PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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Neither economists nor spatial planners have seriously addressed the matter of sociospatial
polarization between the mobile wealthy and the immobile poor. On the
contrary, current transport policy discourses and practices widen the gap between the
mobile wealthy and the immobile poor, because they fail to take into account the
socio-economic consequences of proposed policy measures.
Unfortunately, Baeten’s description of the plight of the “immobile poor” remains
vague and it is not clear how exactly their policy requirements differ from those of the
“mobile wealthy.” He apparently interprets Swyngedouw’s (1993:322) statement that
those “trapped in place, stripped of their capacity to move across space, will suffer in an
age in which mobility has become an even more profitable and extremely powerful
commodity” to mean that poor people are always less mobile than wealthy ones.
In my view, this is a grossly oversimplified view. The “political economy of
mobility” is infinitely more complicated. Socio-spatial polarization certainly exists. Yet
a simple dualistic differentiation between “mobile wealthy” and “immobile poor” renders
a disservice to the overall cause of political economy, because it does not represent the
experience of many disempowered people. So we need to expand on Baeten a bit here.
Firstly, a distinction needs to be made between the distances various social groups
travel, and their means of travel. Secondly, the two are intricately linked. Housing and
transportation are two key capital expenses for any household, and individual locational
decisions and mode choices involve complicated trade-offs that vary greatly according to
local contexts. A few general examples from around the world should suffice to make
the point. In most developing country cities, the poor live in sprawling, often informal
settlements far from the city center, and they spend up to six hours every day getting to
and from home to work, thus traveling much greater distances than their middle class
counterparts (cf. Gannon and Liu 1997). So here it is the poor who continually have to be