Who is (not) in the room? An epistemic justice perspective on low-carbon transport transitions

Car-centric planning exacerbates the climate crisis, compromises public health, and erodes public space. Street-space reallocation programmes, which redistribute road space from cars to active travel, leisure and urban green, are an important strategy to respond to these challenges. In line with a wider shift towards collaborative planning, many of these programmes include public participation. However, participatory planning approaches face criticism for being exclusionary, favouring a loud or privileged minority. Following an epistemic justice perspective, this paper invites to consider the question: ‘who is (not) in the room?’ Based on in-depth qualitative analysis of the participatory processes linked to a pedestrianisation scheme in Berlin, we focus on the link between non-participation in invited participatory spaces and the emergence of claimed spaces of participation. We found all participants to have participated in one of them. The decision of how to participate is a complex interplay between the relevance of the scheme and the feeling of being heard. We show that it seems irrelevant whether this interplay applies to oneself or to one’s social network. Based on our findings, we argue that epistemically just participatory planning approaches to transitions need to go beyond invited spaces to include claimed spaces both spatially and temporally.