I have long used the social media handle @detroittoaccra as a gesture to the two spaces that had such an influence on my life and work and where I could often be found. While I moved to Michigan last year and am no longer living in Detroit, it still plays a large role in my life. Notably, I’m in the city this summer beginning a new project with long-time research partner Steve Marr of Malmö University exploring the challenges and possibilities of community-directed public transportation in neighborhoods in Detroit that are currently underserved by city and regional public transport infrastructure. It is, in many ways, very new. I’ve never really done research in the US beyond what students have done in my classes even if I read and teach widely, particularly around issues of urban space, infrastructure, technology, mobility, and labor. But it’s also, in many ways, the culmination of two decades of work trying to reframe our understanding of global automobility – as a culture, infrastructure, technology, and experience – from the perspective of people often most marginalized and excluded from the seemingly democratic “right to the road”. 

The project has three phases and currently we are speaking with a wide range of individuals – from government bureaucrats and technocrats to community leaders and nonprofit managers to community organizers and urban residents – to understand exactly what transport investments are happening in the city and for whom. We’re also especially eager to work with communities to think about where transit gaps exist and how they address them, both through experiencing them ourselves and holding community workshops where people are invited to share their experiences and brainstorm potential solutions. It’s a fast/short project in many ways, even if it is taking place over 3 years, and that affords us opportunities to co-produce research with community members. In decentering ourselves in producing and communicating the research, we focus our efforts on where we are most effective – advocacy, policy translation, contextualizing within broader historical and geographical stories – and create space for community members to share their own stories as experts on their own experiences and daily lives.

As we talk to organizational leaders in both the public and private sector and across political and ideological divides, I’ve been struck over and over again by how often people seem to look to technology to provide the solution, pointing to EVs and autonomous vehicles as the magic bullet that will make public transportation and mobility more accessible and sustainable. This idea is ever-present in the policies and investment plans, as well as the futurist dreams of a wide range of people, from Big 3 automakers like GM and Ford building new innovation campuses and transforming themselves into tech companies to city government’s public-private partnership in projects like Accesibili-D to the endless apps and health investment projects that promise to improve community health by subsidizing mobility through corporate sponsorship and/or private philanthropy.

There are some obvious and practical scale and implementation issues that would have to be addressed before anything like this would ever have a hope of getting off the ground in an equitable, just, and accessible way that would truly provide sustainable development. Sidewalk repair, road conditions/repair and maintenance, drawing and maintaining appropriate lines and other basic maintenance that is currently apparently not achievable in neighborhoods across the city are a basic, highly practical infrastructural need, but there are other fundamental challenges related to technology and data access that seem to be ignored in these conversations (much like the obsession with smart cities in planning and development sectors). We are living at the height of a technocratic age in which society is organized around the idea that technology will and can solve all of the problems. But accessible mobility is not a technological problem, it’s a human one. 

The root causes of contemporary mobility failures/challenges can be found less in the technologies of roads and vehicles than in the social, economic, and political structures that have shaped the lived experiences of and conditions of possibility for urban residents.  In cities like Detroit and Accra, urban infrastructure and spatial planning are heavily implicated in the history of class and racial inequity and segregation.  Cities were often designed explicitly in ways that idealized and facilitated the values of middle class residents – the bourgeoisie – to the exclusion of working class residents who often most heavily relied on public infrastructure.  Trunk roads in major cities like Detroit and Accra facilitated the movement of wealthy car owners from leafy suburbs to offices in the city center, creating enormous neighborhoods that were impractical within a comprehensive bus system.  Over the last 70 years or more, these spatial and infrastructural inequalities have only been further exacerbated by high car insurance rates, increased unemployment, and decreased public investment in crumbling infrastructure, public transport, and other basic services.  As I’ve recently argued, these patterns of spatial development and investment are no accident – they are the product of colonial and capitalist logics that privilege extraction and protect the interests of elites through technocratic regulation and professionalization, narrowing the scope of possibility for envisioning urban futures.

As a growing body of scholarship on automobility in other parts of the world (including my own Ghana on the Go) has demonstrated, these practices are rooted in the assumptions bound up in Western and particularly American conceptions of automobility.  The single family car, interstate culture, and the “freedom of the open road” are American cultural tropes that cannot even be assumed of most parts of Europe.  And yet, we too often seem to assume that this particularly American middle class ideal is somehow inherent to the technology of the motor vehicle and traveled with the technology as it spread through networks of trade around the world like a form of mobile imperialism.  As Ghana on the Go and other histories of African automobility, for example, make clear, however, automobility did not look and was not experienced in the same way around the world.  As Clapperton Mavhunga and other historians of technology have argued, technology does not have inherent meaning, which is carries with it as it travels; it only takes on meaning through use.  Technology or technological meaning-making, in other words, is a fundamentally human endeavor.  And it does not always – or even often – take the form of a single family car.  Assuming otherwise forecloses possibilities, stifles imaginations, and creates unsustainable models and patterns of policy and practice.

Why, then, might we continue to reproduce processes that are often ineffective?  Why do we waste resources on projects that present so many self-evident challenges and fail to achieve core goals?  I think there are probably many complicating factors – any good historian would hesitate to point to any one thing.  I think there are at least 2 major overlapping factors, however, that we too often ignore but that profoundly shape our current policy/practice paralysis:

1)   Similar to the experience of the “two Accras” that I wrote about many years ago when I started driving myself in Ghana, class isolation and income inequality limit the degree to which we interact with people who navigate the world with access to different levels of resources.  Isolation often leads to ignorance – we don’t know what people need because we do not ask or may not know what to ask.  When middle class and wealthy people are told about the experiences of individuals with fewer means, how often are they listening for understanding rather than listening to problem solve or to victim blame?  And, in thinking about potential solutions, how often are we trying to meet people where they are rather than where we are?  This challenge is most evident in proposals that are centered around an assumed access to smart phones, data, bank accounts, credit, etc., forgetting that not all of us are “wired” because tech is considered a consumable good rather than a public good or right.  Thinking past that isolation and learning to understand to experiences of people different than you requires skill.  One of the biggest challenges with design thinking is that it has made us believe that anyone can do it by following a few steps when in reality true ethnographic and historical research – the ability to understand what a community values and how they are organized and then translate that into some sort of meaningful feedback about where the problems/challenges are and what they might need – is a real skill that requires expertise and training in humanistic and social science research and careful/sensitive community relations

2)   Industrial capitalism and modernism, as systems of exchange, social order, and cultural value, are also based on a number of assumptions about the way that the world works.  Some of these – like the “modernist conceits” that I have written about – are fundamental assumptions about the degree to which we can use technology to change human behavior that is otherwise deeply rooted in and shaped by longstanding cultural practices, social values, and economic relations.  But it also produces a sort of blindness to possibility, informed in part by a form of ethnocentrism but also constrained by the assumptions that technological innovation, complex technical systems, and technocratic expertise are the only solution to complex problems and an assumption that the middle class should be the primary target of investment in economic growth and infrastructural development.  In the mobility sphere, this manifests not only in the marginalization and criminalization of transport solutions that are labeled “informal” but also uneven investment patterns in public transport options among working class and middle class communities.  Local, state, and federal government agencies have consistently invested in limited public transportation catering to middle and upper-class communities in Detroit (i.e. those who are most likely to be able to afford and maintain private car ownership or take advantage of other available and reliable options) while seemingly ignoring the very real transport needs of working class individuals who have few other reliable alternatives to the city’s inefficient public bus system.  This pattern is echoed in the growth and production strategies of US automakers, who continue to produce ever larger, more complicated, and more expensive private cars for an imagined global middle class that is more fantasy or illusion than reality increasingly even in the United States. In the absence of more sustainable and equitable economic growth, producing more expensive and complex vehicles that require more unique infrastructure is not likely a viable path to long-term sustainable growth or corporate survival. 

What do we need instead? Truly interdisciplinary teams that center skills and processes that will take community needs seriously, built around a model in which humanities and social science scholars work with communities to drive technical innovation by identifying potential problems/solutions and helping guide the development and implementation process in true partnership with community members.  Most importantly truly listening to populations who are the most marginalized within our systems/societies

Doing this kind of collaborative, interdisciplinary, community-engaged work requires humility.  No one person/group of people has all the answers and to be successful we all have to come to the table bringing our expertise but also being willing to suspend the assumptions of our fields. As a historian and anthropologist, I would never claim to be able to do the technical work to design and build a vehicle, plan a city, build a road, or create/change complex legislation. But I can help you understand when and how it doesn’t work and why.  Community members might not know how to achieve full implementation of an idea, but they know what their needs are.  And that technical knowledge can likewise help us refine ideas grounded in lived experiences, desires, values, and practices.  We just have to listen and be willing to bravely embrace the possible (with the help of some skilled translators).

I’m looking forward to seeing how this project develops and how much I will learn. I’ve already found the conversations we have had to be inspiring and motivating, and I’m heartened by the response we’ve received from some funding agencies who see real possibility in doing things differently and who are opening up space for challenging conversations.