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Abstract

Chinese

Urban mobility planning has the potential to enact more inclusive cities. Yet mobility planning around the world largely remains insensitive to gender, despite the rich scholarship on gendered mobility in diverse urban contexts. This insensitivity, we argue, is rooted in planning’s epistemic dimensions. Analysing what we term mobility planning knowledge through a feminist epistemological lens, we highlight the role of power in knowledge production. Through two steps, we offer the first comprehensive analysis of the intersections between knowledge and gender insensitivity in mobility planning. First, we review existing research on gender-insensitive planning around three categories: the basic assumptions underpinning mobility planning; knowledge production; and knowledge use practices. Second, we develop a research agenda comprising three directions for gender-inclusive planning research and practice: adopting a ‘commoning mobility’ perspective; interrogating ‘context’; and expanding planning’s methodological and disciplinary toolkit. Using these approaches to analyse gender insensitivities in urban mobility planning, we argue, allows us to explore alternative urban imaginaries based on collective, collaborative principles of gender justice that further discussions of just mobility transitions.

Keywords

care gender knowledge mobility planning

Introduction

Across the world, urban mobility planning is a crucial site for examining inequality and injustice. Inclusive mobility planning has the potential to transform urban social dynamics, including from a gendered perspective (Loukaitou-Sideris, 2020). Every day, millions of women avoid leaving home or adjust their plans because navigating cities poses multiple challenges.¹ On average, women perform more complex mobilities than men: they travel between more stops, drive significantly less and rely more on public transportation, walking and, in some contexts, cycling (Loukaitou-Sideris, 2020; Priya Uteng, 2021). Yet urban planning largely prioritises direct travel by car (Levy, 2013). Other modes of transport often receive less investment and are consequently inconvenient, risky, expensive or even impossible to use. Crucially, harassment impacts women globally (Kash, 2020; Moreira and Ceccato, 2021); a 2014 survey covering 42 cities around the world discovered that 82% of female respondents adapt travel plans because they fear harassment (ILR Worker Institute, 2015). This issue also significantly affects LGBTQIA+ individuals (Lubitow et al., 2020; Shakibaei and Vorobjovas-Pinta, 2024). Exclusion through mobility intersects with other exclusions involving race, ethnicity, caste, income and disability (Loukaitou-Sideris, 2020; Phadke et al., 2011). Yet, these considerations are often overlooked in mobility planning praxis. Contemporary urban mobility policy and planning are thus not gender neutral but gender insensitive, reflecting urban planning’s broader insensitivity to social difference.

In this article, we argue that knowledge underpinning urban mobility planning – what we hereinafter call mobility planning knowledge²– lies at the root of much of this insensitivity. Feminist urban planning and mobility scholars have underscored the need for more gender-disaggregated mobility data and diverse voices in academic and applied research (Priya Uteng, 2021; Sandercock and Forsyth, 1992; Singh, 2020). Some well-known examples of gender-sensitive planning underscore the importance of knowledge production in planning practice. For instance, as part of their widely discussed efforts to be gender inclusive, city administrators in Vienna have adapted existing methods of data collection – surveys and observations – or mobilised new methods (Charafi, 2023). These discussions, however, have rarely drawn inspiration from feminist epistemologies to critically examine mobility planning knowledge and reveal how power relations undergird knowledge production. In other words, a comprehensive analysis of the intersections between knowledge and gender insensitivity in mobility planning is lacking. This article addresses this gap by synthesising relevant insights from the literature and developing a research agenda that builds directly on that synthesis. This contributes to broader discussions of just mobility transitions, which emphasise that the equitable redistribution of resources should be accompanied by a focus on epistemic justice (Schwanen, 2021; Sheller, 2018; Smeds et al., 2023) and structural invisibilities, ignorance and ‘undone science’ in mobility research and planning (Joelsson and Scholten, 2019; Lowe, 2021; Nikolaeva, 2024).

The next section outlines our approach to ‘knowledge’ and presents key ideas from feminist epistemologies. It demonstrates why interrogating knowledge is crucial for addressing systemic inequalities and lays the foundation for the remainder of the article. Next, through a narrative review, we discuss the state of the art on gender insensitivity’s epistemic dimensions in urban mobility planning. Our discussion is organised around three distinct yet interrelated and mutually reinforcing themes: the assumptions behind mobility planning; the production of knowledge; and the uses of knowledge. We carry this three-pronged framework into the following section, in which we develop a research agenda. Interweaving our discussion of assumptions behind mobility planning knowledge, knowledge production and use into our core arguments, we highlight the role of these factors in furthering (gender-)inclusive planning research and practice.

Unpacking mobility planning knowledge from a feminist perspective

Urban planning scholarship has engaged with the question of knowledge by looking at the interaction between different types of knowledge in planning (Rydin, 2007; Stepanova and Saldert, 2022). In these discussions, ‘knowledge’ is often narrowly understood in terms of a ‘knowledge claim’: a claim ‘to understanding certain causal relationships’ (Stepanova and Saldert, 2022: 2–3). We have chosen a broader approach, which exposes planning knowledge’s inherent injustices and exclusions. This approach foregrounds the basic assumptions structuring knowledge (concepts, frameworks and ways of framing problems) as well as processes of producing and using knowledge.

Our approach resonates with Schwanen’s critique of transport knowledge, where knowledge is defined as ‘an arrangement of discourses, procedures, institutions, habits, moralities and materialities that responds to what is seen as a problem in a given context’ (Schwanen, 2018b: 2). Focusing on colonialism’s impact on transport, Schwanen (2018b) traces dominant framings of transport-related issues in scholarship and practice. These include, for instance, a focus on efficiency and reliance on quantitative approaches and modelling, which have shaped planning practice and people’s everyday mobility experiences. This kind of critique rests on the premise that there is an inescapable, mutually reinforcing relationship between knowledge and power (Foucault, 1980: 52). This relationship, we argue, cannot be problematised if one relies on a narrow definition of knowledge as a ‘knowledge claim’. Oppressive power structures, be they colonialism, patriarchy or the entanglement of the two, manifest in the ‘philosophical ideas, methodological practices, theories and modes of problematisation’ that constitute mobility planning knowledge (Schwanen, 2018b: 3).

Planning and mobility scholarship has only recently recognised this entanglement of social injustice and knowledge production. For example, the notion of epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2009) has been mobilised to ‘bring foundational issues regarding [planning] knowledge formation and articulation to the fore’ (Smeds et al., 2023: 4). For this strand of thought, it is not enough to highlight gaps in available data and their possible impact. Beyond this, scholars must establish who is granted epistemic authority and whose needs and worldviews underpin decision making and shape mobility futures (Beebeejaun, 2017; Schwanen, 2021; Sheller, 2018; Verlinghieri and Schwanen, 2020).

On this basis, we investigate the epistemic drivers of gender insensitivity in urban mobility planning. To that end, we mobilise key ideas from feminist epistemologies, which have been crucial for theorising how different types of power relations shape and are shaped by knowledge production (Crasnow and Intemann, 2024; Hill Collins, 2009).

The first idea is that knowledge is always limited, partial and situated; there is no such thing as a generic or abstract ‘knower’, for people’s social locations and experiences shape their perspectives. As Crasnow and Intemann (2024: 18) argue,

the abstract knower is in fact not generic but reflects the characteristics of its inventors – men situated in dominant positions in society. … [T]he social location of the knower affects how and what can be known and so any account of knowledge should acknowledge the social and material context of knowers.

Differences between knowing subjects are ‘socially structured and systematic’ (Grasswick, 2018). What is more, they are embedded in power relationships, such as patriarchal relationships. Feminist epistemologies emphasise that all knowledge production is gendered, which shapes the concepts and frameworks adopted, what is known (and remains unknown) and who is heard (or unheard) in scientific and professional domains (Crasnow and Intemann, 2024). Feminist scholars have examined the consequences of men’s historical dominance in multiple fields of knowledge, from biology (Birke, 2019) to architectural practice (Matrix, 2022). In so doing, they have highlighted androcentric assumptions, sexist values, gendered knowledge gaps, exclusions of certain groups, the dismissal of data and other forms of epistemic injustice. Our article conducts a similar investigation in the field of mobility planning – the first such analysis to be undertaken in a holistic manner.

The second idea, related to the first, is that, as Black feminist scholars have argued, social locations are not limited to gender but include other facets of one’s identity and experiences (Crenshaw, 1989). These intersections have epistemic consequences (Hill Collins, 2009). From biology to urban planning, academic and professional fields have been shaped by sexism, ableism, racism and other forms of structural discrimination. Moreover, interrogating colonialism and its afterlives has generated insights that de-centre dominant regimes, demonstrating how the ‘the western gaze fixes meaning and associations within an epistemic framework that is recognisable’ to those with structural authority (Tolia-Kelly, 2016: 904–905). Our critique of mobility planning builds on both feminist and postcolonial insights to argue for the ‘worlding’ of planning theory and practice (Roy, 2009).

The third idea is that knowing subjects are interdependent. Closely linked to the situatedness of knowledge, this notion emphasises that because their knowledge is always limited, ‘knowers’ must interact with others to diversify perspectives and thereby ‘increase the reliability of one’s knowing’ (Grasswick, 2018). This insight emphasises the importance of reflecting on positionality: the way in which one’s social location influences one’s research. The first two ideas expose how institutions and fields, which have historically been dominated by certain groups and shaped by structures such as patriarchy or colonialism, have produced knowledge that reinforces unequal power dynamics. This third idea opens up generative possibilities for reimagining knowledge production.

The idea that knowledge is produced through interaction leads feminist epistemologists to explore the ethical dimensions of knowing and to see the ethical and epistemic as fundamentally entangled (Grasswick, 2018). In particular, we must consider epistemic violence, which derives from powerful actors’ failure to actively listen to and engage with marginalised voices (Dotson, 2011). Discussions of these issues focus not only on explicating how various fields of knowledge reproduce biased views of world but also on the dynamics of interaction between different groups, how epistemic authority is contested and practices that enable fairer knowledge production and, by extension, fairer societies (Crasnow and Intemann, 2024; Fuentes and Cookson, 2020).

Building on these ideas, as well as on broader critiques of ‘masculinist geographic knowledge production’ in human geography and urban studies (Peake, 2017: 2333; see also Rose, 1993), we posit that exposing the gendered epistemic injustices in mobility planning knowledge has a radical potential that has yet to be realised. Through our review in the next section, we unpack these epistemic injustices to show how they generate gendered exclusions in cities. Inspired by the feminist epistemologies outlined here, we then offer three directions for inclusive urban mobility research.

Locating knowledge in gender-insensitive mobility planning

Assumptions underpinning mobility planning knowledge

As many scholars have shown, mainstream mobility planning is technocratic the world over (Brömmelstroet et al., 2022). It prioritises transport systems’ efficiency (often in the service of economic growth) above inclusiveness and neglects how mobility and urban infrastructure function as sites of connection, and conviviality (Glover, 2016). Planning focuses on vehicles rather than people, managing traffic ‘flows’ and delivering infrastructure. This goes hand in hand with planners’ view that people on the move are discrete, equivalent units without specific identities and needs (Law, 1999). In the mainstream mobility knowledge apparatus, people are therefore imagined as interchangeable individuals moving independently of each other (Joelsson and Scholten, 2019; Law, 1999). Important data collection tools (such as travel surveys) and appraisal instruments (such as cost–benefit analysis) reflect the view of the human being as homo economicus: an individual consumer rationally taking decisions to maximise their utility while travelling (Brömmelstroet et al., 2022; Glover, 2016). ‘Smart’ mobilities and data-gathering procedures further reinforce these assumptions (Singh, 2020).

Whereas these assumptions underlie insensitivity to diverse needs, meanings and practices, feminist geographers and mobility scholars have identified specifically gendered premises in planning. These include normative ideas around gender, gendered roles and household structures, which implicitly centre the working man and heteronormative middle-class family (Henriksson, 2019; Sandercock and Forsyth, 1992). These ideas are linked to several presumed binaries and the spatial separations they entail: the public and private spheres; productive and reproductive domains; workplace and home (Hanson, 2010; Law, 1999; Ortiz Escalante and Gutiérrez Valdivia, 2015). The resultant zoning of urban functions and long commutes are a key consequence of these assumptions in mobility planning. A fundamental binary affecting urban planning is the dyadic construction of gender which is particularly oppressive to ‘those whose behaviour, presentation and expression fundamentally challenge socially accepted gender categories’ (Doan, 2010: 639).

These assumptions, the literature suggests, shape every facet of knowledge production in planning, generating gender-insensitive policies, methods and approaches. Criticising mainstream mobility planning, scholars point out that mobilities are always embodied and situated and cannot be reduced to ‘flows’ and ‘numbers’ (Joelsson and Scholten, 2019). In the wake of the ‘new mobilities’ paradigm, researchers argue that mobilities are inalienably embedded in social relations and that mobility experiences are gendered, racialised and classed, with minoritised groups enduring more difficult or dangerous mobilities (Cresswell, 2010; Hanson, 2010; Priya Uteng, 2021). This is in line with Moser’s (2014) formulation of ‘gender planning’, which she has since developed into the notion of ‘gender mainstreaming’ or ‘transformation’. These approaches highlight that planning should account for multiple factors, which frame the urban landscape ‘as a complete social unit’, while simultaneously considering intersectional experiences of the city (Moser, 2012: 439).

Feminist scholars also argue that public and private are intertwined in nuanced, context-specific ways. For example, paid employment and unpaid care work are often entangled, leading to complex daily mobilities (Doherty, 2021; Plyushteva and Schwanen, 2018). Further, violence inflicted by intimate partners profoundly impacts survivors’ mobility, and transport services can play a role in enabling freedom from such violence (Nahar and Cronley, 2021). However, mobility planning rarely accounts for the interconnectedness of private and public domains in shaping mobility experiences. Moreover, as feminist geographers note, people plan, coordinate and carry out mobilities with others. Relationships of interdependency shape all mobilities, including those that planners see as ‘individual’, work-related trips (Jirón et al., 2020; Plyushteva and Schwanen, 2018). Overall, this research highlights interdependencies between mobile subjects and the centrality of care, social relationships and collective decisions in mobility.

One especially significant outcome of prevailing assumptions in transport planning is that mobilities of care are overlooked (Gómez-Varo and Miralles-Guasch, 2024). According to Sánchez de Madariaga and Zucchini (2019), the number of trips related to care is likely to be very close to the number of employment-related trips (see also Ravensbergen et al., 2023). Yet, planning foregrounds movement related to income-generating work outside the home, whereas mobilities of care are ‘invisible’ and ‘undervalued’ (Sánchez de Madariaga and Zucchini, 2019: 148). Given that women, on average, perform the greater share of mobilities of care, such planning is markedly gender insensitive.

This focus on employment-related mobility and the conception of movement itself as significant only in enabling productive work also marginalises research on mobilities related to leisure and how fun, conviviality and connectedness shape people’s desire to move within cities (Nikolaeva et al., 2023). That said, mobilities of leisure are also deeply unequal, with women and LGBTQIA+ individuals having to ‘brave’ unwelcoming transit and urban environments that often impede their ability to enjoy urban movement (Law, 1999; Shakibaei and Vorobjovas-Pinta, 2024).

Finally, the systemic focus on efficiency and demand-based planning means that planners monitor only those who move (Schultheiss et al., 2024), which further exacerbates the invisibility of women’s experiences. Immobile subjects do not represent a ‘problem’ to those managing urban ‘flows’. Consequently, planning tools such as travel surveys ignore immobilities, with even academic research often foregrounding mobility over immobility. Little is known about those who are too poor, weak, afraid or busy with home-based work to move around cities. Women often fall into this category and obstacles to their movement remain poorly understood (Adeel and Yeh, 2018). Moreover, immobility can also be a choice; this form of gendered immobility is similarly underexplored (Hanson, 2010).

Together, these assumptions result in decisions that effectively erase the complexities of the daily lives of diverse, interdependent individuals, including the intersectional experiences of women and LGBTQIA+ individuals. They also directly shape the methods and practices of knowledge production, as outlined in the next section.

The production of knowledge

Planners and policymakers largely adopt knowledge production practices that reflect the gender-insensitive assumptions described above. This is particularly evident in the relative lack of attention given to collecting gender-disaggregated data (Priya Uteng, 2021). Furthermore, an intersectional focus (Crenshaw, 1989) in data collection is essential for capturing the mobility experiences of women with low incomes (Montoya-Robledo and Escovar-Álvarez, 2020), LGBTQIA+ individuals (Lubitow et al., 2020), women with disabilities (Iudici et al., 2017; Kusters, 2019), women of various ages (Nordbakke, 2013; Porter, 2011) and men and women belonging to various racial, ethnic and religious groups (Shaker, 2021). As these studies show, each of these groups encounters mobility (and mobility exclusions) in different and specific ways, and producing knowledge that overlooks their intersectional experiences further reinforces these exclusions.

Gender insensitivity in knowledge production also results from the emphasis on quantitative methods in data collection and analysis (Henriksson, 2019). This issue is likewise rooted in the basic tenets of transportation planning, seen as a technocratic discipline relying on ‘numbers’ and ignoring the complexities of people’s daily lives (Joelsson and Scholten, 2019). Scholars argue that this privileging of quantitative methods and, more recently, big data (Behrendt and Sheller, 2024) renders women’s experiences invisible, impacting their mobilities, wellbeing and societal participation. Such methods account for neither diversity of experiences, nor emotions, nor mobilities’ embodied nature, the latter being central to issues around harassment and fear in public transport (Sweet and Ortiz Escalante, 2015).

These challenges are especially complicated in the Global South, where even quantitative data is not collected as widely or systematically, which impacts inclusive policymaking (Priya Uteng and Turner, 2019: 1). Further, planning methods should be context specific (Porter et al., 2012; Priya Uteng, 2021). For instance, in some regions, weekly travel diaries might capture women’s mobility better than the more widespread practice of recording daily trips (Priya Uteng, 2021).

The categories adopted in producing mobility planning knowledge also demand scrutiny. This is evident in the way that mobility measurement tools reinforce gender binaries (Ravensbergen et al., 2019) and in the treatment of mobilities of care (discussed in the previous section). In standard travel surveys, mobilities of care are usually split into separate categories (e.g. shopping, escorting, visiting), which obscures their prevalence. This also applies to leisure-related mobilities, which are similarly fragmented into multiple categories, shrouding both their volume (which also approximates that of employment-related trips) and the gendered differences they entail (Sánchez de Madariaga and Zucchini, 2019). Knowledge production practices, then, reproduce the assumed priority of employment-related mobility in planning.

The themes that planners explore and prioritise in travel surveys and appraisal instruments are also shaped by the traditional technocratic perspective, which again clashes with equity and inclusivity concerns (Priya Uteng, 2021). To advance gender sensitivity, scholars have pointed out that mobility researchers and planners should investigate issues that might be perceived as lying ‘beyond transport’: safety and security; the presence of public toilets in streets and nursing rooms at transit stations; street maintenance; and overall neighbourhood planning (Loukaitou-Sideris, 2020; Yossa et al., 2024).

Our final point in this section regards the actors who participate in processes of knowledge production. Scholars have highlighted the lack of diversity among transport planners and researchers and the resulting dearth of multiple perspectives (Lowe, 2021; Priya Uteng, 2021). This is an issue not simply of representation but also of epistemic authority (Beebeejaun, 2017; Henriksson, 2019). Put differently, if issues that women raise are not thought important or even articulated in planning discussions and the knowledge that women (citizens or planners) contribute is not deemed legitimate, their perspectives will continue to be overlooked (Beebeejaun, 2017; Ortiz Escalante and Gutiérrez Valdivia, 2015).

(Not) using knowledge

Gendered mobility has attracted widespread interest among mobility researchers, planning scholars and feminist geographers, as the many references cited thus far demonstrate. There are also collectives and networks across the world that aim to make girls’ and women’s experiences count in urban policy and planning (e.g. Col·lectiu Punt 6 in Spain, Jagori in India, the Union de l’Action Feminine (UAF) in Morocco). Yet, as Sánchez de Madariaga and Zucchini (2019: 146) argue, ‘[T]his greater understanding of gender differences in travel has not had much impact on how transport systems are built and operated’. Why then are these attempts to incorporate gendered perspectives often ignored?

To answer this question, we must return to the basic assumptions behind mobility planning. Planners tend to view planning as ‘gender neutral’ (Kash, 2020; Siemiatycki et al., 2020). Raising gendered concerns, particularly when they are framed as feminist, can generate resistance to the ‘f-word’: feminism (Porrazzo et al., 2022). Hence, even if data is available and planners encounter knowledge that challenges their perspectives, they might ignore or resist it. Kash (2020), for example, describes how, during her research in Colombia and Bolivia, urban planners dismissed numbers based on self-reported sexual assault cases in public transit, suggesting that women were ‘lying’ or ‘mistaken’.

More broadly, scholars have argued that Eurocentric perspectives predominate in academic and applied mobility knowledge systems (Priya Uteng, 2021), transport planning research being skewed towards the views and experiences of transport planners and (some) users in the Global North (Schwanen, 2018a). Consequently, the wealth of knowledge(s) on gendered mobility from outside these narrow confines does not feed into planning approaches. Another, related issue is the challenge of integrating women’s mobility-related knowledge from other policy areas into mobility planning (Joelsson and Scholten, 2019). Although planners sometimes fail to link transport infrastructure to other planning and policy issues, making such connections can improve transport systems’ gender sensitivity (Lowe, 2021). Priya Uteng and Turner (2019), for example, discuss how quantitative data on maternal mortality can help show where transport intersects with gender and healthcare.

‘Adding’ relevant knowledge to a system that does not support gender-sensitive perspectives is challenging: the priorities and optics on which planners rely should be revisited, starting with planning education, which remains ‘deeply embedded in the engineering domain’ (Priya Uteng, 2021: 53). Even focusing on knowledge in planning specifically, tools (such as safety audits) must be used with realistic expectations and as part of a broader, holistic approach to gender sensitivity (Priya Uteng et al., 2019; Whitzman et al., 2009).

New directions for the field

Adopting a commoning mobility perspective

Mainstream mobility knowledge in urban planning, we have shown, rests on a narrow, exclusionary understanding of what kinds of mobilities ‘matter’. Seen through the lens of feminist epistemology, this can be attributed to the field being dominated by structurally powerful social groups, which uphold the technocratic vision of planning as a gender-neutral discipline and planners as generic, self-sufficient knowers. If planning is to move towards more inclusive and reliable ways of knowing and planning mobilities, it must recognise the situatedness and interdependence of knowing subjects and incorporate marginalised views on mobility.

To move research on gendered mobility in this direction, we take up an approach focused on ‘commoning mobility’, which has emerged as a prominent concept in recent scholarship on just mobility transitions (Brömmelstroet et al., 2022; Nikolaeva et al., 2019; Sheller, 2018). From this perspective, which redefines mobility as a ‘collective good’, mobility is social and shared: mobilities are co-produced in that people plan and perform mobilities together. Given the interdependence and materiality of mobilities, people shape each other’s lives as they move (or remain stationary) at various scales (Nikolaeva and Duffhues, 2022). This emphasis on co-production and interdependency resonates with the feminist urban (mobility) scholarship discussed earlier. Both that literature and our proposed agenda present an alternative to the dominant, technocratic vision of mobility, which foregrounds direct individual journeys. Crucially, and in alignment with the tenets of feminist epistemologies, commoning mobility emphasises the need to make room – in research and planning – for mobility to have multiple, socially embedded meanings that go beyond speed, efficiency and economic growth. Commoning mobility also means investigating and, for practitioners, fostering more inclusive and collaborative ways of governing mobility (Nikolaeva et al., 2019).

The commoning mobility approach entails questioning the basic assumptions that condition planning’s gender insensitivity and intersectional exclusions. It also involves de-centring dominant questions, categories, themes, methods of knowledge production and ways of using knowledge. For planning practice, commoning mobility knowledge would mean reconstituting mobility planning knowledge from multiple vantage points, acknowledging and mobilising the embodied, situated knowledges of marginalised groups and centring women and minoritised groups as legitimate knowers. The notion of commoning mobility thus helps conceptualise alternative approaches to mobility knowledges and urban imaginaries that are missing or are marginalised in academia and practice.

To make this proposal more concrete in its engagement with the epistemic dimensions of planning, we first propose linking commoning with a feminist ethics of care, based on the idea that people are fundamentally interdependent: ‘to be in the world, is to be dependent on others at some point in the course of our lifetime’ (Williams, 2020: 2; see also Gabauer et al., 2022). As we have established, for planners, mobility largely means the individualised journeys of homo economicus. Yet that does not reflect the lived reality of many urban inhabitants, who are involved in interdependent journeys, often related to caring for others and with others. Women the world over are more involved in care-related tasks (Sánchez de Madariaga and Zucchini, 2019); urban policy and planning that prioritise multiple forms of care therefore have a greater potential for redistributing, sharing and easing ‘life’s work’ (Mitchell et al., 2003). Perhaps more importantly, in line with other feminist theorists drawing on relational social ontology, we posit that if interdependency is the foundation of social life, then care is and has always been the fundamental ‘force’ shaping cities and mobilities (Gabauer et al., 2022; Lawson, 2007; Williams, 2020). Academic and applied mobility research foregrounding ‘homines curans’ (‘caring people’, Tronto, 2017) and gendered, racialised and classed relationships of care is key for advancing gender sensitivity in planning.

To develop research questions and methodologies able to build visions of differently mobile cities, academic and applied mobility researchers can place commoning in conversation with new theories of urban care (Williams, 2020) as well as critical (feminist) disability theory. Despite having shaped feminist thought, the latter is rarely engaged with in planning literatures (although see recent scholarship by Joelsson et al., 2025; Muñoz, 2024). Disability activists and scholars have developed critiques of assumptions in urban planning and design, demonstrating how notions of a ‘universal body’ are exclusionary (e.g. Hamraie, 2017; Stafford et al., 2022). These insights are key for de-centring the disembodied, generic knower that prevails in transport knowledge.

Secondly, a commoning mobility lens contends that mobility’s dominant meaning in planning is divorced from its situated meanings. Mobility planning therefore rests on an impoverished vision of social life; neglects various collective experiences, meanings and needs; and remains oblivious to the latter’s marginalisation in planning. Consider the example of play and leisure, which, although fundamental for the mental and physical wellbeing of persons of all ages, are marginalised in planning research and practice (Hartt et al., 2024). Importantly, women, girls and other minoritised groups are often excluded from having fun in the city (Clark and Sayers, 2025; Phadke et al., 2011). Experiences of playing or having fun are linked to mobilities, which not only enable people to get to places where they can have fun but can constitute forms of play and enjoyable activities in themselves (Nikolaeva et al., 2023). Play enhances individual wellbeing and results in collective experiences of joy, empowerment, healing and even resistance (Akkad, 2023; Clark and Sayers, 2025). Drawing on her work in Karachi, Kirmani (2020: 12), while cautious of romanticising mobility under oppressive conditions, indicates that fun mobilities can offer ‘agentive possibilities’ even where girls and women are subject to multiple oppressions and constraints. Illuminating intersections between a feminist ethics of care, commoning mobility and urban joy, Clark and Sayers (2025) show how skateboarding during the COVID-19 pandemic in London improved wellbeing and fostered a sense of community among girls and non-binary young people.

Commoning mobility knowledge production means centring such voices and experiences in academic and applied research; this helps rethink cities around shared mobilities that allow for social interaction, connectedness, caring practices and the imagining of mobility’s other meanings. This invites using methods of knowledge production that can both draw from and elicit mobility’s social and shared meanings that emphasise the interdependency of knowers, such as collective storytelling (Ortiz and Millan, 2022), community story circles (Curthoys et al., 2012), theatre (Lepere and Mlangeni, 2020) and collaborative filmmaking (Salimbeni, 2023).

Finally, we posit that more research is needed on the question of whose knowledge counts in planning praxis, how different forms of ignorance operate in urban mobility policy (Nikolaeva, 2024) and how planners engage with knowledge that challenges their beliefs. We underscore the importance of investigating how planners’ subjective experiences shape their professional views (Henriksson, 2019). Commoning mobility knowledge means asking who is deemed an ‘expert’ on gender-sensitive planning, why some types of knowledge are dismissed and which pathways might generate a more inclusive knowledge culture. These questions, which resonate with the ideas of situated knowledge and knowers’ interdependence, are key to grasping planning’s insensitivities. Methodologically, action research, focus groups with planners and activists and institutional ethnography offer rich possibilities for studying these topics.

Situating planning theory

In addition to questioning whose knowledge is privileged and what is considered ‘expertise’ in specific planning cases (Lowe et al., 2023; Sheller, 2018; Smeds et al., 2020), we argue that transport researchers must grapple with the knowledge base of planning theory. More specifically, realising inclusive transport planning (not least in the domain of gender) requires expanding our referent points beyond dominant sites of planning research. This is strongly tied to assumptions in planning, including a certain degree of uniformity in assessing transport systems and their use that risks overlooking contextual challenges faced by women outside these settings. This has been underscored in urban studies more broadly, with a number of striking critiques of knowledge production in the transnational academy showing that the Global North is often cast as the primary site of theorisation, whereas the Global South is reduced to a location for empirical investigation (Robinson, 2006). This literature argues persuasively for the disavowal of viewpoints that present ‘cities of the global South as little more than variations on a universal form’ (Robinson and Roy, 2016: 181).

Research on and from the South includes the rich body of postcolonial scholarship that shows how privileging certain forms of knowledge over others reinforces existing hierarchies in the academy and beyond (McEwan, 2002). Aiming to disrupt these inequalities in power, access and reach demands that researchers interrogate how and why certain locations become the ‘centre’ of theorisation (Raghuram et al., 2009: 9). This critique highlights the relationality of places, globalised processes and (post)colonial legacies that continue to shape urban formations from local to transnational scales (Raghuram et al., 2009). Shifting away from the current metropoles of theory can also generate novel ways of researching mobility. A focus on ‘inter-referencing’ (Roy and Ong, 2011), for example, can demonstrate how transport planning in a specific (Global South) context is transnational and dialogical, circumventing conventional Northern sites to draw instead on other Southern urban models (see also Wood, 2015). Implementing these approaches in (gender-inclusive) transport research requires a deeper investigation into the very roots of the field – its assumptions – to unsettle dominant languages and methods – or knowledge production and use – that have been linked to historical sites of global power (Schwanen, 2018a).

Simply calling for more research from ‘elsewhere’, however, is insufficient; such an approach risks, once again, relegating such work to the sole domain of the ‘empirical’, casting it as particular and lacking wider purchase. We are particularly drawn to Roy’s (2009) concept of ‘worlding’, an influential formulation in planning research that aims to unsettle existing orthodoxies in knowledge production and use. Worlding is about moving beyond Global North frameworks; policy mobilities’ circulatory patterns; globalisation; and how these processes construct subjectivities. Echoing this approach, Castañeda’s (2021) discussion of worlding in research on cycling identifies multiple ways of globalising the field, including reworking perspectives on mobility’s meanings, producing situated research and highlighting transfers of knowledge and innovation from the South.

Building on this, we ask how ‘worldviews, theories, concepts, methods and research practices … [can] move and be moved differently’ when analysing gender sensitivity in planning research (Schwanen, 2018a: 469). Here, we return to our feminist epistemological approach, which emphasises the need for situated research and practice. Beginning with the premise that ‘all theory is located’ (Lawhon and Truelove, 2020: 13), we draw from Hanson’s emphasis on ‘context’ in understanding linkages between gender and mobility, which is critical for understanding and challenging planning assumptions. In particular, Hanson (2010) discusses the need for situated research that can simultaneously generate and engage with portable concepts. While shaped by local specificities, variegated transport systems can present novel insights for research and policymaking, including in currently dominant sites of knowledge production. By finding ways of making knowledge move spatially, this approach does not gloss over differences produced by ‘context’ but instead urges researchers to think through and beyond these differences to identify broader patterns. By disaggregating theory into its component parts (Lawhon and Truelove, 2020), this approach takes the ‘specific’– regardless of location – into the domain of the ‘general’.

To illustrate this point, we consider the example of gender-segregated compartments in public transport systems, which have been adopted in some cities in the Global South. On the surface, this can be viewed as a localised phenomenon that reflects context-specific gender norms around women’s (and men’s) behaviour in public spaces. Certainly, ‘difference’ matters here and variations even between Southern locations – for example, Delhi’s metro and Tehran’s public bus system – must be unpacked. However, these cases also provide insights into various topics: how planners respond to gendered demands from citizens exercising political choice (Shahrokni, 2020); how street sexual harassment is navigated (Phadke, 2012); and experiences of freedom and pleasure in mobility (Tara, 2011). These are all broader facets of gendered mobility, which can translate to other locations. Once again, this example highlights the relevance of our framework, which brings together assumptions, knowledge production and knowledge use, in advancing gender-sensitive planning scholarship and practice.

Methodological and disciplinary knowledges

Assumptions within planning, as we outlined previously, both shape and are shaped by methodological choices in research and practice. Importantly, this connects to knowledge production: planning research on themes such as gendered mobility or care work and transport continues to rely on quantitative methods (Henriksson, 2019), with qualitative methods remaining underutilised. As we argued earlier, this can lead to gendered gaps in the production of knowledge.

Yet qualitative methods, applied creatively, purposefully and meaningfully, can provide valuable insights when exploring gendered inequalities in the uses and meanings of transport. Here, ‘listening’ can serve as a method (Bennett et al., 2015; Ratnam, 2019), where pauses, silence and non-verbal communication can help uncover mobility’s economic, social and cultural meanings. Moreover, qualitative methods extend beyond the more conventional methods used in gendered mobility research, such as interviews or participant observation. Visual methods, for example, can capture the complexities of marginalisation in novel ways (Franco, 2023; Muñoz, 2020). Participatory approaches such as storytelling (Joshi and Bailey, 2023) can centre the knowledge(s) of women and other minoritised groups (Ortiz Escalante and Gutiérrez Valdivia, 2015), as discussed in the commoning mobility section, while ‘visceral’ methods, which foreground sensory engagement (Sweet and Ortiz Escalante, 2015), can shed light on embodied and affective aspects of gendered mobility experiences.

We do not argue, however, that qualitative methods are infallible. As Butz and Cook (2018: 82) write of mobile methods, any research method can potentially ‘instantiate mobility injustice’. Hence, the selection and application of research methods (and, indeed, the entirety of the research process) must be carried out with a deep sensitivity to research context and researcher positionality. This is because, as feminist epistemological approaches to knowledge production highlight, it is necessary to acknowledge how our viewpoints are subjective, situated and partial. Yet urban planning scholarship still provides little insight into researchers’ intersectional identities and how this impacts methodological choices, challenges and outcomes (Beebeejaun, 2022).

Exploring ‘positionality’ does not mean creating a ‘laundry list’ (Kohl and McCutcheon, 2015: 747) that catalogues every axis of one’s intersectional identity, but understanding how these intersections shape our experiences in our research locations. Greater self-reflexivity is therefore needed among those studying (and practising) planning. Ethical research entails self-reflexivity; revealing ‘how one is inserted in grids of power relations’ (Sultana, 2007: 376) is crucial through the research process, including analysis, writing and dissemination.

For mobility researchers (especially those who interrogate sites of power, exclusion and inequality), incorporating self-reflexivity into methodological praxis can help reshape both research approaches and outcomes. This includes instances of studying ‘up’– engaging with ‘elites’ or people in positions of power – which is often the case in urban planning research. It is vital to unpack these ‘relationships of power’ and how they impact researchers’ access to information and resources (Rice, 2010: 74; see also Mukherjee, 2017; Mullings, 1999). More broadly, planning research should acknowledge that all research projects, even the most carefully planned, coordinated and executed, are inherently ‘messy’ (Billo and Hiemstra, 2013). Thinking through methodological discomfort (Shakthi, 2020) or ‘failure’ as inherent to research (Dutta, 2020; Harrowell et al., 2018) can create transparency in research praxis, and can be a productive exercise that pushes our work in new directions. We therefore advocate for methodological interventions (such as reflecting on researcher positionality) that can disrupt ‘the indomitable authority of the author’ (Mullings, 1999: 349), thereby opening urban planning research to wider scholarly and non-academic representation.

Closely related to methodology, we further call for cross-disciplinary dialogue, echoing inclusive mobility scholars who have underscored the need to incorporate more perspectives from the social sciences and humanities into planning research (Ryghaug et al., 2023). Moving across disciplines can reveal the longer histories of current transport systems and unpack transport users’ lived experiences. Carrying language and concepts across disciplinary divides can shed light on how mobility is an active, processual formation that is constantly being made and remade by contextual interactions between social, cultural, economic and historical factors (Davidson, 2021).

For example, a rich, interdisciplinary scholarship on gendered experiences of mobility provides a textured, multifaceted view of how gender and mobility intersect (Hanson, 2010). However, this research seldom centres concerns that interest planners, such as infrastructure, which can lead to it being overlooked by transport scholars and practitioners. Much of the research on gendered mobility in South Asia, for example, shows that decision makers often interpret women’s ‘safety’ in terms of ‘protection’ (reflecting broader societal perspectives), which can translate into the surveillance of women and working-class men (Phadke et al., 2011; Shakthi, 2022). Consequently, planning and, by extension, planning research in these regions does not necessarily consider the freedom to move through public spaces as a requirement for gender-sensitive mobility policies.

Citation is also a fundamental way in which disciplines are constructed (Ahmed, 2013); expanding gender-sensitive planning research’s knowledge base requires grappling with the field’s masculinist, heteronormative underpinnings (Lowe, 2021) – which links to both assumptions about and the production of knowledge – and how these shape citation practices or the uses of knowledge. This has a strong connection to planning education (Priya Uteng, 2021), as we argued in the review section. Given the breadth of any scholarly field (including planning), citational gaps are inevitable; however, we ask, what do researchers leave out in remaining within disciplinary silos, particularly when attempting to foreground gender sensitivity and epistemic justice? A systematic review of citation practices could be a first step in bringing together work from different fields and understanding how and why disciplines do not currently ‘speak’ to each other.

Conclusions

Centring gender sensitivity opens up possibilities for making urban mobility planning more inclusive; moreover, it offers a chance to rethink mobility planning knowledge. In this article, we have built on the rich and diverse literature on gendered mobilities and feminist urban planning, focusing on knowledge’s role in variously advancing and impeding gender-sensitive urban mobility planning. Adopting a feminist epistemological lens, we have reviewed and synthesised research on gender and planning processes, sorting key insights into three distinct but related categories: planning’s basic assumptions, the ways that knowledge is produced and the ways it is used. Building on this, we proposed a research agenda, indicating three strategies for future research on gendered mobilities: adopting a ‘commoning mobility’ perspective, attending to context and speaking across disciplines while incorporating feminist methodological perspectives.

Our overarching purpose has been to provide researchers with tools to disrupt conventional categories and systems in mainstream mobility planning and to rethink – or to ‘common’– the meaning of mobility in ways that are attuned to complex social realities and (gendered) relationships. Urban scholars must facilitate the remaking of mobility knowledges in inclusive ways, reaching across disciplinary contexts and meaningfully engaging with diverse socio-spatial locations while recognising their own positionality. Urban experiences of mobility and immobility are gendered; planning that is insensitive to (intersectional) gendered experiences maintains and reproduces exclusionary environments, services and discourses. Interrogating current gender insensitivities and the invisibilities they produce will allow researchers to explore alternative urban imaginaries, based on collective, collaborative principles of feminist scholarship and activism. By centring urban mobility planning’s epistemic dimensions, we have argued that understanding the role of knowledge in producing gender-insensitive mobility policy is key to advancing inclusive cities and achieving just mobility transitions.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article: The authors are grateful for the financial support from The Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research for the research leading to this publication.

ORCID iD

Anna Nikolaeva

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