Introduction
Transportation permeates our daily lives and produces and organizes social life. Transport politics and transport planning also constitute fundamental cornerstones in the building of modern society. Accordingly, transport planning is inherently political. For a long time, transport policy and planning have been generally understood as a matter of technical practice designed to find solutions for how to bring people, places and goods closer to one another and reducing the cost of doing so. From a Euclidian perspective, physical distance becomes measurable (Healey 2006), and an ordinary everyday trip can be split into sub-journeys dependent on length, motive for the trip, mode of transport, travel time and whether the traveller is with someone else or not. However, mobility is just as much about the expectations, experiences, emotions and meanings that people attach to movement in various situated contexts and situations. Feminist researchers have opposed the mainstream transport planning paradigm (see Greed in this collection, Matrix 1984; Oliver 1988) by pointing out that mobility is always situated. The particularities of mobility imply that those engaged in movement cannot be reduced to flows or numbers, but must always be considered as embodied and material. Men, women, boys and girls travel, move and use the transport system on an everyday basis, and are both affected by and affect this movement and the surrounding environment. Awareness of the situated character of mobility is demanding and challenging for both decision-makers and planners. Governments have also started to acknowledge the importance of considering gender in transport policy-making (see Swedish transport policy objectives and Levin and Faith-Ell in this collection). However, even in Sweden, a country often described as progressive in implementing gender equality, much needs to be done to improve gender-equal transport planning. A possible explanation as to why transport planning still lags behind in integrating gender into its planning practice is the utilitarian planning tradition in which the emphasis is on organizing and structuring transport for the good of businesses and the public. In doing so, the rationale for decision-making about investments has been based on a tradition of reductionist knowledge; moreover, the transport system has been implemented via top-down planning practices. To be able to calculate the net effects of investments in transport, complex physical and social relations have been reduced to measurable numbers and calculable flows of goods and people. As a consequence of the elaborate calculations and transport modelling carried out by transport planning experts, ordinary people face difficulties in reviewing or assessing the infrastructure investments, or valuing the outcomes of such projects.
With growing concern about the environment and climate change, transport planning as we know needs to develop and incorporate knowledge perspectives which until now have been largely absent. Global urbanization draws attention to more integrated transport and urban land-use planning, in which perspectives grounded in qualitative research traditions can help transport planning to address problems which are not easily reduced to isolated and measurable numbers. Transport planning needs to take into account both the numbers that enable us to calculate, make prognoses and measure flows and user experiences and expectations and the meanings of the transport system. This edited collection is a contribution to a more holistic transport planning practice aimed at bringing pluralistic planning traditions and perspectives together. The collection contributes to the development of a transport planning approach that better understands the qualities and meanings of the transport system to a multiplicity of users. This will hopefully aid in transforming transport policy-making and transport planning, and eventually the transport system itself, in more inclusive, equal and efficient directions.
Using Gender as an Analytical Tool in Transport Planning
The concept of gender, as Hanson describes, has âa long and complex genealogyâ (Hanson 2010: 8). Lykke (2009) discusses the birth of Euro-American gender research as being related in part to gender as a topic of study, and in part to various degrees of academic institutionalization of the field. In this process, she claims, there has always been a dual agenda of developing the research field, and remaining cautious as to how institutionalization may affect the field. Gender research is hence a p ost-disciplinary field, researching topics that need transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches stretching beyond disciplinary boundaries (Lykke 2009). Transport and mobility constitute just such a hybrid phenomenon (Latour 1993), we argue, which needs to draw upon theoretical frameworks and tools from several conventional disciplines as well as from post-disciplinary fields, in order to produce novel understandings of complex realities.
In a similar vein, using gender as an analytical tool in relation to transport and mobility necessitates a balancing act between different theoretical feminist ways of using the concept of gender. Gender can also be regarded as a hybrid concept in line with Latourâs understanding (Lykke and Braidotti 1996), which can be illustrated by the scholarly sex/gender division in Anglo-American theorizing and related to further theoretical developments of gender as a concept (Lykke 2009). What is relevant to this collection is, firstly, that feminist analyses of gender are and have been carried out in contrast to gender-conservative ideas and conceptions of gender, thus critiquing and deconstructing determinist and causal connections between biological sex and the social construction of gender. Secondly, perceiving gender as socially constructed explicitly foregrounds the situatedness and contextual character of gender positions, organized in line with societal and cultural norms on accepted performativity (Butler 2006; Rubin 1975). Gender in this sense can never be fixed or stable, but is always open and vulnerable to âperformative failuresâ whereby it can be undone or re-done. The âdoingâ of gender (West and Zimmerman 1987) has resulted in elaborate insights into the sociocultural understanding of gendered positions. Thirdly, gender as an analytical tool, and as the object of study in feminist research, is continuously under scholarly scrutiny within the gender research field. The genealogy of the concept is, however, important to bear in mind when we move on to the different chapters of this book.
The cultural and sociopolitical understanding of gender and power relations needs to be connected to the practices of planning, in which respect, integration and acceptance of diversity are cornerstones. In planning, it is crucial to measure and to calculate. For this purpose, numbers are needed and categorizations need to be made whereby one category is strictly separated from another. Two social categories frequently used in transport planning are âwomenâ and âmenâ, which in light of the discussion above can be critiqued as fixing people and identities and simplifying complex realities. Given the precedence that quantitative studies and travel surveys are given in transport planning, gender research based on post-structural and post-modern epistemologies studying more qualitative aspects of everyday life may encounter difficulties in the translation process. Matters are further complicated by the tensions and challenges encompassing gender equality as a political objective (understood in relation to statistical data on men and women) and critical feminist research, although the goal of moving towards an accessible transport system is the same. We argue tha...