Peace and Planning

I’m excited to be presenting my paper “Moving from an Ethos of Cars to an Ethics of Care: Urban Planners as Urban Peacebuilders” at this week’s Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning – ACSP conference. I’ll be joined by my terrific fellow panelists in the session “Big Philosophical Questions in Transportation,” where I will have an opportunity to share several key tensions I’m exploring in my dissertation while proposing an ethical framework that could guide planners as they build our mobility networks. Specifically, I argue that:

The challenges posed by our mobility status quo are not engineering problems to be modeled or long-range plans to be strategized. Car supremacy is a moral project to be scrutinized and a power structure to be dismantled.

Oh, and I give some ways to do so. Here’s my abstract:

“For the past century, urban planning decisions have cemented the car’s dominance in our lives, whether through land use planning that has made automotive access necessary to carry out even the most mundane activities or transportation planning that has prioritized fast and efficient vehicular travel above all other modes. Beyond reshaping our built environment, the private automobile has fundamentally altered our relationships – with each other and with the natural world. Indeed, in a society where the car has become synonymous with freedom, we fail to recognize what we sacrifice in our endless pursuit of individual liberty – not only the safe movement of others but also our collective ability to fulfill an even more basic human need: to connect.

This paper tackles a set of complementary research questions: first, while we can intuit the indelible impacts of cars on our social relationships, how can we begin to detail the depth and breadth of those impacts – and what role do urban planners play in perpetuating them? Second, what would it look like for urban planners to think of themselves as urban peacebuilders – and what could we gain in the process?

To answer the first question, this paper applies Johan Galtung’s (1969, 1990) triangle of violence to our transportation system using literature from a wide range of disciplines to reveal the ways in which cars have contributed to three forms of violence: direct (interpersonal behavior that causes harm), structural (processes and institutions that enable those harms or introduce new ones), and cultural (narratives and symbols that normalize those harms). In this way, it demonstrates how vehicular violence can offer a compelling framework for understanding how cars are at the center of a complex web of harms and how urban planning contributes to broader cycles of conflict.

To answer the second question, this paper adapts the philosophical approach of the ethics of care to our transportation system to illuminate how centering relationships, reciprocity, and responsibility presents a path out of car supremacy (Engster, 2009; Held, 2005). Moreover, it offers insights from community mobility initiatives that are already challenging our modal hierarchy to reimagine streets for care. In particular, this paper argues that the ethics of care presents a theoretical framework distinct from and more expansive than existing approaches. Pursuing Vision Zero, engineering a carbon-free network, and ensuring mobility justice are all admirable – and necessary – goals; however, if these become our sole guiding principles, we risk achieving them in a way that entrenches car supremacy rather than dismantling it. In fact, we can envision a world where these laudable aims have been achieved because everyone has their own emissions-free, crash-free vehicle, yet we would still be locked in a paradigm that commits the cardinal sin of cars: removing their passengers from the public realm and in turn severing our social fabric.   

Amidst technical jargon and bureaucratic processes, at its core urban planning is a profession that navigates profound moral questions about who can exist where. The reinforcing dynamics of the triangle of vehicular violence makes overcoming the ethical quandaries present in our transportation system seem daunting, and our existing discourse about what the future could be only takes us so far. Ultimately, this paper posits that urban planners are not only players in a complex conflict system, but also that they can be agents of change. Indeed, given the epidemic of social isolation and its connection to parallel trends such as increasing levels of intolerance and political polarization, this paper argues that urban planners must see themselves as urban peacebuilders and suggests a moral compass to guide the way.”