EQUIMOB Research Focus

Cities in the global South are rapidly growing in size, but many marginalised and vulnerable residents (such as lower-income households, older adults, women and people with disabilities) do not have affordable, safe and accessible public transport, which reduces their ability to have decent work, healthcare and social life. Transport planning largely ignores access inequalities but prioritises efficiency and economic benefits. This project will go beyond traditional engineering approaches by taking a novel, user-centred intersectional approach that recognises how multiple forms of social stratification (e.g. class, gender, age and disability) intersect to produce urban mobility inequalities for marginalised groups. The central objective is to develop evidence-based insights for affordable, safe and accessible urban mobility. More specifically, we aim to:

1. Explore how physical and social barriers to urban transport are widened by the existing systems and the social and economic implications of such barriers (SDG-11&9).
2. Develop and contextualise measures to improve access to work (SDG-8), healthcare (SDG-3) and social life (SDG-10) through improvements in the public transport system.
3. Co-design an inclusive urban mobility evaluative framework that can provide guidelines for inclusive cities. We will apply an innovative multi-sited mixed-methods approach combining visual surveys, GPS-led-geo-narratives and multi-stakeholder hackathons.

Inequalities of urban mobility will be studied in Delhi, Bengaluru and Dhaka, as these cities are experiencing major infrastructural changes and have populations with multiple access disparities. Inclusive cities with affordable, safe and accessible low-carbon public transport lead to a reduction of emissions and improvements in public health and wellbeing.