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New Article by Bermet Borubaeva and Egor Muleev on the Trolleybus Case in Bishkek

Published by the Berliner Gazette on the 11th of November 2024

In “Governing ‘Green’ Public Infrastructure: The Trolleybus Case in Bishkek,” Bermet Borubaeva and Egor Muleev take us on a ride through the tangled wires of Bishkek’s trolleybus saga—a tale of sustainability, bureaucracy, and a city at a crossroads. At the heart of the drama is Bishkek’s trolleybus system, the capital’s only electric public transport with enough capacity to avoid daily gridlock, yet it’s on the brink of extinction. City Hall, nudged by foreign consultants and seduced by shiny new e-buses, wants to ditch the old for the new—even though the old is green, functional, and beloved by the people. What follows is a classic case of public infrastructure caught in the gears of bureaucracy, where short-term decisions and backroom deals hold more weight than long-term planning.

The article further explores the role of local governance, workers’ struggles, and grassroots resistance in shaping the future of public infrastructure, using the trolleybus as a case study for broader issues in urban mobility and democratic accountability.

Read the whole article here.

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New review by Lyubomir Pozharliev on “If Cars Could Walk: Postsocialist Streets in Transformation” ed. by Ger Duijzings and Tauri Tuvikene

The October 2024 issue of Technology and Culture is officially out and with that, a fresh review on the recently published “If Cars Could Walk: Postsocialist Streets in Transformation” ed. by Ger Duijzings and Tauri Tuvikene” by Lyubomir Pozharliev, part of the CoMoDe research group, has been published.

Read an excerpt of the review & get access here: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/940504

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Keynote Speaker | t2m Annual Conference 2024, Leipzig

We are happy to share that Prof. Waldemar Kuligowski will be joining us as a keynote speaker at the t2m Annual Conference in Leipzig in 2024. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on the intersection of mobility, sustainability, and digitalization. His research interests focus on the theory of culture, reflexive ethnography, anthropology of motorway, festivals and festivalization.

Recently he published Modernizing Localities in Poland: A Never-ending Transformation (Lanham – London – New York 2024) and (with Marcin Poprawski) Festivals and Values. Music, Community Engagement and Organisational Symbolism (Cham 2023). A selection of his critical essays in Serbian under the title “Polish Christ and Serbian Trumpets” is being prepared. As a “public intellectual”, he publishes his essays and articles in leading Polish newspapers and magazines. Recently he has been involved in organizing scientific conferences in a jazz club and at a punk rock music festival.

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Registration for the 2024 Annual T2M Conference in Leipzig is now open!

The pre-submission of conference contributions closed in April. If you are still interested in participating, please contact us at t2m@leibniz-ifl.de and we can discuss your options of participation!

Register before 7 September!

If you have not received a registration invitation email from us, please contact us at t2m@leibniz-ifl.de. Registration, payment, and submission of contributions are processed via the Indico conference registration portal.

Become a T2M Association member

We also invite you to become a member of the T2M Association if you have not done so yet. Being a T2M member yields numerous benefits, including discounted conference fees and access to the Journal of Transport History, Transfers and Mobilities. You will find more information here: https://t2m.org/internal/become-a-member/

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us at t2m@leibniz-ifl.de. We are here to help!

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Keynote Speaker | t2m Annual Conference 2024, Leipzig

We are thrilled to announce that Prof. Frauke Behrendt will be delivering the keynote lecture at the t2m Annual Conference in Leipzig in 2024. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on the intersection of mobility, sustainability, and digitalization.

Prof. Behrendt’s current research on social justice includes work with Mimi Sheller on Mobility Data Justice, and exploring the implications of AI for the governance of mobility. Current work on micro-mobility comprises Dutch, UK, South Korean, and Chinese case studies, alongside research on the electric mobility transitions in the Global South, specifically around motorbikes and rickshaws. Frauke Behrendt is also involved in ELEVATE project for which she led the funding application. This project explores micromobility in the UK, in collaboration with Leeds, Oxford, and Brighton University. Her previous research focussed on smart cycling, AI and digital/data society, the musical use of mobile phones, as well as sonic interaction design.

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VISITING FELLOWS PROGRAMME


We invite applications for our Visiting Fellows Programme (f/m/d) in the framework of the research project “Contentious Mobilities: Rethinking Mobility Transitions through a Decolonial Lens (CoMoDe)”

Academic and non-academic applicants are welcome to apply for stays ranging from one to six months at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography (IfL) in Leipzig. The fellowship scheme is administered by the IfL and financed by the Leibniz Association in the framework of its Junior Research Group programme.

Continue reading “VISITING FELLOWS PROGRAMME”
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2024 T2M ANNUAL CONFERENCE


23–25 September 2024, Leipzig, Germany
Organised by the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography (IfL), and Lancaster University, Leipzig, Germany. Final Conference of the CoMoDe Project (Contentious Mobilities: Rethinking Mobility Transitions through a Decolonial Lens)

Mobilities and Infrastructures: Transitions and Transformations

Modern societies are experiencing striking technological, ecological, socio-economic and cultural as well as political challenges – with mobility questions at the forefront of these contentions. Actors and institutions across the globe increasingly recognize the need for systemic changes in the ways goods, people, ideas, policies and capital are set in motion – usually framed in the terms of “mobility transitions”. Green deal policies are drafted and “just transition” funds are set up, acknowledging that transition to carbon-free futures will require substantial resources to succeed, but also to avoid uneven and unfair socio-spatial effects on nations, regions, cities, and rural places. Existing research has already criticized mobility transition policies for their narrow normative assumptions, their reliance on large-scale infrastructures and technological innovations, and elaborated on the concepts of mobility justice and commoning mobility as a way of devising collective and collaborative means of shaping mobility transitions (Cresswell et. al 2021; Sheller 2018). It is therefore time to interrogate how and in which ways have “mobility transitions” been framed in different places at different times in their multifaceted histories.

Continue reading “2024 T2M ANNUAL CONFERENCE”
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Freshly published: The Road to Socialism

A core member of the CoMoDe team Lyubomir Pozharliev recently published his new book “The Road to Socialism. Transport Infrastructure in Socialist Bulgaria and Yugoslavia (1945–1989)” via V&R unipress. It is accessible as an open source publication supported by the Leibniz foundation.

The book is the first comprehensive empirical study of transport infrastructure in two socialist countries in the years 1945–1989. In the case study of Yugoslavia, the construction of roads was interrelated with building socialist and trans-ethnic identities, uniting all federal republics. In practice, the “Brotherhood and Unity Highway” was an artery linking the capitals of the most industrialized republics, neglecting Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and parts of Macedonia. In socialist Bulgaria existed a clear ideological link between transport and nation building. Bulgarian roads’ disintegrative function was best seen in the example of the “Highway Ring” which, constructed as an inner circle, isolated the border regions and areas inhabited by Bulgarian Muslims and Turks.

Dr Lyubomir Pozharliev is a research associate at the Leibniz-Institut für Länderkunde (Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography) in Leipzig. He is working within the Leibniz Junior Research group “Contentious Mobilities: rethinking mobility transitions through a decolonial lens” with a focus on mobility modes in Central Asia and other post-socialist countries. Between 2018 and 2020 he was a postdoctoral researcher within SPP “1981 Transottomanica”. He received his doctorate in history and cultural studies (2018) from Justus-Liebig University, Giessen at the Department of Eastern European History.

The full Open Access PDF can be found here.

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Reclaiming I. Chavchavadze Avenue

A ifl.blog entry by Elene Khundadze

The rehabilitation and fundamental transformation of one of Tbilisi’s main thoroughfares – the Chavchavadze Avenue – sparked debates and conflicts over the city’s new transport policy. Many protested that only one car lane was left and car-parking space was reduced in favor of giving space to public transport, cycling and pedestrian infrastructures. Some found the counter-flow organization of bus lanes dangerous and problematic. Yet, others embraced the reform as a key step towards more socio-spatially just urban and mobility planning. In what follows, I retell the history of the transformation of the avenue. I illustrate how precarious and institutionally challenging the accomplishment of such a street redesign can be. I also suggest that the story of redesigning Chavchavadze Avenue shows that even under unfair political rule and precarious institutional settings impressive urban changes are possible. Continue reading “Reclaiming I. Chavchavadze Avenue”

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Call for Papers for the international conference: CULTURE, INFRASTRUCTURE, MOBILITY


EXTENDED CALL – NEW DEADLINE: 27.06.2023

Sofia, 09–11 October 2023

The history of modern technological infrastructure spans over two centuries and includes heterogeneous phenomena: from railroads, sewerage and water pipes, to telecommunications and digital networks. Its construction resembles a techno-world where modern humans live free from the natural constraints of their existence. This is an environment with very different possibilities, problems, freedoms and dependencies. Large infrastructure projects have a decisive influence on social, economic, technical, societal and administrative processes in modern societies. They shape the relations between sedentariness and mobility, define the rhythms and styles of life, consciousness, self-esteem and identity of individuals and groups.

The development of infrastructures has a key relationship to historical change. Infrastructure projects depend on cultural conditions for their emergence, but they also have important consequences for cultural change. They are an instrument for domination and homogenization of territories, for interaction between anonymous individuals, and for the integration of social groups. Transportation and communication infrastructures transform “imagined modern communities” into a new social and techno-cultural reality. They have a strong integrative but also disintegrative function, contributing to the homogenization of populations, making them technological carriers of power ideologies: Eurocentric, colonial or nationalist.Finally, infrastructure projects have their own history: almost two hundred years of development. The progressivist ideology with which they have traditionally been associated has been criticized and reconsidered. But development has not come to a halt, techno- optimism has not disappeared. New, even more far-reaching infrastructure projects are taking the place of the old ones. The role of digital communication, the Internet galaxy and social networks for the integration and disintegration of late modern society is not yet explored: they offer new possibilities but perhaps also unimagined dangers.

We aim to explore the following topics:

  • Infrastructures, mobility, migrations: technological nomads, migration flows and “landscapes”, transnational hybrids and technology driven melanges.
  • Infrastructures, communication and geopolitics: colonization, decolonization, post- colonization, self-colonization, and their cultural impacts.
  • Infrastructures as instruments of social engineering and everyday governance.
  • Regulations and resistance in new digital mobility services: capital flows and power constellations.
  • Standardization, normalization, and homogenization: leveling of inequalities oremergence of new social inequalities and cultural asymmetries?
  • Public transport: mobility services in the face of new technologies and modernization policies; circuits of knowledge production, contested norms and notions of modernity.
  • Transformation of infrastructures and the cultural history of cities: centers andperipheries, urban spaces, territories and imagination.
  • Historical evolution of infrastructures and evolving social and cultural competencies for their use.
  • Forms of infrastructure – forms of cultural imagination: changing concepts, rhetoricsand “aesthetics” of infrastructure (images of the machine; images of progress from secession to geometrism, constructivism and minimalism; retro aesthetics).
  • Infrastructure, acceleration, cultural impact. Accelerating infrastructures and their psycho-cultural impact on the individual. Decaying infrastructures, infrastructural disasters, and apocalyptic visions.

 Please send a 250-word abstract and a 50-word bio to L_Pozharliev@leibniz-ifl.de and jdamianova@gmail.com no later than 27th of June 2023.

The conference is free of charge. Graduates, doctoral students and participants with financial difficulties whose submissions have been accepted may apply for travel grants of up to € 250 (in the form of reimbursement). A limited number of grants are available and will be given on an individual basis. Applications should detail the cost of travel and the amount applied for in an email to l_pozharliev@leibniz-ifl.de.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

  • Prof. Dr. Dirk van Laak, Chair at the Institute for 19th to 21st Century History, University of Leipzig
  • Prof. Dr. Arnold Bartezky, Head of the Department of Culture and Imagination, Coordinator of Art History at the Leibniz Institute for History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO), Leipzig
  • Dr. Wladimir Sgibnev, Leibniz-Institut für Länderkunde. Coordinator of the Research GroupMobilities and Migration and Head of the Leibniz Junior Research Group “CoMoDe”, Leipzig

Organising committee:

Dr. Lyubomir Pozharliev, Leibniz-Institut für Länderkunde Postdoctoral researcher, member of the research group II of the Leibniz Science Campus “Eastern Europe – Global Area” (EEGA), Leipzig
Prof. Alexander Kiossev, Head of the Cultural Centre at Sofia University
Prof. Daniela Koleva, Department of History and Theory of Culture, Sofia University
Dr. Zhana Damyanova, Maison des sciences de l’homme et de la société, Sofia

Continue reading “Call for Papers for the international conference: CULTURE, INFRASTRUCTURE, MOBILITY”