Mobility freedoms: Conceptions of freedom in contestations over urban transport—Ian Loader seminar with InfUr
His presentation took place on Thursday 10th April 2025 with Ian Loader.
Abstract: The link between urban transport and freedom has long been recognized in transport and mobilities literature. Recent controversies over initiatives to reduce car use within urban areas are drawing renewed attention to those links. This paper uses conceptualisations of freedom from across the humanities and social science to analyse the competing ways in which freedom is mobilised in public contests over urban mobilities. Individualised notions of freedom, particularly Berlin’s concept of negative liberty, are commonly invoked by adversaries of car-curbing initiatives, a dominance that seems to reflect prevailing histories of systems of automobility across the global North. An alternative reading views current schemes as attempts by the (local) state to reconfigure the relational co-evolution of mobility freedoms and unfreedoms through application of Mill’s harm principle. While useful, this interpretation remains grounded in individualised conceptions of freedom. The paper then shows how collective/civic notions of freedom can re-frame what is at stake in contests over measures to discourage driving. We conclude that freedom can play descriptive as well as performative roles in the social analysis of contests over the future of urban transport. It is a useful analytic for clarifying the nature of contestations over urban mobilities in particular places and times, and a provocation that creates opportunities for re-thinking the mobility/freedom nexus and its relation to urban governance. The paper ends by outlining a research agenda that harnesses freedom’s dual role in relation to mobility contestations.
Ian Loader is Professor of Criminology at the University of Oxford and Honorary Professorial Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Ian is the author of numerous books, edited collections, theoretical and empirical papers, and works of public engagement on policing; private security; public sensibilities towards crime and justice; penal policy and culture; crime control and political ideologies, and the democratic purposes of criminology.
Ian’s current work focuses on aspects of environmental harm. He recently has been awarded a Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust for a project – entitled ‘Car harms: Automobility and the objects of criminology’ – that seeks to use the car, and systems of automobility, as a means through which to explore what it means practice criminology in the midst of a climate breakdown. Ian is also chair of Cyclox, a cycling advocacy group in the UK.