A key challenge for urban planners worldwide is to address how best to enhance mobility and transport infrastructure for urban dwellers. As transport options are rapidly changing and as new transport infrastructures are being planned in cities across the world, we still know very little about how these changes to transport systems are affecting those who work in the transport industry and how economic, political, and labor relationships in cities are being affected by these changes. This anthropological project will address this gap. Through a fine-grained study of the transport industry the project will seek to understand how changes in transport infrastructure can have impacts on many aspects of life in a city. The data gleaned from the research would also inform and advance policy in urban planning by offering researchers, planners and public officials insights into the factors that enable and inhibit urban mobility. The project specifically includes dissemination activities targeted at transport policy-makers and urban planners in the United States and globally.
Dr. Tarini Bedi of the University of Illinois at Chicago will explore how stakeholders, including urban planners, transport labor, and urban citizens engage with the changes in urban transport infrastructure. The research will be conducted in two cities, the Indian city of Mumbai and the Southeast Asian city of Singapore. These cities are both ideal laboratories for exploring questions of transport infrastructure because of several new major transport infrastructure initiatives and investments in Mumbai and because the city of Singapore's transport planning has become a model for cities in Asia, Europe, and the United States. The researcher will conduct twenty-four months of research across these two cities using a range of ethnographic data collection and analytical techniques, including participant observation and interviews with urban transport planners, transport labor, municipal officials, and investors in transport and road infrastructures. The project will make important contributions to debates in anthropology, transport policy, labor studies, and political economy more broadly. The data will allow the researcher to better understand the challenges of urban mobility by exploring the possible relations among urban planning, urban mobility and infrastructure, and the experiences of transport labor.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
