“The crisis justified the urgency, but now we have to go back to the rule of law”: Urban mobility governance during Covid-19

ABSTRACT

During COVID-19, many cities built pop-up infrastructure for cyclists and pedestrians. We analyse the experiences of Geneva and Lyon through a qualitative approach based on document analysis and interviews with institutional and societal actors. We explore what contributed to the development of pop-up infrastructure during COVID-19, and how these interventions were shaped by and affected policy-making processes and actors’ agency. We found that COVID-19 accelerated social and political trends regarding urban mobility. In both cities, authorities used the crisis to push through existing plans. Authorities’ commitment and the existence of ready-to-implement plans proved crucial. The implementation processes constituted a breach from usual procedures. In Geneva, this empowered actors who usually act from the margins. In Lyon, authorities adopted pop-up infrastructure as a way to reduce costs. Our study clarifies the potential of experimentation in a context of crisis for urban climate governance and highlights the democratic implications of such interventions.

KEYWORDS:

• Experiments
• sustainability transitions
• climate governance
• cycling
• pop-up infrastructure
• covid-19

Acknowledgments

We thank our interviewees for their time and trust, and the colleagues from ENS de Lyon as well as Mariana Fernandes Mendes for the fruitful exchanges and collaboration. We also thank the three reviewers and the editor for their constructive comments which allowed us to greatly improve the manuscript. This article benefitted from discussions with our colleagues at TU München.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded through the ENAC Cluster Grants [0950 (520 712)].