CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

This special issue brings together contributions from the three diverse perspectives of its co-editors ? urban geography, planning, and transport studies. Its primary aim is to think through the relevance and utility of contested mobilities as a framing concept, and Latin America as a paradigmatic case. In this sense, contested mobilities is a concept that is still under construction, and open to wide interpretation. It can refer to a direct dispute over the conditions of transport services and allocation of transport investments, or struggles over everything from costs and benefits to location and externalities. It can be seen as an indirect dispute, expressed as a resistance aimed at maintaining the continuity of mobility practices of social groups that may be threatened by transport policies and projects, or simmering long-term grievances over structurally unequal mobility stretching back generations. Furthermore, contested mobilities is never entirely independent of the broader context of urban contestations. As many of the papers in this special issue demonstrate, residential setting is closely related to conditions of mobility, which allow access to jobs, health, and education. Struggles over how and where people move in the city are also obviously related to how and where people live, work, learn, shop, play, and socialise. Similarly, mega-events and major urban redevelopment projects are rarely without a linked transportation program, and the former in particular are often major drivers of large transport infrastructure investments. The forms of production of the city and the possibilities for access to housing inaccessible locations also are all key elements of meeting the basic needs of the poorest households. We can also observe that many of the same institutional actors are involved in both urban and mobility contestations.

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