More-than-human mobility in the smart city

Cities have become central sites in discussions of the environmental crisis, simultaneously catalysing and suffering from its escalating effects. Scholars have increasingly recognised human exceptionalism, the belief that humans take precedence over all other beings, as a primary cause of these socio-environmental injustices. In response, urban planners and policymakers are being increasingly urged to consider the needs of urban nonhumans, including rivers, animals, insects, trees and microbial life, within what has been defined as the growing ‘more-than-human’ turn in urban planning and development. Yet one domain remains largely absent from this conversation: urban mobility. Although mobility is fundamental to all species, the design of urban infrastructures such as roads, pavements and traffic lights remains deeply embedded within a human-centred logic of technological and economic efficiency. This is consequential: roads carve up space, fragmenting habitats, while ever-increasing traffic results in roadkill. As cities accelerate the digitalisation of urban systems through smart city initiatives, there is a risk of this same logic becoming structurally embedded in ways that are increasingly difficult to contest. Drawing on urban geography and human-computer interaction design, this PhD study is exploring what ‘smart’ urban mobility might look like if approached from a more-than-human perspective. Rather than working through institutional frameworks that often reproduce human-centric assumptions, the study works with citizens directly. Participants will be invited to attend to the mundane infrastructures of everyday movement in London and examine how these systems distribute mobility unevenly across species. By surfacing the power relations embedded within everyday infrastructure, this research generates situated insights and speculative design provocations for reimagining urban mobility beyond the human.

About the speaker:

Karl is a designer and PhD researcher based in London. His work sits at the intersection of the arts, technology, urban experience, and more-than-human perspectives, exploring how people notice, move through, and relate to the everyday environments they inhabit. His current PhD research investigates how urban objects and infrastructures shape movement and encounters between human and non-human life. His practice combines research, design, and experimental methods to explore alternative ways of experiencing and understanding cities.