Car-free city politics and the urban commons

Automobility has come to constitute one of the most contentious issues in cities today. While research has provided valuable insights into the effects and conditions of motorized private transportation, it is precisely the local politics of the car’s future role and potential demise in cities – what we call car-free city politics – that has been conceptually and empirically neglected. In this Urban Pulse, we advance a novel conceptualization of struggles for car-free cities. Building on the burgeoning literature on the urban commons, we propose two commons-oriented perspectives to make sense of the stakes at play as well as the ideas and narratives employed in highly politicized debates around the car and the city: a liberal and a radical view. The radical view, in particular – recognizing the centrality of the car in capitalist urban development – allows us to grasp the deeply contentious and potentially transformative nature of car-free cities beyond the technicalities of urban mobility planning. We illustrate the framework's insights with evidence from two radical urban movements: “Barcelona en Comú” (Barcelona in Common) and “Berlin autofrei” (Berlin car-free).