PUBLIC TRANSPORT SYSTEMS: THE SINEWS OF EUROPEAN URBAN CITIZENSHIP?

ABSTRACT

Public transport is often given a key role in the reinvigoration of European cities. The paper explores the relationship between urban citizenship and urban transport through a study of four cities (Athens, Bologna, Dublin and Helsinki). Urban citizenship is considered to comprise both ‘social cohesion’, i.e., the participation in the public space of the city, and ‘social inclusion’, the right of all inhabitants to physical mobility within the city and hence to access employment and social facilities. Despite the claims of urban planners, there is only weak evidence that reducing car usage contributes to social cohesion, but there is however stronger evidence that reducing car dependency contributes to social inclusion.

Keywords:

• car dependency
• social exclusion
• public transport
• urban citizenship

Notes

This paper is based on the collaborative work of all members of the ‘SceneSusTech’ research project in Athens, Bologna, Dublin and Helsinki. My thanks also to the two anonymous reviewers for pointing out the weaknesses of an earlier version of the paper. The paper was written during a fellowship at the Policy Institute, Trinity College Dublin.

²Project ‘SceneSusTech – Scenarios for Sustainable Technology: Car-Systems in the city & the sociology of embedded technologies’. Funded by the European Commission within the Targeted Socio-Economic Research (TSER) programme of the Fourth Framework Programme. Contract number: SOE1-CT97-1071.

³Detailed reports on each stage of the project, as well as the complete final report, are available from the project homepage: http://www.tcd.ie/ERC/oldprojectcars.php

⁴I thank one of the anonymous referees for pointing this out.

⁵Full descriptions of the two areas, together with secondary sources, are contained in the project report ‘Ethnography of transport use’ (Wickham et al. 2002).

⁶Respondents were asked for their current or most recent job; these were coded according to the International Standard Classification of Occupations and then aggregated into a three-fold ‘Goldthorpe’ schema (working, intermediary, service).

⁷Open ended questions; multiple choices coded.

⁸In these quotations all names are pseudonyms; for full accounts of the focus groups see Rajanti (2002). The Dublin report was compiled by Maria Lohan, the Helsinki report by Taina Rajanti.