Chapter Lessons on empowering inhabitants through Extended Mobility and the commons

Overview & Synopsis

Extended Mobility for the City as a Common offers a novel framework for understanding how urban inhabitants access and experience cities. It invites readers to critically examine the ways in which stigmatization and socioeconomic barriers combine to restrict access to urban opportunities for marginalized communities. Arguing that the right to the city is inseparable from the right to mobility, this book calls for a radical shift toward a welcoming and solidary city, both in transportation systems and in the inhabitants’ destinations. This book is structured into three parts. Part I introduces the concept of “Extended Mobility,” a multidimensional framework encompassing motility, accessibility, and porosity that provides a new lens to interrogate the multifaceted nature of mobility as a social phenomenon. Part II applies this framework through a grounded ethnographic comparison of Favela da Maré in Rio de Janeiro and the San Siro housing project in Milan. These rich and detailed studies develop robust methodological tools and theoretical insights that uncover the complex mobility experiences of peripheral urban inhabitants. In the final section, leading experts in transportation and urban planning engage Extended Mobility across different global settings to critique existing policies and explore pathways toward mobility justice and a city of rights for all. By integrating structural and experiential perspectives on urban mobility, this book is an essential resource for social science researchers and urban and transportation planning scholars as well as policymakers, practitioners, and activists seeking to foster more inclusive cities and empower communities to access the full possibilities of a common urban life. Chapters 1, 4, 7, and the Introduction of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 International license.