Severing the spatial leash: Promoting women’s right of mobility through digital disruption and a feminist ethics of care

Ensuring women’s right to mobility is essential to meeting the New Urban Agenda and United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which prioritize safety for women in all life domains, including transport, and enshrining these as principles for sustainable cities. To achieve these rights an infrastructural response is required that recognizes the socio-technical dynamics of infrastructure systems and how infrastructure and spatial systems reproduce uneven and gendered power relations that may limit women’s mobility. Furthermore, while the right to mobility has significant gendered implications, these are generally overlooked in infrastructure and urban planning and policy. In examining feminist interventions in mobility systems that draw on critical infrastructure studies, feminist geography, and technofeminism, we apply an ethics of care perspective to mediate the infrastructural, technological, and spatial dimensions of women’s experiences of mobility. These case studies are drawn from existing literature and media accounts of women’s mobility experiences. The analysis of these cases applies theory to address rights from a feminist ethics of care perspective. We propose that, due to the multiscalar complexity of infrastructure systems, the examination necessitates merging feminist understandings of space and of technology. The framing of women’s agentic actions and interventions as an ethics of care emerges as feminist infrastructuring that highlights gendered experiences of mobility. In recent years, technology-enabled interventions in and reconfigurations of transport systems and spatial relationships have emerged to provide women with choices and information in relation to practices of mobility and their rights. In this chapter, we examine three sets of interventions, each with a digital infrastructure dimension that, when combined with a feminist ethics of care, have the potential to safeguard and promote the needs of individuals in consideration of their risk exposure and vulnerability. The first set of interventions are social media campaigns focused on sexual harassment and race-based harassment related to public transport use. The second set of interventions are digital innovations, including the emergence of women’s safety reporting and mapping apps and women-only ridesharing services. The third considers attempts to reshape spatial relationships through the development of digital work centers and similar infrastructure that reduce the need for transport. The emergence of these technology-enabled interventions is a move toward the development of a feminist infrastructure. Such a feminist infrastructure acknowledges and cares for women’s experiences of public transport, enacts a feminist right to the city, and disrupts the gender blindness that proliferates urban and infrastructure system development. These interventions illustrate the potential for digital disruption to address gaps in existing transport infrastructure solutions and merge feminist socio-technical practices and care as infrastructuring. We interrogate each set of interventions through the following questions: Why were these initiatives established? How are they organized? How are they infrastructural? And how do they care? We conclude by discussing the need for more systematic and far-reaching policy engagement with the gender dimensions of mobility systems, particularly at a time when policymakers are focusing on the “disruption” of such socio-technical systems.