Transfers

A couple of months ago I found myself in an enormous ballroom high above midtown Manhattan, New York City, with some two hundred climate activists, scientists, philanthropists, and government officials from all over the world. The posh and polyglot gathering's theme was “2050 Today,” with plenaries, sessions, and workshops revolving around visions of how the next twenty-five years would play out, based on various models assessing climate change and the various factors driving, exacerbating, or slowing it. There was, alas, little credible talk of stopping or reversing it within this twenty-five-year horizon, which draws nigh when one thinks about how quickly the last quarter- century has sped by, and when one considers the fractious political tenor of our current moment.

The association of morality with mobility transitions is a little investigated phenomenon, but it offers a particularly timely direction for scholarship located in Southern urban contexts. In this brief introduction, I begin by emphasizing the particular import of the terms of urban, transition, and morality guiding this special issue by decentering their implicit Eurocentrism. Building upon this base, I draw upon critical mobility theory (and the diverse interpretations of the field that contributors to this special issue have elaborated on) to examine what moralities and normativities accompany transitional urges in Southern urban contexts. I do so by employing three axes: spatio-temporal embeddedness that decenters Eurocentrism, questions of power and inequality, and shifts in valuations arising through the reimagining of mobilities rooted in lived experiences.

Various regions in the Global South have embraced the call to transition to low carbon mobilities, often accompanied by promises of sociotechnical solutions that aim to better existing mobility conditions. Building upon the work on decolonizing transitions research, this article takes the case of the Public Utility Vehicle Modernization Program in the Philippines—which aims to phase out old paratransit vehicles called jeepneys—to understand the implicit embedding of moral values based on Western narratives that drive such programs. Based on fieldwork with jeepney users in Metro Manila, the article argues that the casting of the program as “better” and “modern” advances a particular vision of transport and development, while obscuring other perspectives on the importance of jeepneys for the everyday mobilities of marginalized groups.

In this article we argue for attention to the everyday ethics of mobilities transitions, demonstrated through the example of possible everyday futures in a site of South–North encounter. Dominant transition narratives seek to leverage changes in mobility systems within calculated timescales by orchestrating diverse actors through technologically solutionist automated and electric mobility interventions. We reframe mobilities transitions through futures anthropology, to investigate how people, other species, environment, and tech- nologies configure in continually emergent, indeterminate, and unquantifiable or unmeasurable futures. We draw on design ethnography research undertaken in a multicultural and multispecies university precinct in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia, to demonstrate how everyday ethics participate in, complicate, and offer new insight for possible future mobilities transitions.

This article examines how young Muslim soccer players in South Delhi navigate spatial segregation and infrastructural exclusion through everyday sporting practices. Based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork, it explores how soccer becomes a site for negotiating moral legitimacy and limited urban mobility in neighborhoods like Meerabh Bagh. Drawing on theories of neoliberal governance, political society, and edge politics, the article argues that soccer fields function as “zones of transition” where marginality is both reproduced and contested. NGOs enable movement but also reinforce symbolic boundaries. In this context, sport is not merely recreational, it is political. Soccer becomes a method through which marginalized youth assert visibility, claim space, and reimagine their relationship to the city.

Bengaluru, a metropolitan city in India, struggles with high levels of traffic congestion caused by enormous increase in personal automobiles. To tackle congestion, Bengaluru has designed streets restricting automotive usage and with dedicated spaces for walking and cycling to facilitate sustainable transition. These design efforts are heralded as transformative initiatives to solve congestion. However, through a longue durée analysis, this article reveals that congestion has been consistently mobilized to intervene in the streets of Bengaluru. We argue that historically, in Bengaluru, congestion was the rationale for reimagining streets and has been the leitmotif in transitional impulses and the ongoing colonization of Indian streets. We conclude by considering what it takes to decolonize and make sovereign the transition in streets in Bengaluru and in India.

Tiitu Takalo and Tiina Männistö-Funk, Polkimilla: Nyt, ennen ja tulevaisuudessa (Tampere: Suuri Kurpitsa, 2023), 168 pp., €28 (paperback).

Safdar Ahmed, Still Alive: Graphic Reportage from Australia's Immigration Detention System (Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics Books Inc., 2022), 222 pp., $30.00 (hardback).