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Slowing down: degrowth and the limits to urban mobility
Umeå University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Political Science. K2 – The Swedish Knowledge Center for Public Transport, Sweden.ORCID iD: 0009-0002-4441-3950
School of Economics and Management, Lund University, Sweden.ORCID iD: 0000-0001-6114-7397
2026 (English)In: Urban Studies, ISSN 0042-0980, E-ISSN 1360-063XArticle in journal (Refereed) Epub ahead of print
Abstract [en]

Cities worldwide face immense challenges in transitioning to a sustainable future. While being structurally and politically bound to continuous growth, the striving for a constant increase in production and consumption puts enormous pressure on our planet and its ecosystems. Degrowth has been proposed as a pathway to solving this dilemma. Although scholarly attention to urban degrowth has expanded, a central aspect of cities remains partly unexplored: mobility. Urban mobility, being motorized and dependent on fossil fuels, has a substantial environmental and social impact, making it a central issue for sustainability. Within mobility research, urban sustainability has primarily been addressed by problematizing automobility and discussing how to replace the car as the dominant mode of transport. However, the relationship between mobility and growth extends beyond cars and needs to be addressed more generally. This article develops and expands the conversation between the degrowth and sustainable mobility literatures through a theoretical exploration of the concept of “limits.” It proposes a relational conceptualization of limits, providing an analysis of this concept in relation to key vectors of urban mobility: space, speed, and the body. Our study suggests not only that limits should be conceptualized along these vectors but also that these specific limits could be used to tease out what sustainable urban mobility might mean in practice.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Sage Publications, 2026.
Keywords [en]
degrowth, limits, mobility, planetary boundaries, sustainable transport
National Category
Political Science (Excluding Peace and Conflict Studies) Business Administration Human Geography Other Social Sciences not elsewhere specified
Research subject
Social and Economic Geography; political science; Business Studies; architecture, urban planning
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-250670DOI: 10.1177/00420980261420654Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105031740369OAI: oai:DiVA.org:umu-250670DiVA, id: diva2:2043498
Funder
Swedish Research Council Formas, 2025-00813Available from: 2026-03-05 Created: 2026-03-05 Last updated: 2026-03-12

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Isaksson, Elias

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