutual benefit and knowledge sharing potential. Opportunities explored were possible placement of researchers within the council for short secondments to facilitate knowledge exchange and sharing of research findings to support council policy development.

Tim Schwanen, Co-Director presented an outline of the project Innovations in urban transport ‘and shared some initial findings. A subsequent round table discussion on the project identified several opportunities for future collaboration on transport related issues.

Download the Presentation to Brighton and Hove Council [PDF 74.59KB]

On 13th December 2013, Dr Tim Schwanen delivered a workshop at Hong Kong Baptist University on ‘activity-travel behaviour analysis. Download the presentation Understanding low energy innovation in passenger transport [PDF 223.54KB]