Thought experiment provoking transport-justice

Thought experiment provoking transport-justice
how is everyone affected, not only the poor?
Dr. Mennatullah Hendawy
Cairo and elsewhere
Links
Field of work
Urban planning, Communication, Research
Project category
Sustainable mobility
Project submitted
2022

I am an interdisciplinary urban researcher who works on the intersection of cities, technology, and justice, with a focus on sustainability, visualization, digitalization, communication, and mediatization. I define myself as a cross-border global citizen who is inspired by local stories and observations. My personal vision is to tackle global inequalities by producing and transferring impactful knowledge . The most important values for me are freedom, justice, and sustainability.

Transportation is a basic consumer good and right in a currently growing connected world. Scholarly work on transportation injustice is concerned with advocating for a system that provides every citizen with the right to move freely in accordance with their needs and wants. Seen in this light, transportation is not only an infrastructural project but also a socio-cultural element that connects people and places, as well as activities, facilities, and opportunities locally and globally. While most literature focuses on the negative influence of transportation inequalities on the most vulnerable, everyone, including residents in suburban or satellite development, suffers from transportation injustice. As we do the hard work of unseeing poverty as the poor's problem, transportation should be kept at the forefront of discussion such that the right of everyone to have a safe, accessible, and affordable livelihood is affirmed. Using a fictional example for a thought experiment, in this article, I would like to ignite the discussion around how the rich are disadvantaged by transportation injustice. Using a thought experiment, I shift the conversation towards 'everybody' to lead to more practical discussions coupled with the current neoliberal urban age, as the discussion no longer excludes the rich from the conversation. The reason I would like to make this argument is to move away from addressing poverty as a problem of the other, towards seeing poverty and injustice as a broader issue coproduced by everybody.