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Beyond fear and abandonment: public transport resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic

New in: A collaborative paper by Louise Sträuli, Tauri Tuvikene, Tonio Weicker, Wojciech Kębłowski, Wladimir Sgibnev, Peter Timko and Marcus Finbom, published in the scope of the Putspace project at IfL.

´The authors investigate how the Covid-19 pandemic affected both the accessibility of urban public transport and its structures themselves. It takes a closer look on the specific governmental regulations regarding urban mobility and points out the struggles of people who were especially affected by the Covid regulations on urban transport systems.

In an extensive mixed-method study, data on the behavior, emotions and struggles of public transport users and urban citizens from Berlin, Brussels, Stockholm and Tallinn has been collected. It is shown, how the regulations transformed general passenger behavior  in terms of usage, distances and frequency of travel and that certain narratives and passengers emotions as well as their socio-economic conditions have to be taken into account when trying to understand the realm of public transport in times of crisis.

Read the full open-access paper here!

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The Soviet city as a landscape in the making

Aerial view of Samarkand in 2020 showing the old city (yellow), the colonial city (green), and Soviet-era apartment blocks and micro-rayons (orange). The areas of the city that are not coloured feature a mix of private dwellings, commercial and administrative buildings. The white box indicates the boundaries of the map by Ernst Giese (see Figure 1). Numbers indicate the approximate location of respondents’ houses
(c) Copernicus Sentinel data 2020, modified by the authors.

Following the launch of the mass housing campaign under Nikita Khrushchev, the cityscape of Soviet Samarkand still remains some changes and continuities of it. This paper examines the planning, building, appropriation, and renovation of public and private housing on the level of practices rather than policies and discourses. It relates these practices to the specific temporalities of Samarkand’s landscape, such as the life cycles of inhabitants, the change of seasons, or the timelines of material decay, among others. Continue reading “The Soviet city as a landscape in the making”

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Freshly published: Geoforum Editorial on informalities in urban transport and mobility

This editorial introduces and contextualises the Special Issue on informalities in urban transport and mobility in cities across the Global South, East and North. It identifies a mutual misrecognition between the urban studies literature on informality and research on transport and mobilities, and proposes that urban mobility be understood as a critical site of contestations over (in)formalisation processes. Continue reading “Freshly published: Geoforum Editorial on informalities in urban transport and mobility”