Opening session of the Inequalities Conference, Milano Triennale, 30 October 2025 – Credit: Photo by the author.
by Eda Beyazit, Research Fellow in Active Travel and Micromobility
When I was invited to speak at the closing conference of the Milano Triennale 2025, themed Inequalities, as one of the panellists, I found myself facing a familiar question: how do we talk about mobility inequalities in a way that resonates beyond academic circles? As someone who has worked in the field of transport and mobility for nearly two decades, preparing for this event meant reflecting on how to make complex issues accessible to a wider audience, even if these are experienced by the majority on a daily basis.
The one-day conference, organised by Politecnico di Milano, in celebration of World Cities Day, was inspiring, with panels exploring themes ranging from access to clean water to the equity challenges of the digital transition. The final session brought together international voices from local authorities and supranational organisations discussing the role of cities and metropolitan areas in addressing inequalities.
Our panel on Mobility, Migration and Inequalities, organised and chaired by Paola Pucci and Giovanni Lanza, included three panellists and focused on three guiding questions:
- How can mobility inequalities affect contemporary society?
- What specific issues have you addressed through your research?
- Which new perspectives, policies, and projects can help reduce them?
In this post, I would like to share some of my reflections, not through the lens of academic writing, but as a conversation about how mobility, care, and social and spatial inequalities intersect. For transport enthusiasts, though, I’ve included a selection of links to academic sources that might be of interest.
Mobility is power-driven: Stories from the peripheries
To mobility scholars, mobility is never just about getting from one place to another. It’s deeply connected to power dynamics. Our ability to move freely often depends on who we are: our income, gender, age, social class, or race. Can a wheelchair user get to work independently without needing help? Can children walk safely to school on their own? How long is the daily commute of a migrant woman living on the edges of Milan or a woman who crosses borders daily to earn a living in sub-Saharan Africa?
A woman walking across a field and the railway lines to reach a bus stop (Istanbul) – Credit: Photo by the author.
Yet, these aren’t only questions about social norms or justice. They’re also about who decides how we design our cities, towns, and transport systems. Policy and planning still tend to imagine an able-bodied, middle-aged man, likely a driver, as the “typical” transport user. This approach leaves out so many people who face overlapping challenges, caring for others, juggling time, or struggling to afford transport, and adds further burdens on them.
In one of my research projects, I studied women domestic workers living in Istanbul’s peripheries, most of them with migrant backgrounds. During the pandemic, when public transport services were reduced, they created their own system of shared mobility. They organised with drivers of school and factory shuttles, through their social networks, to run informal minibus routes between their neighbourhoods and the gated communities where they worked.
These collective arrangements enabled them to remain employed. In many ways, this was an example of commoning mobilities – practices of cooperation, trust, and solidarity, in this case, when formal systems failed.
Yet I also describe these as precarious mobilities: risky, fragile, and dependent on informal arrangements. The shuttles could be overcrowded or unsafe, the vehicles are unlicensed, and the women may be anxious about police inspections. And, of course, many domestic workers lacked the networks or resources to join such systems at all.
A minibus dropping off female domestic workers heading to one of the gated communities on the outskirts of Istanbul – Credit: Snapshot from the documentary ‘Servis: commoning commutes’ by Erhan Kugu and the author.
Mobility inequalities, in this sense, affect far more than transport choices: the processes that lead to those choices, and even the very ability to be mobile, are shaped by power dynamics within societies. Moreover, such inequalities tend to deepen with intersecting challenges – as seen in this example, being a migrant woman, a domestic worker, and living in the peripheries of a metropolitan city.
Beyond infrastructure
There are growing efforts to make mobility more inclusive, but many focus primarily on infrastructure, including new subways, air-conditioned buses, bus rapid transit systems, and paved rural roads. These are vital, but not everyone benefits equally from them. Some people even bear the negative consequences of these projects, such as displacement, gentrification, unsafe walking conditions, pollution, or reduced access to their livelihoods.
Credit: Photo by De an Sun on Unsplash
We also need to understand mobility as something social and emotional: a means to reduce isolation and loneliness, build confidence, and become part of community life. Transport systems should allow people of all ages, genders, and backgrounds to move with dignity.
Planners have been discussing participation for over fifty years. To me, it still is the most vital step. What really matters is developing participatory methods that give local residents and communities a genuine voice in shaping mobility policies and projects, not in a tokenistic way, but as equal partners. This approach involves methods of listening, caring, and co-creating the city together.
So we need to consider not only the distribution of transport resources, but also the processes that lead to this distribution: whose needs count, and who gets to decide? The call to think through different forms of justice, such as recognition and procedural, shouldn’t be limited to achieving just transitions to low-carbon transport, even though that has rightly become a significant priority in transport research. If we aim to build inclusive transport systems from the start, the transition to greener mobility will follow more naturally. In other words, a fair transition shouldn’t be a by-product of decarbonisation efforts but rather the foundation of them and that justice-led planning can make environmental goals more achievable.
Looking ahead
Drawing on my and others’ work on gender and mobility, I believe we should start treating mobility as part of a city’s care infrastructure, something that supports not only economic life but also social connection and community care. Seeing transport as a caring system changes how we prioritise investments: from big roads to safe pavements, from faster metro lines to more reliable local buses. Istanbul’s free travel card for mothers with children under four, or Bogotá’s “care blocks,” presented by its former Mayor Claudia López at the conference, linking transport with daycare and community facilities, are inspiring examples. Care infrastructure should not only support recognised carers, but also help communities look after one another, an infrastructure of solidarity as much as of movement.
There’s also the question of how we communicate our messages. As researchers, we often rely on reports and journal articles, but these rarely reach the people who make decisions or those who live the inequalities we study. We need more creative and accessible ways to share knowledge and to build stronger collaborations between planners, civil society, and communities. In my own work, I’ve found that storytelling, especially through documentary film (coming soon!) can make invisible inequalities visible. It builds empathy and opens space for dialogue. Similarly, running small-scale street experiments or co-creating public space projects with local communities can generate real, tangible change. Advocacy, when combined with lived experience, can lead to action.
Tram passing next to a protected cycle lane, Amsterdam – Credit: Photo by author
When I worked with domestic workers in Istanbul, I saw how migration plays a crucial role in shaping everyday mobility inequalities. This reminds me that we must reach beyond our disciplinary comfort zones to engage with labour geography, migration studies, and fields like data science, AI, and technology design. Mobility scholars already have rich evidence on how inequalities emerge. If we can engage with these disciplinary areas on the basis of justice thinking, we can translate that knowledge into policies and plans that reduce anticipated mobility inequalities.
This blog was written by Dr Eda Beyazit, Research Fellow in Active Travel and Micromobility at the Centre for Transport and Society, University of the West of England, Bristol.
Dr Eda Beyazit previously worked as an Associate Professor in Urban Planning at the Faculty of Architecture, Istanbul Technical University, and founded the IstanbulON Urban Mobility Lab. Eda was an Urban Studies Foundation international fellow at the University of Manchester between 2022 and 2023. Eda completed her DPhil in transport geography at the Transport Studies Unit, University of Oxford, focusing on transport-related socio-spatial inequalities. Lately, her interests include gender, precarity, and the urban periphery.